Too much of a good thing
Storm clouds on the horizon? Been feeling kind of blue? Then count your blessings. It turns out that there’s such a thing as too much happiness.
A new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that those lucky few who enjoy high levels of well-being -- and I assume that includes large swaths of the newspaper reading public -- can reach the point of diminishing returns. In other words, the people with the most positive attitudes toward their lives tend to enjoy the little things that happen to them on a daily basis less than those who have lower overall expectations of life. When you’re happy, it seems, positive daily events lose their impact.
Does that mean the more content we are, the more we become, in the words of Pink Floyd, “comfortably numb?” Not exactly.
The study’s authors found that general contentment -- defined broadly as having more good things happen to you then bad -- can give the inevitable negative events in your life more weight. That helps explain why studies find so few people report being “very happy,” and why the very happy rarely remain that way for long. You see, if good things happen to you a lot, they consequently affect you less, and bad things, which you’re frankly not used to, tend to affect you all the more. So, in order to keep being a very happy person, you’d have to constantly improve the ratio of positive to negative events in your life, and that’s hard to do, particularly because you’re also spending a lot of time and energy just getting over the negative events that irritate you so much.
So have we reached a plateau of well-being and happiness? Is it possible that everything in every way won’t just keep getting better and better? Absolutely. Happiness surveys of Americans have been stagnant for decades. But that doesn’t discourage the happiness industry, which makes big bucks promising to teach us how to live more pleasurable, fulfilled lives. Quite the contrary. From all accounts, the search for happiness is more intense than it has ever been. And that’s creating brand new problems.
“We’ve invented a new type of unhappiness,” says Darrin M. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University and the author of “Happiness: A History.” “Now we have the unhappiness of not being happy.”
It’d be easy to blame it all on consumerism. But it’s not just that today’s most successful consumer brands tell us relentlessly that their products will help us achieve happiness. It’s that the very pursuit of it is part and parcel of our identity as Americans. Before the Enlightenment, happiness was understood to be the province of the virtuous few. But starting in the 17th century, men such as John Locke let the cat out of the bag and proclaimed that “the business of man is to be happy in the world.” No one clung to that doctrine more fervently than Americans, whose forefathers even codified it in their nation’s founding document. And this drive for happiness is, in part, what makes this country so extraordinary.
But once we reach the point of diminishing returns, won’t our high expectations of happiness hurt us? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, the drive for happiness keeps us striving for fulfillment and for new ways to solve the world’s problems. But on the other hand, according to the new study, it may also undermine our ability to respond to negative events. Remember Osama bin Laden’s taunt: Americans have gone soft. I don’t think he’s right but, as the study suggests, we don’t respond well to bad things that happen to us.
You can see it in our public policy as we overreact to tragedies and under-react to long-term threats on the horizon. High expectations for future happiness don’t lead to good long-term planning for the inevitable tragedy. Our policymaking tends to be reactive rather than proactive. When bad things happen, the public gets hysterical, then angry; politicians exaggerate, cast blame and scramble for position; and hastily written laws and policies are enacted to put everyone at ease.
The fervent search for happiness may have gotten us where we are, but now that we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, it’s time to inject a healthy sense of tragedy into our worldview. Read Hawthorne and Melville -- they’ll show you that it’s just as strong in the American character as the pursuit of happiness. At the very least, a nod to the dark side will make us smarter. We won’t be so surprised the next time tragedy strikes.
grodriguez@latimescolumnists.com
