by Jim McCarthy
Purpose is also about loving impactful work that you feel compelled to do. That could be a career as a social worker, a journalist, or a software engineer.
Pleasure is about doing your own thing, focused on whatever is convenient and enjoyable according to your needs and desires.
Purpose is about being part of something bigger than yourself. You could be a civil rights activist as part of a larger social movement. You could be serving your country in the military. Or you could be an entrepreneur creating an amazing business that provides better services at lower prices for consumers.3
Pleasure’s extreme is hedonism — the excessive pursuit of pleasure and sensual self-indulgence.
Purpose’s extreme is obsession. I’ve seen many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley who are obsessed with the success of their start-ups. Such intensity might be helpful or even necessary for some businesses to succeed, but don’t expect that founder CEO to be available to take you to the hospital for a medical procedure, because they are way too busy building their empire.
Pleasure’s best case is genuinely great health and vitality, as well as physical and emotional security and a lack of violence or threats. It can also involve living in the moment, which is quite wonderful, especially as you practice mindfulness and reduce your anxiety.
For purpose, the best case is what I would call a “true spirituality,” or deep, wise understanding of your mission or place in the universe. It makes sense of the past, explains the present, and anticipates the future. It gives you a narrative for what you’re doing in your life.4
Balancing Pleasure and Purpose
It’s easy to see the appeal of purpose. Hollywood doesn’t make inspirational movies about people sitting on the beach, sipping mojitos. Hollywood makes inspirational movies about people fighting for freedom, justice, or simply survival.
Purpose is what you’d like to have written on your tombstone. It’s your legacy.
Purpose is what inspired Nkosi Johnson, the South African AIDS activist who died at age 12, to tell journalist Jim Wooten, “Do all you can with what you have in the time you have in the place you are.”5
Purpose is what inspired former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to dedicate his life to raising awareness around climate change. He challenged all of us when he said, “Will our children ask, why didn’t you act? Or [will they] ask, how did you find the moral courage to rise up and change?”6
Researchers note the difference between pleasure (sometimes called “happiness”) and purpose. In The New York Times, Stanford Professor Jennifer Aaker and journalist Emily Esfahani Smith wrote, “Although a meaningful life and a happy life overlap in certain ways, they are ultimately quite different. Those who reported having a meaningful life saw themselves as more other-oriented — by being, more specifically, a ‘giver.’ People who said that doing things for others was important to them reported having more meaning in their lives.
“This was in stark contrast to those who reported having a happy life. Happiness was associated with being more self-oriented — by being a ‘taker.’ People felt happy, in a superficial sense, when they got what they wanted, and not necessarily when they put others first, which can be stressful and requires sacrificing what you want for what others want. Having children, for instance, is associated with high meaning but lower happiness.”7
You may have seen how cultures around the world differ in how they try to achieve a balance between pleasure and purpose. One can point to many cultures that value hard work — the Confucianist cultures of eastern Asia, the entrepreneurial people I’ve known from India and the Middle East, or the hardworking Latinos who do many of the most dangerous and poorly paid jobs where I live — in California. To varying degrees, enterprising individuals in all cultures make time for community, family, and self-actualization.
Looking back on my experiences, I grew up in a middle-class Irish-German-American family in the Midwest of the United States. The U.S., northern Europe, and Scandinavian countries are characterized by their “Protestant work ethic,” defined as “a concept in theology, sociology, economics and history which emphasizes that hard work, discipline and frugality are a result of a person’s subscription to the values espoused by the Protestant faith.”8 Like many Americans, I was raised Catholic, but I submit to you that even Catholic Americans subscribe strongly to the Protestant work ethic.
I did not give any of this a lot of thought, however, until I spent my junior year of college in Vienna, Austria. During my first semester there, I had an internship at the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency. (It was not as sexy as it sounds. But at least the U.N. cafeteria had some pretty good food, especially for a lowly student like me.)
I asked an American career diplomat in my office to describe her experience there. She mentioned the nepotism, cronyism, and corruption that influenced a lot of politics all over the world. And then she said, almost as a given, “Of course, all of the Americans here at the U.N. are workaholics.”
A couple of years later, I was visiting a brilliant, fun, French friend of mine in the Marais neighborhood of Paris. I asked him how his job was going at the American advertising agency where he had just started. “Well,” Pascal said, “these guys really know a lot about advertising. But they work like crazy! I mean, they don’t even go out for lunch! They simply eat at their desks. In France, most people go out for lunch for at least an hour.”
I had these admittedly massive cultural generalizations in the back of my mind when I began teaching English to bankers in Frankfurt, Germany — my first real job after college.
One of my very first students, a successful businessman about twice my age, said in his thick German accent, “The Latin countries like Italy, Spain, and France are great when you’re a student. You don’t need a lot of money to go out at night and have fun. When it comes to your career, the U.S. is the best place to be, because it’s a meritocracy and the system allows you to earn a lot of money and not pay a lot of taxes. Then later, when you retire, Germany or the Northern European countries are best, because they’re safe, clean, quiet, and well organized.”
“Geez!” I thought to my 23-year-old self, as I walked through the German rain back to my dark little studio apartment, “I’m in the wrong country at the wrong time!”
Comments from my colleague and mentor in Frankfurt, Bill McAndrews, only made me feel worse. “Jim,” he told me, “you ought to go to Spain! I used to live in Madrid and it was so much fun! People go out all the time, partying until 4:00 a.m. They don’t take work so seriously. The weather is great. The city doesn’t shut down by 9:00 p.m. like it does here in Frankfurt. In fact, that’s when they’re just getting started!”
I worked hard in Frankfurt, saved my Deutsch Marks, and later moved to Madrid, thanks to help from Bill’s connections. Spain was everything that Bill promised it would be — though I suddenly found a whole new set of things to complain about, such as slow service, bureaucratic inefficiency, and bad infrastructure. (For example, I waited seven weeks to get a telephone line connected in my apartment in the heart of Madrid.) In other words, what I disliked about Spain were all the things which I took for granted in Germany.
I remember one interview while I was working in Madrid as a business journalist. I can’t recall the context, but the interviewee, a high-ranking Spanish businessman, noted, “We Latins love everything which is sensual: food, wine, dancing, music, fashion, sex. It’s much more a part of the Mediterranean cultures than in Northern Europe.”
Are these outrageously huge generalizations?
Yes.
Can you find massive counterexamples?
Sure.
But do I find them true to my experiences of living more than six years in Austria, Germany, Spain, the U.K., and then the rest of my life in Nebraska, Iowa, or California?
Yup.
Why should you care?
Because
the Protestant work ethic is filled with purpose — especially related to your job. In contrast, sensual joys are related to pleasure.
In teaching my master classes in the U.S., nobody feels awkward or giggles when I speak about purpose. But some participants get a bit uncomfortable when I mention pleasure — perhaps because they associate it so closely with sex. It’s easy to think that purpose is serious, noble, and good. And it is! But pleasure deserves respect and attention, too.
As a psychology doctoral student at Harvard University, Matthew Killingsworth created a smartphone app to track happiness in real-time, daily life. His findings: Out of 22 activities, people were happiest when:
•making love (That’s right, sex was the winner!)
•exercising
•talking
•playing
•listening to music
•taking a walk
•eating
What was on the bottom of the list? People were least happy while:
•resting/sleeping (perhaps related to insomnia)
•working
•using a home computer
•commuting9
Perhaps unsurprisingly, according to Dr. Killingsworth’s findings, people were getting a lot more happiness out of what I’d call their “pleasure activities” than their “purpose activities.”
So you should take your pleasure seriously. Take the advice of BJ Miller, a physician who previously headed up the Zen Hospice Center in San Francisco, not far from where I live. At age 19, he lost his left arm and both legs to an accident. He has spent much of his career doing the tremendous work of bringing more compassion, art, and spirituality to end-of-life care. He has comforted the dying, and has also taught many others how to do so.
In Dr. Miller’s 2015 TED Talk, “What Really Matters at the End of Life,” he discusses the importance of pleasure for his dying patients: “Over Zen Hospice’s nearly 30 years, we’ve learned much more from our residents in subtle detail. Little things aren’t so little. Take … Kate -- she just wants to know her dog Austin is lying at the foot of her bed, his cold muzzle against her dry skin, instead of more chemotherapy coursing through her veins -- she’s done that. Sensuous, aesthetic gratification, where in a moment, in an instant, we are rewarded for just being. So much of it comes down to loving our time by way of the senses, by way of the body -- the very thing doing the living and the dying.
“Probably the most poignant room in the Zen Hospice guest house is our kitchen … We realize we are providing sustenance on several levels: smell, a symbolic plane. Seriously, with all the heavy-duty stuff happening under our roof, one of the most tried and true interventions we know of is to bake cookies. As long as we have our senses -- even just one -- we have at least the possibility of accessing what makes us feel human, connected. Imagine the ripples of this notion for the millions of people living and dying with dementia. Primal sensorial delights that say the things we don’t have words for, impulses that make us stay present -- no need for a past or a future.”10
Finding the Right Balance for You
There are people who have a great deal of purpose in their lives, but not enough pleasure. They may be stay-at-home parents, those who take care of their own parents, or people who work at nonprofit organizations or do volunteer work. In one of my keynote talks, there was a 20-something woman who had founded a nonprofit to help the poor in Oakland, California. She said that although her organization was successful, after about six years she had had to take a sabbatical, because she had been simply exhausted from the years of hard work and dedication.
These “high-purpose individuals” might be very committed to their mission or their families — but they can get burned out. To regain their happiness, they need to take better care of themselves. Give themselves a break. Go to the spa, or take a vacation. Eat better. Get more sleep. Make the time to meditate or do yoga. Otherwise, they run the risk of becoming angry, bitter, self-righteous, self-pitying people. No matter how noble their cause, they can be a real pain to be around. Some literally work themselves to death. Do you know anybody like this?
Having too much purpose and not enough pleasure can be a problem.
Having too much pleasure and not enough purpose can be a problem, too.
A friend of mine from business school (let’s call him “Adam”) ended up working as an early employee at eBay. (He asked me to join eBay as well, but I was already working at Yahoo, which was at the time a highly successful company.) He ended up making many millions of dollars over several years, retired while he was still in his 30s, and traveled the world. But when he got back to the San Francisco Bay Area, he dropped into a deep, long, clinical depression — so bad that he could not even get himself out of bed in the morning.
How could Adam have become so depressed, right when he had “achieved it all”? According to my Happiness Framework, it’s because his life lacked purpose. Sure, he had plenty of pleasure. He could travel anywhere he wanted, eat the best food, drink the finest wine, stay in the most luxurious hotels — and almost certainly be surrounded by lots of beautiful (and potentially romantic) people, as well. He was also able to call “home” the Bay Area — which many people regard as one of the loveliest areas in the United States.
Similar to the Day 1 scenario in my Happiness Framework, Adam’s life was filled with pleasure. And I myself might find it very appealing for a month. Or six months. Or even longer. But eventually … sitting on the beach all day and partying all night would feel a little empty for me. I don’t know if I’d get “bored,” exactly. But my life would lack meaning. And at that point, I’d start looking around to do something — anything — that would have a positive, purposeful impact on others.
Unfortunately, I had lost touch with Adam as he was having his struggles. But his story has a happy ending. Adam eventually found a new purpose in his life — to be a middle school teacher in California — and he’s been joyously doing that work for more than a decade. He’s also gotten married and raised a family.
Scientific investigations confirm the downside of having more pleasure than purpose. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that 75 percent of her study participants were “very high on happiness” but low on “meaning.” (I would describe them as very high on “pleasure” but low on “purpose.”) As described in the Atlantic, the research found that “people who are happy but have little or no sense of meaning in their lives … have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity.” This yields an inflammatory response in their bodies, linked to illnesses such as heart disease and cancers. Fredrickson notes that it’s OK to be happy, but problems develop when there is happiness without meaning.11
A broader study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 41percent of Americans were either neutral toward or disagreed with the statement, “My life has a clear sense of purpose.”12
This is unfortunate because, as Emily Esfahani Smith writes in the Atlantic, having a sense of purpose in your life “increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression.”13
I used to call my master class “Happiness: Find Your Pleasure, Purpose and Peace.”
And then I realized that you don’t suddenly “find” your happiness, the way you’d find a flower on the side of the road, waiting to be picked. Happiness does not land on you from above, either, like the 16-ton weight crushing unsuspecting characters in Monty Python skits.
I would never tell you, “Just be happy!”
Instead, you have to create your happiness. You have to actively focus and have the discipline to work on things that increase your happiness. It might be quite straightforward and direct — just like walking five miles is simple and direct, as lo
ng as you keep putting one foot in front of the other. Thus, the word “Simple” in the title of this book. In later chapters I’ll show you exactly how you can take baby steps to design and develop your happiness, day by day. You have to try. But your effort will be worth it.
Writing Activity 15:
Do you create enough pleasure but not enough purpose in your life?
Enough purpose but not enough pleasure?
Not enough of either?
Or an ideal balance of both?
Once you finish your writing, check in with a loved one and ask them how they would respond.
Happiness, Unhappiness, and Suicide
As I started to write this chapter, the fashion designer Kate Spade and the TV host Anthony Bourdain both took their lives, just days apart. This shocking news forced me to think about the opposite of “happiness.” I was reminded of the great author Elie Wiesel, who once commented that the opposite of “love” is not “hate” but apathy. By extension, I suppose the opposite of “happiness” is not “unhappiness,” but apathy, despair, hopelessness, and depression.
I believe that many people who cannot find meaning in their lives end up combatting this psychic pain by numbing themselves with alcohol and drugs. This might help us understand how more than 70,000 people in the United States died of drug overdoses in the past 12 months — most from opioids.14 Another example is the 45,000 people in the U.S. who took their lives in 2016 — a 30 percent increase since 1999.15
How does this fit with my framework of happiness? I don’t pretend to know everything about the life of Anthony Bourdain, who was an irreverent, funny, and tough-but-compassionate chef and author who traveled the world for his CNN series, “Parts Unknown.” But I’m a big enough fan to perhaps draw some lessons from his suicide.
By all appearances, Bourdain had plenty of pleasure in his life. Millions of viewers saw him eating some of the best food, drinking some of the best wine, and visiting some of the most wonderful places in the world. He was famous and probably wealthy. On the opposite side of the “pleasure” part of the equation was that he was on the road 200 days per year, which was a grueling travel schedule. Too much work and sleep deprivation can definitely lead to depression.16 Similarly, being away on business travel — even if this means eating caviar in Paris — can keep you away from your family, friends, and loved ones.