by Paul Dolan
Most of the activities and projects we stick with will end up being both pleasurable and purposeful in time—even if they started out principally motivated by one category of sentiments or if the relative weights of pleasure and purpose continue to change over time. Pleasure and purpose will often go hand in hand over time even if they are traded off against one another at any one moment in time. In the language of economics, pleasure and purpose are complements over time even if they are substitutes at any one moment in time. So my weight training is now both pleasurable and purposeful (these sentiments are complements over time) even though it started out as relatively more pleasurable and became relatively more purposeful (these sentiments are substitutes at each moment in time).
Adaptation to purpose will result in boredom and futility, so you are more likely to stop engaging in such activities. In general, the impact of purposeful inputs will probably wane less because many activities that you continue with will become more purposeful over time. Context matters and this will not be true all of the time. But it remains important to think of pleasure and purpose as separate, but interrelated, components of happiness.
Attending to happiness
Attention holds together our lives—as well as this book. It converts stimuli into happiness and it drives our behavior. We are often unaware of the effects of attention on our happiness and our behavior, just as many people are unaware that background music affects their choice of wine. Yet this precious and scarce resource is responsible for all of what we do and how we feel. Attention explains why we adapt to weight gain and not to noise and stammering. It also explains why we might not be as happy as we could be.
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Why aren’t we happier?
We have seen that our brain, particularly our automatic system 1, tries to help us out in a complex world, but its efforts to simplify things can sometimes be silly strategies so far as making decisions that make us happier are concerned.
The brain is of course truly wondrous but it’s much more interesting, to me at least, to look at where it makes mistakes. We have evolved to be attractive mates and to survive, but aspects of ourselves might also simply be evolutionary mistakes—and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference, especially because societies develop so quickly. Given how much more complex the world is now compared to the one faced by our tree-dwelling ancestors, it is remarkable how well we function. Equally, it is unremarkable that we are prone to misallocating our attention. We do so by making conscious mistakes and unconscious errors that mean we aren’t as happy as we could be.
When you are attending to what you think will make you happy in the future, you are making predictions about what the production process will look like: what you will attend to, in what ways, and for how long. We need to understand the attentional obstacles to being happier if we are to consider ways in which we can be happier. This chapter addresses what I categorize as the three main attentional problems: mistaken desires; mistaken projections; and mistaken beliefs. Let’s consider each in turn.
Mistaken desires
On the face of it, we ought to desire what makes us happy. In a thorough attempt to see if what we desire is consistent with maximizing happiness, nearly three thousand people from various sources—patients in a doctor’s waiting room in Denver; a telephone survey; and the student population at Cornell University—were asked which of two scenarios would bring them the greatest happiness, and which of the two they would choose. The choices were consistent with happiness 83 percent of the time. The other 17 percent of the time, the choice was different from the one thought to maximize happiness. For example, if someone said they would choose a better-paying job requiring them to sleep less, their choice would have been inconsistent with happiness maximization if they had also said more sleep would bring them more happiness than a better paying job.1
Now, you could say that this shows happiness does not always dominate, but I suspect that much of the 17 percent could be explained by assumptions about happiness in the long run (e.g., from taking a higher-paying job that makes you miserable in the short run but gives you a nice nest egg for later). Moreover, in further analysis, predicted sense of purpose was an important driver of people’s choices and so some of the results in the original study may have been because the authors didn’t include purpose in their original conceptualization of happiness.2
Nonetheless, there are many scholars who believe that attending to certain goals, such as achievement, bring happiness in themselves and others who maintain that there are objectives, such as authenticity, that transcend happiness. I consider these to be mistaken desires, for the reasons outlined below.
Achievement
We have a desire to achieve, and some argue that this brings happiness in itself. There is no doubt that achieving a goal, which makes our evaluative self happy, can feel pretty good in itself: in video game players, achieving goals releases dopamine, which is the pleasure-producing neurotransmitter in our brains.3 But even if the goal is achieved, these are only fleeting moments, and so the process of attempting to get there should be a pleasurable and/or purposeful one, too.
It is also true that the desire to achieve can bring happiness later on—but only for those who do achieve. Some great studies have looked at the desires people expressed when they were students and then the difference between desires and achievements twenty or so years later. Those who as students were motivated by making money turned out to be greatly affected by whether or not they became wealthy later in their lives. If they did, they were satisfied with their lives, but many did not make as much as they would have liked to, so they were not that satisfied. The message from this research is that if you care a lot about money, you better make sure you get it. If you do not become rich, then being motivated by money will, unsurprisingly, lead to disappointment.4
Consider the story of the fisherman and the businessman, a narrative highlighting the paradoxes in our relentless drive for achievement.
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village. As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat toward the shore having caught quite a few big fish. The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?” The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.” “Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished. “This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said. The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?” The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and [when] evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink—we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman. “I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to São Paulo, where you can set up an HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?” The businessman laughs heartily. “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.” The fisherman asks, “And after that?” The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with [your] kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled. “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”5
Much of what the fisherman is meant to aspire to he has now. The consequences of this tale could, in fact, turn out to be worse than circular, as the fisherman loses friends on the way up and out. He could also develop doubts about his sense of identity. This is one reason why many of the scholarship kids from poor backgrounds are not as happy as their equally high-achieving peers from wealthier backgrounds.6 This sense of identity (or rather a lack of it) resonates with my own experiences of moving from a lower-working-class background to an upper-middle-class occupation. While one part of me quite enjoys not belonging to either group, another part dislikes not knowing where I belong.
Be especially alert to the fact that a desire for achievement may help in achieving a narrow set of goals but at the expense of the more important goal of happiness. It is good being motivated to be successful at work but not at the cost of health and personal relationships. Sometimes we can get so wrapped up in things that the attainment of a goal becomes all that matters. Some people will make extreme sacrifices to achieve them—like the many climbers who have died on Everest because they are obsessed with getting to the top. In these cases, the attainment of their goals comes at too great a price for happiness.7
On occasion, achieving more objectively might result in feeling worse subjectively. What would you say if I asked whether you’d be happier with a silver medal or a bronze one? If you are anything like athletes at the 1992 Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona, it might well be that a bronze would make you happier. Observers rated the immediate reactions of the athletes on a 1 to 10 scale of agony to ecstasy. The results showed that bronze medal winners were considered to be happier than silver medal winners. While a silver medal winner is gutted that they just missed out on gold, a bronze medal winner is simply pleased to be on the podium.8 Of course, it’s an open question whether or not bronze medal winners remain happier than silver medal winners over time. Unfortunately, we do not have data for the months after the event that would enable us to know this.
Here’s a story David Bradford told me to illustrate that second place can hurt for quite some time—and that this feeling can even sit alongside a general sense of success. A relative of his played for the NFL team the Buffalo Bills for eight years back in the 1990s. He was one of the best players in his position in the entire NFL and made the Pro Bowl four years in a row. While he was on the Bills, the team had great success—well, sort of. They made the playoffs most years, and actually won their Divisional Championship and played in the Super Bowl four years in a row. But they lost all of those matches (twice by missing a field goal kick by no more than a few feet). David’s relative got four NFC Divisional Championship rings (the NFL equivalent to a silver medal). He hated to see those rings because they reminded him that his team lost the Super Bowl—not that his team had done better than every other team bar one. He kept them in a closet in the back of his house and wouldn’t show them to anyone, no matter how many times he was asked. The interesting point from an attentional perspective is that he talks very fondly indeed about his NFL career when he is not forced to pay attention to the Super Bowl. So whatever you achieve, try to pay attention to the good bits.
It is certainly true that pursuing a goal (as well as cutting down on cigarettes, alcohol, chocolate, porn, or Facebook) can be a challenge in the short term and may make you feel less happy for a while. We stick with goals like this because we think they’ll make us happier in the long run. Sometimes the gain may not to be worth the pain, but you always think it will be at the outset. It would simply be masochistic for you to make a decision that you knew for sure would make you more miserable overall. So you must be alert to what you are sacrificing as well as how you are benefiting from fulfilling your ambitions. Remember that future happiness cannot really compensate for misery now: lost happiness is lost forever. So you need to be pretty confident that any current sacrifices of happiness you make in order to fulfill some ambition or other will actually be worth it in the long run.
As elsewhere, we need more research and better evidence on the full costs and benefits of different decisions and life courses. We do know people are happier with their lives over time if they are satisfied with aspects of their jobs like their boss, pay, and daily tasks, which suggests it is most important that the job is a good fit for the individual rather than the type of job per se.9 This might help explain why the happiest workers in the UK are florists and the least happy are bankers (see the table below for more details).10 Of course, the florists could have started out happier than the bankers before any of them started work. We need more happiness data on the same people over time so that we can see how their happiness changes in response to their jobs.
Profession
Percentage agreeing that they are happy
Florists and gardeners
87
Hairdressers and beauticians
79
Plumbers and water workers
76
Marketers and PR people
75
Scientists and researchers
69
Leisure and tourism workers
67
Construction workers
66
Doctors and dentists
65
Lawyers
64
Nurses
62
Architects
62
Child care and youth workers
60
Teachers
59
Accountants
58
Car workers and mechanics
57
Electricians
55
Caterers
55
HR and personnel staff
54
IT and telecom workers
48
Bankers
44
Even without good causal evidence, I am pretty confident that I am happier—but certainly not richer—as an academic than I would have been as a banker. I would have been happier as a builder than as a banker, too, but my clients would not have been: I have no practical skills whatsoever. I am willing to bet that my kids would also be happier as builders than as bankers, since they would more directly see the tangible fruits of their labor. As such, and notwithstanding the fact that my kids may have inherited my inability to do any form of DIY at all, I would much rather that they be builders than bankers.
In any event, I am sure to remind my kids that I am blessed to have a job that brings me some pleasure and lots of purpose, pays pretty well, and does not involve getting my hands dirty or risking death. And I will remind them that, whatever else they may achieve in their lives, their greatest achievement of all will be their happiness.
I actually think that, deep down, other parents tend to agree with me, when at first it might appear that they do not. Many of the middle-class parents I come across in Brighton are seemingly obsessed with their kids achieving as much as possible at school. There are many potential reas
ons for this, but I’m pretty sure that the main reason why parents care about achievement in quite narrow terms is because they see achievement as a route to happiness. They think that if their kids excel at school, they will later go to a good university and land a well-paid job, and that all of this will make their kids happy. They may have mistaken desires for their kids’ achievements but it would be sadistic for them to want something for their kids that they knew for sure would make them unhappy.
Authenticity
You might continue to maintain that it is perfectly rational to have some evaluative desires that you know might make you feel less happy. You may have “higher-order” desires for morality, freedom, truth, knowledge, aesthetics, beauty, and the preservation of species of birds and animals, which may not be based solely on the consequences for your happiness (or, importantly, for the happiness of those you care about). But it strikes me as rather odd, to put it mildly, to desire something that will never show up in better sentiments of pleasure or purpose.
Consider an example that philosophers are fond of: your partner is cheating on you. Assume for simplicity that no one else knows about it. You would like to know, right—even if it made you miserable? Of course you would, and so, the argument runs, the truth must matter more to you than “deluded happiness.” But you probably think that you will eventually be happier from finding out—that clearing the air will lead to greater happiness in the end, whatever you decide to do about the affair. And so it is the consequences for happiness of the truth that matter, not the truth in itself.