Yes, but Are You Happy?
“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend.” Henry Thoreau said that.
Sound advice with the holidays upon us. Particularly since many of my friends are downcast. Just look at the drift in the world around us, they say.
I have been. And for the sake of my friends, I’m happy to report a happy trend. After way too long studying what makes us miserable, social scientists are turning their thoughts to the opposite: What are the sources of our well-being?
Increasingly, we are told, the good life rests on the obvious, like having friends. But coming upon the self-evident and understanding it are not necessarily the same. For instance, British researcher Michael Argyle, a professor of social psychology at Oxford who died earlier this year, found that watching soap operas on TV was a source of “a great deal of happiness” for some people.
“One theory,” he reported, “is that through doing it, they are making imaginary friends.”
There’s a thought that could veer in many strange directions, no doubt. But the truth is that happiness and its various component parts, in particular friendship, remain one of the least explored, most understudied facets of human life. That’s why the new scientific emphasis on our well-being is such an encouraging development. If nothing else, it reminds us that getting the most out of life requires more than surmounting its problems.
I don’t mean to dismiss, certainly not entirely, any of the many popular neuroses that have people in their grip, real and imagined. But perhaps we’ve gotten carried away. Obsessed with victimhood and surrounded by evidence of social derangements, we are losing track of those things that provide natural recourse.
I am not the first to note that antidepressant drugs receive far more attention, in the news and in the laboratory, than do the circumstances that might reduce their need.
David Myers, a social psychologist at Hope College in Michigan, surveyed the published literature in psychology since 1887 and reported 85,938 mentions of depression but only 3,912 of happiness and 5,485 of friendship.
In his book “The Pursuit of Happiness,” Myers concludes that those scientists who bother looking find strong correlation between friends and one’s self-esteem, career satisfaction, longevity and health. “We humans are made to belong,” he concludes.
So here’s to your health, friends. And to what we hope will be a growing awareness of the things that count.
In one published study of 800 college graduates, individuals who sought high incomes and career prestige were twice as likely to classify themselves as unhappy compared with classmates who gave a higher priority to friends and a close marriage.
Daniel Kahneman, a Princeton economist, has added new legitimacy to the scientific study of our well-being. He received the Nobel Prize in economics this year for his insight into how people intuitively account for risk in making decisions. He’s now pursuing questions of our happiness. In a published interview, he said preliminary findings foretold “the huge importance of friends. People are really happier with friends than they are with their families or their spouse or their child.”
For many today, the problem with friends has become time and distance. Our hours at work and our commutes to get there are both lengthening and may already have rendered us more or less perpetually exhausted. Then, according to the Census Bureau, the average American moves 11.7 times in a lifetime.
To the extent that many people regard their spouse or lover as their best friend, the news is not good either. The percentage of the population living alone has tripled since 1940, and the share of single-parent households has more than doubled during the last generation. Thoreau’s advice to be friends to our friends has never been more difficult.
In my experience, e-mail and telephones bring friends close again in time of crisis, but otherwise serve chiefly as maintenance and little more. Maybe this explains the astonishing popularity of the suburbia computer game Sims, where friends and the unceremonious social life associated with friends can be summoned to the screen -- virtual life -- when you need them.
What’s clear is that Reagan-esque strategies for success through individual competition, like many good ideas, can be pursued to extremes.
Mark Twain might have been wrong when he said “grief can take care of itself.” But he surely was not when he added: “To get the full value of joy, you must have somebody to share it with.”
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By the way: In a column earlier this month, I was wrong in saying that two Democratic senators were killed in airplane crashes in recent years. Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri was not elected senator until after his death.
