Some years ago, I spent
time with a guy who I
typically greeted in the
most ordinary way: “How are
you?” I’d ask.
“I’m WON-DER-FUL,” he’d
respond, rapturously, and every
time I asked. Talk about a
conversation stopper. What do
you say back to that?
Suffice to say this wasn’t a
guy with whom I was eager to
share a long meal. Here’s the
paradox: “Happy” people are
some of the dullest people I
know. And yet happiness is the
state to which so many of us
doggedly aspire.
When I looked up “happiness”
on Amazon there were
18,751 books with that word in
the title. Here are a few from
the past several years: Happy,
Happier, The Happiness Project,
The Happiness Advantage,
The Happiness Hypothesis, The
Happiness Makeover, The How
of Happiness, Stumbling on
Happiness, Delivering Happiness,
Exploring Happiness,
Raising Happiness, Authentic
Happiness, Zen and the Art of
Happiness, and the tenth anniversary
edition of The Art of
Happiness, by His Holiness,
the Dalai Lama.
I’m loath to rain on this parade,
but dare I suggest that
happiness isn’t all it’s cracked
up to be?
I’m thinking about a CEO
with whom I once worked at a
large, prominent company.
This man was happy all the
time—relentlessly, oppressively,
suffocatingly, and ultimately,
I came to believe, blindly
content. He used happiness
(and certainty) both as a defence
against the far more
complex and nuanced reality
of the world around him, and
as a weapon to bludgeon others
into following his preferences.
At the same time, he fiercely
resisted bad news, disappointment,
doubt, and even the
most basic level of introspection.
He was a modern Pangloss:
“All is for the best in the best of
all possible worlds.”
What this executive failed to
see was the unhappiness that
his exuberant smugness and
certainty created in others,
and how it eventually began to
drag his company down.
As Jung suggested, where
there is light, there is always
shadow—whether we choose
to notice it or not.
Paradoxically, when we seek
happiness as the ultimate
state, we’re destined to be disappointed.
Absent unhappiness,
how would we even recognize
it? If we’re fortunate,
happiness is a place we visit
from time to time rather than
inhabit permanently. As a
steady state, it has the limits of
any steady state: it’s not especially
interesting or dynamic.
To seek happiness as a permanent
state derives from two
primitive evolutionary impulses:
avoiding pain (which we
associate with danger and the
risk of death) and seeking gratification
(which helps ensure
that our genes get passed on).
But it also turns out that
pain and discomfort are critical
to growth, and that achieving
excellence depends on the
capacity to delay gratification.
When we’re living fully, what
we feel is engaged and immersed,
challenged and focused,
curious and passionate.
Happiness—or more specifically,
satisfaction—is something
we mostly feel retrospectively,
as a payoff on our investment.
And then, before
very long, we move on to the
next challenge.
Pain necessarily comes with
the territory. We can’t grow
without subjecting ourselves to
stress. Think about strength
training. You push your biceps
or your triceps past your comfort
zone, to the point of exhaustion.
It’s difficult, and
even painful in the short term,
but the eventual reward is that
you get stronger, which is satisfying.
It’s the same process that
occurs in getting better at anything,
whether it’s learning an
instrument, playing a sport,
parenting a child, programming
a computer, or struggling
to understand a difficult concept.
Ask any great performer
to describe the key to excellence,
and they’ll invariably
tell you it’s practice.
But they’ll also tell you that
practice is the most difficult
and the least enjoyable activity
they do. I’m no fan of suffering
for its own sake, or of despair,
or depression. They’re unpleasant
states. When we’re
feeling them, it’s hard on us,
and often hard on others.
It’s not about choosing up
sides. It’s about learning to
embrace our own opposites. In
Good to Great, Jim Collins
finds a perfect example in
James Stockdale, the highestranking
naval officer held as a
prisoner of war during Vietnam.
Over seven years, Stockdale
was tortured repeatedly, held
in solitary confinement and
given no reason to believe he
would ever make it out alive.
His saving grace was the
ability to embrace both optimism
and realism concurrently—
something Collins named
the Stockdale Paradox.
As Stockdale himself explained
it, “You must never
confuse faith that you will prevail
in the end—which you can
never afford to lose—with the
discipline to confront the most
brutal facts of your current reality,
whatever they might be.”
There are many circumstances
in our lives for which it
makes no sense to be happy.
That’s true if you’re in danger,
if someone you love is suffering
or dies, or when you fall
short of a goal you’ve worked
hard to achieve.
We also live in a world in
which millions of people suffer
from hunger, disease, unemployment
and lack of opportunity,
inequality, and unfairness.
Their despair must also
be at least partly ours.
Give me the sort of people
who grapple with these complexities
and contradictions
rather than a lot of people who
don’t, any day of the week.
The result will be a richer,
more compassionate world
that keeps evolving for the better.
Express your joy, savour
your good fortune and enjoy
your life, but also feel your disappointments,
acknowledge
your shortcomings, and never
settle for happiness.
This article was published on
www.hbr.org (http://
blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/
10/happiness-is-overrated.
html#) on October 5, 2010.
©2011 HARVARD BUSINESS PUBLISHING
