This book, a highly-readable practical distillation of wisdom gleaned from years of behavioural socioeconomic and psychological research into personal and public wellbeing by happiness guru Paul Dolan, is a real treat. I picked it up out of pure whimsy (from a little high-end bookstall in St Pancras station, of all places), which is not my usual mode of bookbuying, but I'm very glad I did, as it helped build on loads of long-run trains of thought that I've been having for the past couple of years (as such, expect me to use this excuse to litter this relatively-short (every time I say that they seem to continue on to relative-longness in defiant verbosity anyway - I need a better editor) post with loads (and I mean loads) of links to an eclectic selection of previous blogposts).*
Before I dive into reflection, I'll give an overview of the book, which despite the breadth and quantity of academic studies it draws on is extremely consistent in proposing a simple system for managing our lives in a way conducive to happiness. Part one of the book lays out this system, exploring how happiness is evaluated, felt, and aimed for. Dolan, in true behavioural-economist form, argues that happiness, as people generally experience it, is a psychological output resulting from inputs that yield combinations of pleasure and purpose. Maximising our own happiness is achieved by realising our preference functions for pleasure and purpose, working out how reasonably we can attain ideal combinations for these, and taking practical steps to reshape our lives to resemble and contain these combinations. The key element of how we do so is attitudinal - it's what we pay attention to that yields pleasure or purpose in our lives, and therefore considerable thought and effort should go into where we allocate our attention. This part concludes with an excellent chapter about psychological hindrances to doing this well; generally subconsciously, our lives fail to make us happy in particular ways because our desires are for unpleasurable or unpurposeful things, our expectations unrealistic, or our beliefs erroneous. Part two of the book, very straightforwardly, builds on this framework for how we can better attain happiness by giving some very generalistic (so suited to a range of people) but still rigorous (so not fatuous and actually extremely helpful) pointers about how we can reform our attitudes and behaviours to make our lives more conducive to happiness. The whole book is couched in the terminology and methods of behavioural economics and statistical psychological studies, which I loved, because it lends a strong scientific flavour to what is essentially an easily accessible and enjoyable book about how to take practical steps to making your life a bit (or a lot, maybe) better. Paul Dolan's framework is coherent, positive, and flexible - there isn't anyone I wouldn't recommend this book to if you want what must be one of the least wishy-washy self-help manuals out there, not to mention learning a buttload of interesting stuff from psychology, economics, epidemiology and whatnot about public behaviour and wellbeing (all these elements will probably be more interesting to you if you're an outright social science nerd, like me).
Okay, now the kind-of-reflective bit.
I'm not going to try to outline all, or even a summary, of my thoughts about happiness and wellbeing and life and purpose and so on from the last couple of years, as that would be pretty much unreadably personal and unwriteably long. But here are a few** thoughts.
Happiness is, I think it's fair to say, taken as the point of life by most modern young Western people. Largely, it is pursued out of an individualistic perspective that sets up a goal which one expects or hopes will make one happy, and then the pursuit of this goal is prioritised (within a complex series of social and economic constraints) above most other things until it is attained - or not. In this way, we are like Jay Gatsby - albeit lacking his vast resources (money, prestige, charm, a nonjudgmental neighbour played by Spiderman). But even despite his enormous lack-of-constraints, Gatsby [SPOILER ALERT] failed in his personal quest for happiness, and so do many of us. We encounter problems during our pursuits of whatever it is we think might make us happy, and many of these are personal or circumstantial, but often they are connected to wider systems of constraints on the reasonable of individual capabilities to seek pleasure or purpose. In terms of happiness, this might be a helpful way to pose the concept of injustice: the avoidable perpetuation of these structures of constraints on people's pursuit of happiness. These kinds of injustices are not hard to see: socially and culturally pervasive sexism constrains women, aspects of freemarket economics constrain people all over the world in different ways, our skew-whiff relationship with nature constrains both the capacity of future generations to sustain themselves and also leaves contemporary society living in a stilted world alien to the biosphere that sustains us. Not everyone is affected by or necessarily cares about these injustices, but the fact of the matter is, this world is far from perfect, and we as relatively insignificant parts of it can hardly expect our quests for happiness to go smoothly at every turn. So we get frustrated, we get depressed, we turn cynical, and the modern response to so having so many potential traffic-jams on our road to self-fulfilment is, largely, to streamline our concerns. In Paul Dolan's language, to restrict our attention to only things that bring us maximal combinations of pleasure and purpose and stop giving a fuck (to use Sarah Knight's language, albeit in a mischaracterisation of her argument) about things that don't feature in those combinations. Basically, in the grim disappointing mess of reality, the search for happiness makes us selfish beings, as the way we define our priorities becomes subjective. And not everyone suffers the same injustices, not everyone experiences the same constraints, not everyone's struggles overlap - in fact they often conflict. This means that the quest for happiness, in aggregate, if people take their own subjective preferences and ambitions as the core pursuit of that quest, may well actually perpetuate injustices. (This is similar to what I discussed in my post about Sarah "IDGAF" Knight's book, and is also, I think, the one area (but it's a biggy) where Paul Dolan's book falls down in providing a coherent map to living well.)
So, what's missing? Objectivity.
This obviously doesn't entail everyone abandoning their own perspectives or preferences or whatever. This is the cultivation of knowledge, in individuals, of the nature of the world, of their place in it, of what they can reasonably expect to get out of life, of similar realities for other people, and of the legitimacy of both their own and another persons' claims to any particular pursuit. Wisdom, in a nutshell. Imbuing people with wisdom helps them come to terms with and make the best of situations they're in, rather than the desire-driven striving to be somewhere else, somewhere better, that comes with the subjective pursuit of happiness. Wise people can and do attain happiness, of course, but never indefinitely - because nobody ever does. Happiness is a feeling, it's inherently transient. Wisdom helps people know this, and so be comfortable with their lives even where they're not feeling particularly pleasurable or purposeful. This state of wisdom-based contentment I think is best referred to as joy: one finds a consistent set of good*** objective truths to live by and refer back to constantly, keeping both happy and unhappy moments in perspective.
What is wisdom though? I want to clarify straight-off that it is not cleverness. It is knowledge, of a sort, but not the taught-or-learnt kind - the living, intuitive, adaptive kind, that can never really be proved beyond argument but the truth of which is generally evident. For examples - it is better to build than destroy, to trust than fear. However, the complexity of uncovering objective facts about a world that has so much wrong with it proves the application of wisdom difficult indeed. At the heart of wisdom though is a practical understanding of who you are and what you're doing in the world. Mindfulness (the practice of relinquishing worldly concerns by focusing on a simple task or sensory input) is one method, long-established largely through meditative Eastern practices and picked up increasingly in modern times by Westerners seeking inner peace, of trying to attain insights or disciplines that help one know oneself. Philosophy and poetry, though extremely different in style and substance, are both also things that can help us realise things about ourselves and the world that empower us, enlighten us, exercise our faculty of wisdom intellectually and spiritually. I think the chief practical insight of wisdom, something that I'd like to believe all humans know intuitively, something so obvious once known but so easily forgotten that regular reminders from personal mindfulness and conversation with friends, from philosophy, poetry, novels, newspapers, strangers, rocks, memories, TV, trees, even Buzzfeed quizzes (eh, well, ok) are needed to reorient our awareness and living-out-the-implications of this enormous truth, is that other people's lives matter just as much as yours. They are just as complex, just as worthwhile, just as full of self-justification and self-doubt, full of joy and fear and turmoil and loss and longing, subject to constraints on agency and choice, directed by a mixture of decision and circumstance.
This in tremendously obvious (I hope) but I so easily forget it in the moment, swept along in my own subjective pursuit of what I think will give me pleasure and purpose. The point of philosophy or meditation or poetry or art (we'll come to that in a sec) is, in this view, to instill empathy, to make that empathy genuine and affirmative and proactive, to strengthen the bonds between human persons that they may help each other have better lives. And intellectualism can be an enormous asset in doing this: critical theory is a perfect example of a field where academics, in seeking to understand culture and politics, have developed ways of explaining differences between people and differing constraints placed upon them so that these groups can learn better about the others' experience and act in a way that helps lift those constraints rather than perpetuate them (remember, this is technically (well, by my own definition) injustice). Art though may be the greatest man-made vehicle of empathy. I mean - paintings and films and theatre and television and music aside (sorry, it's not that I don't love vast swathes of those things but this, if you hadn't noticed, is a blog about books) - basically any good novel or short story will test you, will force you to empathise, at least some of the way, with a character who is not altogether like you; will bring you to understand how another mind, another life, might work, and see something of human sincerity there, even if there isn't much. A few books that do this brilliantly are this and this and this. Oh, and don't even tell me you wouldn't offer Holden Caulfield a cup of tea and just try to have a nice chat with the poor kid.
All worthwhile philosophy, all earnest and meaningful poetry or prose, leads in some way to the conclusion of wisdom that is empathy, extended equally and absolutely to everyone. In another word, love. I believe this pops up so consistently as the endpage of morality, the central gist of human life, not because it is a nice-but-improbable target that idealists throughout history have pinned up as a muse, but because it is objectively true. As a Christian I believe that God is the point of everything, including human life, including my life, including art and trees and philosophy and psychology and behavioural economics and the pursuit of happiness and everything we might interact with during that pursuit; and I also believe that God literally is love. God exists in ongoing eternal relationships, and we were made to do so too. (This post is already waaay long so if you're curious about the theology check out this excellent overview of Christianity.) This solves the objectivity problem: God has absolute claims over all aspects of reality because God created and sustains them, so we have a definite start on how to define 'good' (this book is an excellent philosophical exploration of how God's being good provides a platform for ethics, as well as guiding behaviours consistent with Christian joy). I do not believe that Christianity has solved the problem of happiness - in this broken world, there will always be constraints and frustrations to pleasure or purpose-seeking, no matter how much injustice is tackled. However, I do think that Christianity shows us the fallacy underpinning the whole pursuit: happiness, while good, is fleeting, and is not the point - God is the point, and God is love. True wisdom is knowing this and acting from it.
I think, as a concluding remark, that Paul Dolan's excellent insights in this book into what happiness is and how we can actively pursue it are wholely worthwhile and deserve to be read and heeded. However, they are grounded in a subjective and individualistic worldview that pays little attention (ironic) to bigger questions about the point of the entire venture - and these are questions that need asking. Reading Paul Dolan's book without belief in anything concretely objectively good may, I fear, render in people the kind of selfishness that neoliberal society mistakes for rationality. Reading this book in light of a coherent joy-giving worldview though, I think will help people make practical marginal increments on their own happiness while still operating primarily out of love (pay Søren Kierkegaard a visit, my fingers are starting to cramp). Happiness 'by design' of individual agents seeking to maximise it isn't a patch on experiencing happiness as a natural part of a joyful life in loving relationships with God and everyone else.
I've written way too much. Again. Here's some relevant poignant Bible words.
"I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live, that each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all their toil - this is the gift of God."
- Ecclesiastes 3: 10 - 13
* My half-sincerest apologies for that extended double-nested parenthetical statement. That was monstrous and totally unnecessary but quite fun to write.
** A few. A few. Ha. Hahaha! I've just finished writing this post and reading back over it - good grief. How in the name of Buddy Glass do so many small thoughts grossly overextend into full-blown rambles? Ah well. You either read it all or you didn't. Kind regards.
*** I specify 'good' here because if one settled on objective truth that didn't build a worldview that you could comfortably accept your place in, it would ruin you, and you'd probably return, one way or another, to subjective self-directed happiness-seeking, albeit tainted by the haunting knowledge of a universal meaninglessness. Hm.
Before I dive into reflection, I'll give an overview of the book, which despite the breadth and quantity of academic studies it draws on is extremely consistent in proposing a simple system for managing our lives in a way conducive to happiness. Part one of the book lays out this system, exploring how happiness is evaluated, felt, and aimed for. Dolan, in true behavioural-economist form, argues that happiness, as people generally experience it, is a psychological output resulting from inputs that yield combinations of pleasure and purpose. Maximising our own happiness is achieved by realising our preference functions for pleasure and purpose, working out how reasonably we can attain ideal combinations for these, and taking practical steps to reshape our lives to resemble and contain these combinations. The key element of how we do so is attitudinal - it's what we pay attention to that yields pleasure or purpose in our lives, and therefore considerable thought and effort should go into where we allocate our attention. This part concludes with an excellent chapter about psychological hindrances to doing this well; generally subconsciously, our lives fail to make us happy in particular ways because our desires are for unpleasurable or unpurposeful things, our expectations unrealistic, or our beliefs erroneous. Part two of the book, very straightforwardly, builds on this framework for how we can better attain happiness by giving some very generalistic (so suited to a range of people) but still rigorous (so not fatuous and actually extremely helpful) pointers about how we can reform our attitudes and behaviours to make our lives more conducive to happiness. The whole book is couched in the terminology and methods of behavioural economics and statistical psychological studies, which I loved, because it lends a strong scientific flavour to what is essentially an easily accessible and enjoyable book about how to take practical steps to making your life a bit (or a lot, maybe) better. Paul Dolan's framework is coherent, positive, and flexible - there isn't anyone I wouldn't recommend this book to if you want what must be one of the least wishy-washy self-help manuals out there, not to mention learning a buttload of interesting stuff from psychology, economics, epidemiology and whatnot about public behaviour and wellbeing (all these elements will probably be more interesting to you if you're an outright social science nerd, like me).
Okay, now the kind-of-reflective bit.
I'm not going to try to outline all, or even a summary, of my thoughts about happiness and wellbeing and life and purpose and so on from the last couple of years, as that would be pretty much unreadably personal and unwriteably long. But here are a few** thoughts.
Happiness is, I think it's fair to say, taken as the point of life by most modern young Western people. Largely, it is pursued out of an individualistic perspective that sets up a goal which one expects or hopes will make one happy, and then the pursuit of this goal is prioritised (within a complex series of social and economic constraints) above most other things until it is attained - or not. In this way, we are like Jay Gatsby - albeit lacking his vast resources (money, prestige, charm, a nonjudgmental neighbour played by Spiderman). But even despite his enormous lack-of-constraints, Gatsby [SPOILER ALERT] failed in his personal quest for happiness, and so do many of us. We encounter problems during our pursuits of whatever it is we think might make us happy, and many of these are personal or circumstantial, but often they are connected to wider systems of constraints on the reasonable of individual capabilities to seek pleasure or purpose. In terms of happiness, this might be a helpful way to pose the concept of injustice: the avoidable perpetuation of these structures of constraints on people's pursuit of happiness. These kinds of injustices are not hard to see: socially and culturally pervasive sexism constrains women, aspects of freemarket economics constrain people all over the world in different ways, our skew-whiff relationship with nature constrains both the capacity of future generations to sustain themselves and also leaves contemporary society living in a stilted world alien to the biosphere that sustains us. Not everyone is affected by or necessarily cares about these injustices, but the fact of the matter is, this world is far from perfect, and we as relatively insignificant parts of it can hardly expect our quests for happiness to go smoothly at every turn. So we get frustrated, we get depressed, we turn cynical, and the modern response to so having so many potential traffic-jams on our road to self-fulfilment is, largely, to streamline our concerns. In Paul Dolan's language, to restrict our attention to only things that bring us maximal combinations of pleasure and purpose and stop giving a fuck (to use Sarah Knight's language, albeit in a mischaracterisation of her argument) about things that don't feature in those combinations. Basically, in the grim disappointing mess of reality, the search for happiness makes us selfish beings, as the way we define our priorities becomes subjective. And not everyone suffers the same injustices, not everyone experiences the same constraints, not everyone's struggles overlap - in fact they often conflict. This means that the quest for happiness, in aggregate, if people take their own subjective preferences and ambitions as the core pursuit of that quest, may well actually perpetuate injustices. (This is similar to what I discussed in my post about Sarah "IDGAF" Knight's book, and is also, I think, the one area (but it's a biggy) where Paul Dolan's book falls down in providing a coherent map to living well.)
So, what's missing? Objectivity.
This obviously doesn't entail everyone abandoning their own perspectives or preferences or whatever. This is the cultivation of knowledge, in individuals, of the nature of the world, of their place in it, of what they can reasonably expect to get out of life, of similar realities for other people, and of the legitimacy of both their own and another persons' claims to any particular pursuit. Wisdom, in a nutshell. Imbuing people with wisdom helps them come to terms with and make the best of situations they're in, rather than the desire-driven striving to be somewhere else, somewhere better, that comes with the subjective pursuit of happiness. Wise people can and do attain happiness, of course, but never indefinitely - because nobody ever does. Happiness is a feeling, it's inherently transient. Wisdom helps people know this, and so be comfortable with their lives even where they're not feeling particularly pleasurable or purposeful. This state of wisdom-based contentment I think is best referred to as joy: one finds a consistent set of good*** objective truths to live by and refer back to constantly, keeping both happy and unhappy moments in perspective.
What is wisdom though? I want to clarify straight-off that it is not cleverness. It is knowledge, of a sort, but not the taught-or-learnt kind - the living, intuitive, adaptive kind, that can never really be proved beyond argument but the truth of which is generally evident. For examples - it is better to build than destroy, to trust than fear. However, the complexity of uncovering objective facts about a world that has so much wrong with it proves the application of wisdom difficult indeed. At the heart of wisdom though is a practical understanding of who you are and what you're doing in the world. Mindfulness (the practice of relinquishing worldly concerns by focusing on a simple task or sensory input) is one method, long-established largely through meditative Eastern practices and picked up increasingly in modern times by Westerners seeking inner peace, of trying to attain insights or disciplines that help one know oneself. Philosophy and poetry, though extremely different in style and substance, are both also things that can help us realise things about ourselves and the world that empower us, enlighten us, exercise our faculty of wisdom intellectually and spiritually. I think the chief practical insight of wisdom, something that I'd like to believe all humans know intuitively, something so obvious once known but so easily forgotten that regular reminders from personal mindfulness and conversation with friends, from philosophy, poetry, novels, newspapers, strangers, rocks, memories, TV, trees, even Buzzfeed quizzes (eh, well, ok) are needed to reorient our awareness and living-out-the-implications of this enormous truth, is that other people's lives matter just as much as yours. They are just as complex, just as worthwhile, just as full of self-justification and self-doubt, full of joy and fear and turmoil and loss and longing, subject to constraints on agency and choice, directed by a mixture of decision and circumstance.
This in tremendously obvious (I hope) but I so easily forget it in the moment, swept along in my own subjective pursuit of what I think will give me pleasure and purpose. The point of philosophy or meditation or poetry or art (we'll come to that in a sec) is, in this view, to instill empathy, to make that empathy genuine and affirmative and proactive, to strengthen the bonds between human persons that they may help each other have better lives. And intellectualism can be an enormous asset in doing this: critical theory is a perfect example of a field where academics, in seeking to understand culture and politics, have developed ways of explaining differences between people and differing constraints placed upon them so that these groups can learn better about the others' experience and act in a way that helps lift those constraints rather than perpetuate them (remember, this is technically (well, by my own definition) injustice). Art though may be the greatest man-made vehicle of empathy. I mean - paintings and films and theatre and television and music aside (sorry, it's not that I don't love vast swathes of those things but this, if you hadn't noticed, is a blog about books) - basically any good novel or short story will test you, will force you to empathise, at least some of the way, with a character who is not altogether like you; will bring you to understand how another mind, another life, might work, and see something of human sincerity there, even if there isn't much. A few books that do this brilliantly are this and this and this. Oh, and don't even tell me you wouldn't offer Holden Caulfield a cup of tea and just try to have a nice chat with the poor kid.
All worthwhile philosophy, all earnest and meaningful poetry or prose, leads in some way to the conclusion of wisdom that is empathy, extended equally and absolutely to everyone. In another word, love. I believe this pops up so consistently as the endpage of morality, the central gist of human life, not because it is a nice-but-improbable target that idealists throughout history have pinned up as a muse, but because it is objectively true. As a Christian I believe that God is the point of everything, including human life, including my life, including art and trees and philosophy and psychology and behavioural economics and the pursuit of happiness and everything we might interact with during that pursuit; and I also believe that God literally is love. God exists in ongoing eternal relationships, and we were made to do so too. (This post is already waaay long so if you're curious about the theology check out this excellent overview of Christianity.) This solves the objectivity problem: God has absolute claims over all aspects of reality because God created and sustains them, so we have a definite start on how to define 'good' (this book is an excellent philosophical exploration of how God's being good provides a platform for ethics, as well as guiding behaviours consistent with Christian joy). I do not believe that Christianity has solved the problem of happiness - in this broken world, there will always be constraints and frustrations to pleasure or purpose-seeking, no matter how much injustice is tackled. However, I do think that Christianity shows us the fallacy underpinning the whole pursuit: happiness, while good, is fleeting, and is not the point - God is the point, and God is love. True wisdom is knowing this and acting from it.
I think, as a concluding remark, that Paul Dolan's excellent insights in this book into what happiness is and how we can actively pursue it are wholely worthwhile and deserve to be read and heeded. However, they are grounded in a subjective and individualistic worldview that pays little attention (ironic) to bigger questions about the point of the entire venture - and these are questions that need asking. Reading Paul Dolan's book without belief in anything concretely objectively good may, I fear, render in people the kind of selfishness that neoliberal society mistakes for rationality. Reading this book in light of a coherent joy-giving worldview though, I think will help people make practical marginal increments on their own happiness while still operating primarily out of love (pay Søren Kierkegaard a visit, my fingers are starting to cramp). Happiness 'by design' of individual agents seeking to maximise it isn't a patch on experiencing happiness as a natural part of a joyful life in loving relationships with God and everyone else.
I've written way too much. Again. Here's some relevant poignant Bible words.
"I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live, that each of them may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all their toil - this is the gift of God."
- Ecclesiastes 3: 10 - 13
* My half-sincerest apologies for that extended double-nested parenthetical statement. That was monstrous and totally unnecessary but quite fun to write.
** A few. A few. Ha. Hahaha! I've just finished writing this post and reading back over it - good grief. How in the name of Buddy Glass do so many small thoughts grossly overextend into full-blown rambles? Ah well. You either read it all or you didn't. Kind regards.
*** I specify 'good' here because if one settled on objective truth that didn't build a worldview that you could comfortably accept your place in, it would ruin you, and you'd probably return, one way or another, to subjective self-directed happiness-seeking, albeit tainted by the haunting knowledge of a universal meaninglessness. Hm.
