Accelerating Past Happiness

We know what makes us happy -- but can we slow down to go get it.

If I had a chance to grab a beer with Thomas Jefferson, I think we’d get along OK. I’d compliment him on his design for Monticello and thank him for founding a nation that would become the envy of the world for its freedom and prosperity. (I’d also let him down easy when I told him that the whole world knows about his affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, through DNA testing) He’d probably be too busy gawking at cars and smartphones to receive my appreciation.

But my favorite contribution from Jefferson to the world is the idea that God has created in us the inalienable right to pursue happiness. It’s such a well written and subtle phrase that outlines a profound reality: humanity does not have the right to happiness itself, but it does have the right to pursue it. Whether or not we find happiness, implies Jefferson, is unrelated to the right to search for it.

Many tend to think of the search for happiness as each individual person’s quest for whatever makes them happy. Each person would be free to pursue relationships, hobbies, charitable works, fandoms, political parties and experiences that they found meaningful and good. But what if we discovered that humans aren’t so different, and we are all made happy by the same basic things? What if we uncovered a pattern of joys that 99% of all human beings share? As much as I dunk on social science for “proving” what religions have known for millennia (see the Oct. 19 edition of this column), their hard data allows believers and secularists to find unexpected common ground. It turns out, despite all our differences, we all derive happiness from the same basic needs.

Here’s what the research is telling us: Your happiness will dramatically increase if you invest in your family and friends, take care of your body, join a club, practice your religion, avoid anger, and be generous to others with your time and money. This short list comes from writer Arthur C. Brooks, who writes a happiness column for The Atlantic and teaches the happiness course at Harvard. Pursue these things, says Brooks, and the data says you’ll grow in happiness. This is true for people of all stripes and life situations.

We know what makes people happy, but as Jefferson wisely understood, knowing what makes us happy and owning the right to pursue it doesn’t mean we’ll actually achieve it.

Heartmut Rosa is a German scholar of sociology whose diagnosis of the times is as insightful as it is terrifying. According to Rosa, the key feature of our industrial and post-industrial age is what he calls “acceleration.” The pace of change that we have witnessed in technology, society and our inner personal life has given us all a case of whiplash. My grandparents, for example, grew up without electricity in rural Virginia and slept on hay-filled sleep sacks with upward of nine or 10 siblings. Today, just shy of 90 years old, their smart tablet gives them access to the totality of human knowledge, most of the music that’s ever been written or recorded, and the ability to video chat with their family across three or four different states. What an incredible experience of change they’ve had in their lifetime!

All this change, according to Rosa, leads to more change. Technology becomes obsolete at shorter intervals. Social cues and morays change at the drop of a dime. The result is that everyone must keep up with the change or be left behind at a disadvantage. Despite technology’s promise to make life more efficient, it in fact accomplishes the opposite. It takes time to keep up with the changes in technology and remain competitive in the marketplace. It also takes more time to remain social, as our relationships are impacted by these new technologies as well. All of a sudden, we discover we cannot find rest or satisfaction, because resting and satisfaction put us behind in keeping up with the varying changes around us. Acceleration also prevents us from investing in timeless and universal sources of happiness, filling our calendars instead with “keep up” obligations.

If you think about it, you’ll find examples of acceleration in your own life. Acceleration is cheaper LED lights which mean more affordable Christmas decorations which means more neighbors are decorating for Christmas which means we experience the peer pressure to decorate for Christmas ourselves. Acceleration is politically correct language, which changes quickly and shapes public discourse, and those who don’t know the language are excluded from that discourse. Acceleration is looking at your calendar and realizing that your next true day off won’t come for another month at least, and you might need to reschedule that dinner you organized a while back to finish up this last-minute work project.

Jefferson’s argument in the Declaration of Independence was that America needed to separate from England to best pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As long as America remains in a state of acceleration, happiness will become increasingly hard to come by. Unless we all work together to pull the emergency break on the changes of our time, we’ll continue to focus our attention on keeping up, and happiness will continue to elude us.