We’re Not Talking Cars Anymore. We Are Talking About You. And About Your Happiness. And Dissatisfaction. You Know, THE INNER YOU.
Ten years after he drafted the Declaration of Independence, enshrining the pursuit of happiness as a national entitlement, Thomas Jefferson remarked upon the “sublime delight” of sharing in hardship; “This world abounds indeed with misery; to lighten its burden, we must divide it with one another.” Jefferson did not focus on happiness in itself. It was the consequence of “a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits.” * Although he would, no doubt, defend the rights of personal-development experts to be published and read, Jefferson might have been disconcerted by the message so many propound, a message ingrained in our culture--that we should aspire to be happy. An advocate of public education (in which the experts claim to engage), he saw self-government, not self-esteem, as its purpose. If the people were to safeguard their own liberty, he wrote, “their minds must be improved to a certain degree,” particularly with lessons in history. A positive thinker of sorts who believed that people were capable of shaping their own destinies, despite “the condition of life in which chance has placed them,” Jefferson’s own existence was a testament to struggle and hard work, not the magic of affirmations. * Work and staggering accomplishments must have made Jefferson’s life immensely satisfying. Although he retreated briefly from “the tumult of the world” at age 50 to seek “tranquillity” at Monticello, he reentered the fray to serve two terms as president before retiring, at 65, in 1809. In his old age, he remained a prodigious letter writer and devoted himself to designing and establishing the University of Virginia, the nation’s first great secular university, which opened the year before he died on the Fourth of July in 1826.
But if Jefferson had reason to be satisfied with his life, he was not complacent. Indeed, we remember him today partly because of his capacity for dissatisfaction--with the tyranny of the British monarchy or the paucity of public schools or even the condition of his estate in Monticello. Dissatisfaction, combined with idealism and a penchant for action, is the seed of progress. “The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits,” Nathaniel Hawthorne observed.
So, is it good news or bad if a majority of Americans profess satisfaction with their lives? As we head toward the millennium, it would seem we are a contented lot, at least according to a recent L.A. Times Poll. But when people say they’re satisfied, do they mean they’re happy and at home “within ancient limits”?
The words “satisfaction” and “happiness” are sometimes used interchangeably. Hawthorne seems to use “happy” as a synonym for “satisfied,” as I often do. But words like these have multiple meanings and are as nuanced as the emotional states they describe. Sometimes “satisfaction” implies self-congratulation, and sometimes it connotes mere acceptability--a satisfactory grade is an average one. Sometimes satisfaction is a realistic stopping point between frustration and elation--it may be the realization that you have enough of what you want, if not everything.
So what do people mean when they say they are satisfied? Are they smug--pleased with their lives and not likely to harbor “onward impulses”? Are they, instead, simply resigned to their displeasure, lacking the energy to change? Or have they adapted to inevitable limitations that we all confront, without losing the capacity to progress in spite of them?
It is heartening, for example, to see that satisfaction rates are about equal for the oldest group of respondents (people over 65) and the youngest group (those between 18 and 29), even though most people over 65 acknowledge that their general sense of satisfaction has remained constant or diminished over the past five years. Young people testify to an increase in satisfaction during the same period. You’d expect people to feel less discontent and more in control of their lives as they leave adolescence, just as you’d expect people to experience a loss of control as they enter old age. But it is a pleasant surprise to find evidence of our capacity to accept the unavoidable restrictions of aging.
It’s less surprising and less encouraging to see that interest in helping others is lower for people at higher income levels (36% of respondents with incomes under $20,000 cited helping others as a goal, as compared to 20% of respondents with incomes over $60,000). If a social conscience is one casualty of wealth, satisfaction among the upper classes may in part reflect complacency. Satisfaction does rise steadily (and predictably) with income, although it remains relatively constant with age; for many Americans the threat of poverty may be harder to manage than the approach of death.
But unlike death, poverty is possible to avoid. Perhaps people ought to be more dissatisfied with material deprivation than old age. One is a human invention, subject to change; one reflects a natural order. By chafing at the constraints poverty imposes on their own lives, some people may find prosperity. Concerned about the effect of poverty on others, more affluent people may contribute to social change.
All our great social reforms are reflections of discontent. The crusade to abolish slavery, progressive campaigns to regulate industry, the civil rights movement and feminism--all fed on widespread dissatisfaction with cruelty and injustice, matched by a belief in the efficacy of protest. Dissatisfaction with American intervention in Vietnam brought down Lyndon B. Johnson--and brought back Richard M. Nixon. Nearly 200 years ago, Jefferson expressed hope that the new American nation would fuel grievances among malcontents everywhere who were denied their freedom.
Not that all causes are just, any more than all revolutionaries are guided by what Jefferson called “the unbounded exercise of reason.” Self-government, after all, is the animating cry of the militia movement and once inspired segregationists’ demands for states’ rights. Dissatisfaction is also a potentially malevolent political force. Wedded to ignorance, an attraction to violence and strong authorities, it spawns terrorism.
In its more benign form, unreasoned dissatisfaction degenerates into complaining. Nowadays, we are routinely denigrated as a nation of whiners, obsessed with “victimism.” Most attacks on victimism are leveled by right-wing critics against the Left, and their resistance to reform is hardly new. All our major campaigns for social justice have generated vituperative opposition. If few people today would defend slavery, segregation, the disenfranchisement of women, or child labor, many would question the continuing complaints of dissatisfied women, minorities and labor leaders. Criticisms of victimism seem apt when the complaints seem trivial--to you. We struggle to reach consensus on legitimate claims of victimhood. When is dissatisfaction justified? When does victimization demand redress? The difference between protest and whining is a matter of perspective.
How, then, do we value satisfaction? Politically, we alternately exalt and demean our dissatisfactions, conducting an ongoing argument about justice. Our society is sometimes enhanced and sometimes endangered by them.
In our personal lives, we are equally equivocal about satisfaction. Consumerism relies on dissatisfaction and the belief that it can be alleviated by shopping. Advertisers promise us that if we buy the right clothes or cars, drink the right cola or enter the right diet program, we’ll be satisfied--until another, better product comes along.
Pop psychology and personal-development fads (part of the consumer culture) also encourage the quest for individual happiness--in the form of professional, sexual and marital success or victory over excess weight--which reinforces intolerance of routine trials and disappointments in life and in our own physical imperfections. The effect of positing happiness as a goal is probably an increase in dissatisfaction, but at least that’s good for the retail trade.
Recent excesses of popular therapies that promise individual fulfillment have generated more impatience with whining than political complaints, (although politics and therapy sometimes merge, particularly for feminists; we can’t always separate the two). Based partly on the premise that no problem is too small, the therapeutic culture offers people little help in evaluating their sufferings; the pain of feeling misunderstood by your parents is commonly compared to the trauma of physical abuse. Lacking perspective on suffering, it offers little understanding of tragedy.
The culture of therapy is insensible to the virtues of stoicism, which is mistakenly identified with denial or emotional repression --just as passivity in the face of tyranny is associated with political repression. Stoicism, however, doesn’t imply the denial of pain so much as a capacity to tolerate it. Should someone endure unhappiness without complaining? All you can say is, “It depends,” remembering that tragedy, by definition, is what can only be endured.
Can we will ourselves to tolerate tragedy? Some people manage trauma better than others accommodate inconvenience. Psychologists speculate that disposition is partly in our genes: Some of us are naturally inclined toward happiness, while others are congenitally saturnine, Daniel Goleman reported recently in the New York Times. In this view, a correlation between income level and satisfaction is coincidental; happiness, or satisfaction, can only be inherited. But even if there is truth in this, cultured mores probably also play a role in determining how we react to loss. A culture that equates lamentation with mental health is bound to encourage bad moods.
Popular therapies that glorify complaining in search of happiness parody older religious traditions that sanctify suffering in the quest for redemption. In the therapeutic culture, being healthy equals being saved. Familial dysfunction is a cross to bear along the way, and some wear the wounds of family life with a martyr’s pride. It’s not only the religious zealot who yearns for a bed of nails or understands the exquisite satisfaction of self-flagellation. The notion that suffering purifies and exalts explains the appeal of victimization, underlies the testimonial tradition of support groups and lends credibility to self-proclaimed experts who recount their own experiences with whatever syndrome or disease they promise to cure.
These days, even political candidates establish moral authority with testimony of their own sufferings--their histories of severe dissatisfactions. Presidential candidate Bob Dole’s combat experience and his painful rehabilitation is at the core of his claim to good character. Vice President Al Gore tells stories about his son’s auto accident, or his sister’s death from cancer, while President Bill Clinton talks about his brother’s struggles with addiction or his abusive stepfather, not simply to plead for sympathy or lay claim to compassion but to assure voters that they, too, have been refined and redeemed by suffering.
But the stories are unconvincing, partly because the willingness of politicians to exploit their own tragedies makes you wonder how deeply affected they were, and partly because both Gore and Clinton convey the self-satisfaction of people who don’t suffer. If the dour Dole stands for dissatisfaction, Clinton embodies optimism. Reinventing himself daily, he seems to have no memory, and how does a man without memory suffer? How can he be anything but satisfied?
Of course, an incumbent president needs to convey satisfaction with the general condition and direction of the country, while acknowledging its problems and relying on public satisfaction with his efforts to solve them. And he mirrors particular public dissatisfactions.
For better and worse, there is something in most of us that yearns to be unsatisfied, or finds dissatisfaction gratifying. Anyone who has ever cried at the movies or listened to a torch song knows the satisfaction of sorrow. “Unrequited love’s a bore/And I’ve got it pretty bad/ But for someone you adore/It’s a pleasure to be sad,” Lorenz Hart wrote in “Glad to be Unhappy.” With more exalted notes, Romantic poets captured the particular ecstasy of grief. Undergraduates must still swoon over Keats’ command to “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,” contemplating the delicious poignancy of “beauty that must die.”
The image of the tormented artist, such as Keats or Van Gogh, is a cultural staple, which has some basis in reality. As Kay Redfield Jamison reported in her study of the artistic temperament, “Touched with Fire,” there is strong evidence of a connection between manic depressive illness and creativity, not just among Romantics.
There is surely a link between wit and misanthropy; think of H. L. Mencken or Mark Twain. Imagine a world of congenitally happy people and you imagine a library of greeting cards. Unadulterated satisfaction seems available only to the stupid, smug or utterly oblivious; some discontent and melancholy seem the cost of consciousness.