The Happiness Issue
— Is materialism bad for one’s emotional well-being? —
While reviewing thousands of psychology studies performed over the past six decades, Martin Seligman discovered a disturbing pattern: the overwhelming majority dealt with mental illness. Only a tiny portion addressed the issue of greatest concern to most people: How to be happy.
Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, was thunderstruck by the implications of his discovery. During World War II, Seligman realized, psychologists had focused on helping traumatized soldiers regain their lives. In the process they became preoccupied with studying, classifying, and treating mental illnesses. Inquiries into happiness and well-being were crowded out of the research ring. For the past 60 years psychology had been devoted almost exclusively to rehabilitation, remaining largely unconcerned with understanding how people become happier and more satisfied.
Seligman has since spearheaded a “positive psychology” movement dedicated to scientifically defining, identifying, classifying, and engendering behavior causally linked to happiness and well-being.
In short, he and others have undertaken rigorous research into Soul Shelter territory: Fortune and fulfillment. What did they learn?
Most important, work satisfaction is crucial. Seligman discovered that people become happier when they can use their “signature strengths”—another word for skills or core competencies—in an enterprise linked to a greater good. That jibes with Marcus Buckingham’s work (and my personal theory that business ventures are scalable and successful to the extent that they address significant social problems).
A growing number of scholars agree. Psychologists and couples therapist Aline Zoldbrod says recent research demonstrates that materialism is bad for one’s emotional well-being. Psychology professor Tim Kasser, the author of one such study, was quoted in an International Herald Tribune article:
Consumer culture is continually bombarding us with the message that materialism will make us happy. What this research shows is that that’s not true.
Such findings trace back to the Easterlin paradox, first proposed in 1974 by the economist Richard Easterlin. Easterlin conducted a global study showing that wealth does not improve national happiness levels once basic needs are fulfilled. Since then the Easterlin paradox has become one touchstone of the positive psychology movement as it relates to happiness.
Recently, though, the Easterlin paradox has been challenged. An article entitled “Maybe Money Can Buy Happiness” quoted two economists who found measurement problems with the data underlying the Easterlin paradox. “The central message,” one said, “is that income does matter.” Other economists agree.
Easterlin himself admits that people in richer countries are more satisfied, but cautions that correlation does not equal causality. In other words, wealth doesn’t necessarily cause satisfaction.
What are we non-economist, non-psychologist types to make of all this?
Well, it seems the experts agree on at least one thing: increased wealth clearly increases happiness for people living paycheck-to-paycheck. Yet unbridled materialism is a recipe for dissatisfaction. The problem seems to be our ability to effectively predict what will make us happy. Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert put it this way in (yet) another IHT article:
If it were the case that money made us totally miserable, we’d figure out we were wrong … it’s wrong in a more nuanced way. We think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time.
P.S. On May 2nd, 2008, after completing the rewrite of this post, I discovered that Justin Wolfers, the author of Economic Growth and Subjective Well-Being: Reassessing the Easterlin Paradox, wrote an extensive, six-part series on happiness. I really need to start reading more posts than I write …
(This essay first appeared in a different form in the October 2004 issue of Japan Entrepreneur Report. It comes to you today from the Soul Shelter archives.)
You may also enjoy:
“What We Really Need to be Happy”
“The State of American Happiness”
5 Comments to The Happiness Issue
There is another often overlooked component to the costs of consumption and materialism and that is time.
Buying things, cleaning things, maintaining things, protecting things, worrying about things, and stressing about things we don’t have all take a lot of time.
Consumption only creates fleeting moments of happiness at the cost of sapping our available mental capacity. Most of our free time is spent thinking of things or not thinking at all in front of a TV.
Spot on, John.
This made me think: If I had to discard all possessions, and could keep only one, what would it be?
Easy: My guitar. Of those happy hours that require a thing, mine are spent playing music.
Television would be the first to go
TO LOVE OR TO HATE—the CRITICAL choice in Life
We all have choice in this world, a sage writes, to create or to destroy, to love or to hate. Which choice do you think the present day right wing Republicans, the extremists among the tea baggers, the militia, the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs of this world have made? It is not difficult to answer this question. All of us have another choice to make: to follow those who destroy and hate, or to follow those who create and love. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist’s mind to recognize who are the enemies of humanity and who are the true friends of humanity. Those whose narrow vision leads them to hate and destroy live mostly for themselves and never want to give to others. Those whose broad vision leads them to selflessly give and do things for others are engaged in works of eternity—and what they do will live forever. Henry Drummond put it somewhat differently: “There is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving.” In giving, we render service to the broader humanity. Louis M. Savary considers service “an ultimate concern.” He states: “an ultimate concern can never be self-centered; it is always focused on the on the human family. That is where the world should be going?needs of others and young people want us to do this. That is the path of progress.
© Dr. Sam
http://www.onehumanityvision.com
Further to my earlier post, I provide here my further reflection on this important issue (see a fuller exposition on my website). Many of those who seem happy to the world because of their perceived outward circumstances or the front they put forward to the world may in fact be among the most miserable people on earth without anybody else knowing it. Therefore, happiness does not depend upon one’s estate, class or status in life. It is not dependent upon whether you live in the main street or the mean street. It is not a matter of how rich or how poor one is. Birth does not guarantee happiness. Nationality or gender has little if anything to do with it. If any person should believe that any of these conditions or situations or involvements assures happiness, then he should ask the next pertinent question: why does the living person of every age, class, nationality, race or color endlessly feel dissatisfied and unhappy? Happiness is not found in the glamour of high society nor in the speedways of a pop culture that promises an easy and spectacular lifestyle, including happiness, in a quick and trendy manner.
Obviously, the quest for happiness is not that simple! That is why the problem of unhappiness endures! Therefore, the search continues. But the answer does not lie outside of the individual. It lies within! Happiness above all else is an inward, not an outward, experience. This view is supported by many studies in psychology, especially in the immensely popular studies on the psychology of personal achievement. It is a fundamental spiritual lesson thought by many religions, sages and masters, especially those of the East.
Those individuals who draw their strength and sense of being from within themselves rather than from outward events and circumstances have indeed the strength of a Titan. In reality, no individual search for meaning has ever been satisfactorily accomplished without drawing from the inside! When a person draws from the resources within himself, he is surrendering to a power greater than himself. That power becomes his self-affirming power.
© Dr. Sam
http://www.onehumanityvision.com
I like the way the Tao Te Ching puts it: “Which is better: to be esteemed by others, or to have self-esteem?”