Question Posed in Our Quest for Fulfillment: Are We Happier? : Baby boomers: Although the longing is part of human nature, researchers say it has never been more intense than it is today.

Not long after dawn, the Esalen Institute’s communal hot tubs begin to fill with early risers and some bashful others dodging peak-hour crowds.

It’s quiet at first, a handful of bathers contemplating the ribbon of fog stretched along the Pacific shoreline far below. Grown-ups wearing no more than a wristwatch, sloshing about like awkward, overgrown children.

Bather No. 1, salt-and-pepper beard with a sizable belly and hair on his back, soon turns to Bather No. 2, Rubenesque blonde with freckled thighs, unshaved armpits and a New Age crystal dangling from her neck.

“This is definitely heaven,” says the guy, who drove up from Hollywood for a weekend retreat at this, the granddaddy of all human-potential centers. “But I don’t like to call it that.”

For an instant, the woman looks puzzled. Then her eyes widen and her head begins to bob: “Ohhh,” she chimes. “I know what you mean. When you come expecting heaven, things always fall short.”

An uneasy silence follows, broken only by the barking of sea lions at play in the surf beneath Esalen’s cliffside perch. It sounds like a taunt: “See how easy it is?” they seem to say. “This is happiness.”

But evolution has played a nasty trick, drawn us into a perpetual game of hide-and-seek with this thing the Declaration of Independence only guarantees the right to pursue. In 1992, happiness is a sophisticated business.

The number of books on the topic has quadrupled in recent years and the therapy industry has more than tripled in size. Excruciatingly frank talk shows dominate afternoon television, and entire catalogues are devoted to marketing meditational tapes and inspirational videos. People pay hundreds of dollars and travel thousands of miles to retreats like Esalen.

Generations born after World War II grew up hearing how happiness was theirs to grab. After all, America was No. 1, the undisputed postwar leader in science and technology. The economy was booming, educational opportunity expanding, social barriers crumbling at every turn.

Soon women were going to have equal rights, and minorities their civil rights. Drugs promised higher consciousness and the sexual revolution promised freedom from old Victorian convention.

This generation of young people would have “careers” rather than jobs, spouses who were sensitive, bodies that were beautiful, goals fulfilled, selves completely actualized. They would have it all, or at least have a great time trying.

And so, rich and poor, many young people showed up at life’s buffet table assuming that their plates would be filled. Maybe their Depression-era parents and grandparents were satisfied just to have food on the table, but things were different now. Something more profound than getting by was out there.

It was just a matter of finding it.

“We watched our parents live with misery. They basically settled,” said Penny Sharbino, hoisting another beer at Woody’s Ice House. “For us, we were told things would be better, that we’d have all these choices. Then we became adults.”

It’s past 11 p.m. on a Thursday. Voices echo through the drafty mechanic’s garage-cum-poolroom on the edge of Natchitoches, a rural Louisiana town rimmed by historic plantations and several bends of the Red River.

The music is loud and by now, after several rounds, people’s tongues are loosened on convenient new best friends. Sharbino, 26, and Sherry Byers are hunched on bar stools, assessing love and marriage in 1992.

Byers is divorced. Sharbino, a pretty Southern blonde, does not know that six weeks later she and her husband will be deep in the process. Right now, she’s still counting on marriage counseling. Maybe they can learn to relate.

“I’ve known I was unhappy in my marriage a long time. But do I want to leave it?” she said. “Maybe our parents were happier not knowing so much. The problem is, the more educated you are, the more you want and expect.”

Baby boomers are four times likelier to say they are not satisfied with their lives than are people of their parents’ generation, according to an Associated Press poll. Experts estimate that the incidence of psychological depression is 10 times what it was pre-World War II.

Expectations have vaulted higher and higher--perhaps so high that real life inevitably would fall short for some. At the same time, just as this thing called happiness seemed an attainable goal, the rules were changing.

Giddy sexual freedom ground to a halt with AIDS. Recreational drugs and drinking landed millions in rehabilitation clinics. The price of an afternoon at the movies climbed to $7 and comfort foods were demonized for their high cholesterol content.

The 1980s wound down in recession and permanent lay-offs for 1.4 million white- and blue-collar workers. Those with jobs sense thinner ice with each round of factory or corporate layoffs. Neither union brotherhood nor the mother company are guaranteed life preservers.

We know that a hole has opened in the ozone, that smoking kills, that one in four girls are sexually abused, that the known rape rate has quadrupled, that the violent crime rate has quintupled, that half of all marriages end in divorce.

We’ve been told that 96% of us come from dysfunctional families and may consequently harbor a “wounded child within.” Not me, you say? Perhaps you’re in denial.

“It seems we are all victims. And if we’re not, then we’re repressing something,” said the Rev. William Nolte, 69, a Roman Catholic priest in Martinsburg, W.Va. “Ever since World War II, the idea of putting on a smile and sacrificing for others has been out of style.”

This draws a laugh from two young colleagues who have joined Nolte in the sun-splotched rectory living room. They’ve heard mixed messages.

“People yelled at me, ‘Eh, why are you leaving? You’re earning good money and have an excellent future,’ ” said John Bocan, 28, who left the banking fast-track in Pittsburgh to become a pastoral minister at St. Joseph’s.

“Me, I had a lucrative job in the Army. I was a helicopter pilot and homeowner. But it wasn’t enough,” said Herb Peddicord, 33, now director of religious education for the small-town parish.

They don’t make much money. They’re both still single and unsure of the future. But there’s this banner flapping out front the church’s 12-foot Greek Revival columns. “Come On Home,” it says.

“Being part of a community, working with people instead of against them--that’s spirituality. That’s what’s missing: spiritual peace,” Bocan said.

“There’s a lot of surface happiness out there. But I think deep down people--especially young people--are just very lonely,” said Peddicord. “A lot of people feel cut off.”

The majority of Americans live in urban or suburban areas, away from nature and its consoling rhythms. Communities have fragmented, children migrated to better jobs, mom and pop’s Main Street store replaced by strip malls that look pretty much the same from one town to the next.

We may listen to television talk at us rather than talking to one another. On warm evenings, we often are inside by the air-conditioner rather than out on the porch, shooting the breeze with neighbors or passersby. We drive around in cars and are mostly in a hurry.

Half of those polled for the Associated Press by ICR Survey Research Group of Media, Pa., said marriage, friends and family contribute most to their happiness--four times as many as credited such individual pursuits as career or hobbies.

But the standard 1950s’ nuclear landscape has been reshaped by feminism and economics. More than half of mothers today work outside the home, many coexisting uneasily with a guilty sense that neither the job nor the children are getting enough attention.

Men are supposed to pitch in, and many do. But studies indicate that the vast majority still find child care and housework more or less optional activities, certainly not the sort of thing their fathers had to do.

Women shuttle between the promise of strength and equality and warnings about the perils of loneliness, barrenness, flabby thighs. Men wonder why they’re folding laundry when Robert Bly’s best-selling book urges a search for their warrior souls.

“And all the while, these questions are brewing: Am I doing the right thing? Have I done what I set out to do? Am I happy?” said Kim Bragg, who works at The Tot Spot in Middletown, Va. “I think about where I could be. I think about that every day.”

The child care center’s walls are lined with cut-out lambs and flowers. Two dozen little bodies bounce here and there, laughing and clamoring for attention. Bragg loves these youngsters, too many of whom are from troubled homes.

She’s doing her best with two toddlers of her own. But this isn’t the career she planned. In the late ‘70s, when she was in high school, the world was her oyster. Maybe she’d try nursing, or a singing career.

“I never wanted children until I was 30. It happened before I got all my running around done,” said Bragg, whose husband’s business keeps him on the road a lot. “I love my kids, but it’s hard sometimes.”

Ninety-two percent of Americans say they’re satisfied with their lives, according to the poll. But of those, one in four use self-help books, recovery programs or counseling to make themselves happier.

“It’s a perpetual search for Mr. Goodbook, the idea that maybe the next one will be the one that solves all my problems and finally makes me happy,” said Steven Starker, author of “Oracle at the Supermarket: The American Preoccupation with Self-Help Books.”

“It’s like buying a lottery ticket. You know you’re probably not going to win,” he added. “But there’s always a chance.”

Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob had no idea what they unleashed when they came up with 12 steps to alcoholic recovery in 1935. Today, their formula provides the blueprint for Gamblers Anonymous, Sex-oholics Anonymous, Messies Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Shoplifters Anonymous, Parents Anonymous, Spenders Anonymous, Emotions Anonymous and on and on. . . .

“Groups are developing left and right. I just got across my desk a group that’s forming for people who have been struck by lightning,” said Edward Madara of the American Self-Help Clearinghouse in Denville, N.J.

It may sound laughable, he admits, but in fact his own daughter had a boyfriend who was killed by lightning.

“There’s a tendency to trivialize or think it’s funny, but these groups are opening doors on issues and giving people some sense of community. When they walk into the room, they know they’re not alone.”

These groups--to which an estimated 12 million to 15 million Americans belong--represent a new kind of community, a modern religion binding people together in understanding. Talking openly about incest or wife-beating, alcoholism or unemployment has afforded millions relief from isolation.

If even one family’s destructive cycle is broken, one child protected from harm, then who would say the new awareness isn’t all to the good?

But where to draw the line? Some say we are becoming a nation of victims, paralyzed rather than empowered by what we know. Do we really need another star’s confession? Another chat show featuring “born-again” cross-dressers for peace? At what point does healthy self-awareness become unhealthy self-absorption?

“I wonder if in the ‘90s we’re not beginning to see a shift back toward an appreciation of close relationships and a communal mentality. For all our pursuit of individual happiness, there’s no evidence that we’re happier today than when we had much less,” said David G. Myers, a social psychologist and author of the new book “The Pursuit of Happiness: Who is Happy--and Why.”

Maybe Dorothy was onto something. Forget the land of Oz, she said. Happiness is found in the gardens we tend, the people we love. Maybe, in the words of the late songwriter Harry Chapin, “It’s got to be the going, not the getting there that’s good.”

Arlene Savakus sighs, smiles and leans back in her booth at the Delaware Water Gap Diner, a neighborhood place just off Interstate 80 in eastern Pennsylvania. Starting with Reichian therapy some 40 years ago, she has devoted a lot of time to questions of self-fulfillment. She has thought a lot about happiness and watched her thirtysomething kids grope toward it.

“For a long time, we were all walking around with a lot of shame kept behind a facade. ‘You shouldn’t know my pain,’ that’s what we were taught,” said Savakus, a part-time tax consultant whose bangles and flowered pedal-pushers betray a Bohemian bent.

“Then we all were told to open up, get in touch with our feelings, learn about our dysfunction. But dysfunctional doesn’t have to mean non-functional,” she said. “We are all wounded birds. But ultimately, we have to accept responsibility and get on with life.”

Moments later, a gray-haired black man who refuses to give his name looks up briefly from his bowl of soup and crackers:

“The problem is that young people today say you’ve got to make yourself happy before you can make anyone else happy. That’s a spoiled way of thinking,” he said.