Bookshelf

🎨 Impressions

A wonderful book that explores every facet of how humans think of the phenomenon of happiness. It seems to be one of the most central emotions of our existence, and currently there has been an explosion in focus on how we can make sure to increase it. This is the clear sign of civilizational improvement. If we’ve got some much time on our hands to start actively caring about increasing our own happiness, a few things have gone right. On the other hand, you can certainly classify this quest as a “First World Problem”, a derogatory term, but also one that carries a subtext of envy.

Or maybe it’s a sign of a decline in mental health that people are flocking towards scientific methods to increase happiness these days, because they feel they don’t have enough of it in their lives?

In any case, the book doesn’t judge this, it is meant to educate on the topic. What makes us happy and why? Jonathan Haidt has structured this book very well. The chapters are short and easy to grasp, although he’s using advanced language at many points, requiring focus on it. I found myself drifting off when losing his train of thought at times, needing to reread some sentences. For my taste, this is a good sign though, as it makes me think more intensely on what is said.

It’s also clearly not a self-help book, even though the title might suggest so. It’s more of an explorational journey through the whole topic. Haidt sometimes inserts his own opinion, too, but he does so in a charming way. He brings his own experience to the table, which is nicely illustrated with this paragraph, paraphrased: “The study concluded that we have this instinctive urge to share new knowledge with others – we want to tell them immediately! Much like i’m doing right now with you!”

It was also interesting to read about his take on a bunch of the findings of other popular books in this general area. By now, I’ve read many of them, which made this fun for me. He goes over the often mentioned and horrifying Milgram Experiment, he wrote a whole chapter about the “Reciprocity Rule” I first saw in Cialdini’s book “Influence”, and he has been heavily influenced by the brilliant writings of Yuval Noah Harari, just like many of us have been as well.

The book profits a lot from his broad approach to the topic. He looks at all the major cultures and religions around the world and what stances they have had over the centuries and millennia, when it comes to happiness. There’s a lot about the Stoics in it, Greek mythology too, but a strong focus can be found on Buddhism, mainly because it’s the world religion that most closely thought about the human psychology and how to work with it. Compared to the rather mystic approaches of Christianity and Islam, you can certainly see, why.

It’s a good book and an instant recommendation if you’re interested in human psychology and the active efforts that can be made to increase your happiness and fulfillment in life.

📔 Highlights

Introduction: Too Much Wisdom

The mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. Like a rider on the back of an elephant, the conscious, reasoning part of the mind has only limited control of what the elephant does.

1. The Divided Self

Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex things in relation to things we already know.

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.”

Split-brain studies are important for this book because they show in such a dramatic way that one of these modules is good at inventing convincing explanations for your behavior, even when it has no knowledge of the causes of your behavior.

Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brains works so well that our reasoning can work at all.

But whatever its origin, once we had it, language was a powerful tool that could be used in new ways, and evolution then selected those individuals who got the best use out of it.

In later studies, Mischel discovered that the successful children were those who looked away from the temptation or were able to think about other enjoyable activities. These thinking skills are an aspect of emotional intelligence—an ability to understand and regulate one’s own feelings and desires. An emotionally intelligent person has a skilled rider who knows how to distract and coax the elephant without having to engage in a direct contest of wills.

“I know it’s wrong, I’m just having a hard time explaining why.” The point of these studies is that moral judgment is like aesthetic judgment. When you see a painting, you usually know instantly and automatically whether you like it. If someone asks you to explain your judgment, you confabulate.

2. Changing Your Mind

Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.

The unsettling implication of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name. Life is indeed what we deem it, but the deeming happens quickly and unconsciously.

Some commonalities of animal life even create similarities across species that we might call design principles. One such principle is that bad is stronger than good. Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.

You have to do something that will change your repertoire of available thoughts. Here are three of the best methods for doing so: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac.

3. Reciprocity with a Vengeance

Those species each evolved a reproduction system in which a single queen produces all the children, and nearly all the children are either sterile (ants) or else their reproductive abilities are suppressed (bees, mole rats); therefore, a hive, nest, or colony of these animals is one big family. If everyone around you is your sibling, and if the survival of your genes depends on the survival of your queen, selfishness becomes genetic suicide.

So what is really built into the person is a strategy: Play tit for tat. Do to others what they do unto you. Specifically, the tit-for-tat strategy is to be nice on the first round of interaction; but after that, do to your partner whatever your partner did to you on the previous round. Tit for tat takes us way beyond kin altruism.

Vampire bats, for example, will regurgitate blood from a successful night of bloodsucking into the mouth of an unsuccessful and genetically unrelated peer. Such behavior seems to violate the spirit of Darwinian competition, except that the bats keep track of who has helped them in the past, and in return they share primarily with those bats.

Dunbar proposes that language evolved because it enabled gossip. Individuals who could share social information, using any primitive means of communication, had an advantage over those who could not. And once people began gossiping, there was a runaway competition to master the arts of social manipulation, [..].

We feel vicarious shame and embarrassment when we hear about people whose schemes, lusts, and private failings are exposed. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance.

As long as everyone plays tit-for-tat augmented by gratitude, vengeance, and gossip, the whole system should work beautifully. (It rarely does, however, because of our self-serving biases and massive hypocrisy. [..])

4. The Faults of Others

“the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”

He says that thinking generally uses the “makes-sense” stopping rule. We take a position, look for evidence that supports it, and if we find some evidence—enough so that our position “makes sense”— we stop thinking.

People who are told that they have performed poorly on a test of social intelligence think extra hard to find reasons to discount the test; people who are asked to read a study showing that one of their habits—such as drinking coffee—is unhealthy think extra hard to find flaws in the study, flaws that people who don’t drink coffee don’t notice.

[..] a large majority say they are above average. (This effect is weaker in East Asian countries, and may not exist in Japan.)

People were quite happy to learn about the various forms of self-serving bias and then apply their newfound knowledge to predict others’ responses. But their self-ratings were unaffected. Even when you grab people by the lapels, shake them, and say, “Listen to me! Most people have an inflated view of themselves. Be realistic!” they refuse, muttering to themselves, “Well, other people may be biased, but I really am above average on leadership.”

If I could nominate one candidate for “biggest obstacle to world peace and social harmony,” it would be naive realism because it is so easily ratcheted up from the individual to the group level: My group is right because we see things as they are. Those who disagree are obviously biased by their religion, their ideology, or their self-interest.

Threatened self-esteem accounts for a large portion of violence at the individual level, but to really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism— the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end.

The first step is to see it as a game and stop taking it so seriously. The great lesson that comes out of ancient India is that life as we experience it is a game called “samsara.” It is a game in which each person plays out his “dharma,” his role or part in a giant play.

When you first catch sight of a fault in yourself, you’ll likely hear frantic arguments from your inner lawyer excusing you and blaming others, but try not to listen. You are on a mission to find at least one thing that you did wrong. When you extract a splinter it hurts, briefly, but then you feel relief, even pleasure.

5. The Pursuit of Happiness

From the perspective of Buddha and the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, the author’s problem is obvious: his pursuit of happiness. Buddhism and Stoicism teach that striving for external goods, or to make the world conform to your wishes, is always a striving after wind. Happiness can only be found within, by breaking attachments to external things and cultivating an attitude of acceptance.

Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer. The final moment of success is often no more thrilling than the relief of taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. If you went on the hike only to feel that pleasure, you are a fool.

Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”

Of course, it’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. Because whatever happens, you’re likely to adapt to it, but you don’t realize up front that you will. We are bad at “affective forecasting,” that is, predicting how we’ll feel in the future.

This is the adaptation principle at work: People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.

When we combine the adaptation principle with the discovery that people’s average level of happiness is highly heritable, we come to a startling possibility: In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.

Happiness causes marriage. Happy people marry sooner and stay married longer than people with a lower happiness setpoint, both because they are more appealing as dating partners and because they are easier to live with as spouses.

Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures.

Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress. It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.

In a review paper that Rodin and I wrote, we concluded that changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.

Csikszentmihalyi’s big discovery is that there is a state many people value even more than chocolate after sex. It is the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the zone.”

When we enter a state of flow, hard work becomes effortless. We want to keep exerting ourselves, honing our skills, using our strengths. Seligman suggests that the key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths.

One of the big accomplishments of positive psychology has been the development of a catalog of strengths. You can find out your strengths by taking an online test at www.authentichappiness.org.

You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening connections—helping friends, expressing gratitude to benefactors.

Other people—“satisficers”—are more laid back about choice. They evaluate an array of options until they find one that is good enough, and then they stop looking. Satisficers are not hurt by a surfeit of options. Maximizers end up making slightly better decisions than satisficers, on average (all that worry and information-gathering does help), but they are less happy with their decisions, and they are more inclined to depression and anxiety.

So to cut off all attachments, to shun the pleasures of sensuality and triumph in an effort to escape the pains of loss and defeat—this now strikes me as an inappropriate response to the inevitable presence of some suffering in every life. Many Western thinkers have looked at the same afflictions as Buddha— sickness, aging, and mortality—and come to a very different conclusion from his: Through passionate attachments to people, goals, and pleasures, life must be lived to the fullest.

But I believe that the Western ideal of action, striving, and passionate attachment is not as misguided as Buddhism suggests. We just need some balance (from the East) and some specific guidance (from modern psychology) about what to strive for.

6. Love and Attachments

[..] research on how people cope with the death of a spouse, or a long separation. The review found that adults experience the same sequence Bowlby had observed in children placed in hospitals: initial anxiety and panic, followed by lethargy and depression, followed by recovery through emotional detachment.

But in the competitive game of evolution, it’s a losing move for a male to provide resources to a child who is not his own. So active fathers, male-female pair-bonds, male sexual jealousy, and big-headed babies all co-evolved— that is, arose gradually but together.

True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other.

Having strong social relationships strengthens the immune system, extends life (more than does quitting smoking), speeds recovery from surgery, and reduces the risks of depression and anxiety disorders.

7. The Uses of Adversity

The first benefit is that rising to a challenge reveals your hidden abilities, and seeing these abilities changes your self-concept. None of us knows what we are really capable of enduring.

Most of the life goals that people pursue at the level of “characteristic adaptations” can be sorted—as the psychologist Robert Emmons has found—into four categories: work and achievement, relationships and intimacy, religion and spirituality, and generativity (leaving a legacy and contributing something to society).

Optimists are more likely to benefit than pessimists. Optimists are, for the most part, people who won the cortical lottery: They have a high happiness setpoint, they habitually look on the bright side, and they easily find silver linings. Life has a way of making the rich get richer and the happy get happier.

The key to growth is not optimism per se; it is the sense making that optimists find easy. If you can find a way to make sense of adversity and draw constructive lessons from it, you can benefit, too.

Those who talked with their friends or with a support group were largely spared the health-damaging effects of trauma.

Of course, children need limits to learn self-control, and they need plenty of failure to learn that success takes hard work and persistence. Children should be protected, but not spoiled.

Wisdom, says Sternberg, is the tacit knowledge that lets a person balance two sets of things. First, wise people are able to balance their own needs, the needs of others, and the needs of people or things beyond the immediate interaction (e.g., institutions, the environment, or people who may be adversely affected later on). Ignorant people see everything in black and white—they rely heavily on the myth of pure evil—and they are strongly influenced by their own self-interest.

8. The Felicity of Virtue

Cultivating virtue will make you happy. There are plenty of reasons to doubt the virtue hypothesis. Franklin himself admitted that he failed utterly to develop the virtue of humility, yet he reaped great social gains by learning to fake it.

Trying to make children behave ethically by teaching them to reason well is like trying to make a dog happy by wagging its tail. It gets causality backwards.

They made large tables of virtues and tried to see which ones were common across lists. Although no specific virtue made every list, six broad virtues, or families of related virtues, appeared on nearly all lists: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence (the ability to forge connections to something larger than the self).

One of the best predictors of the health of an American neighborhood is the degree to which adults respond to the misdeeds of other people’s children. When community standards are enforced, there is constraint and cooperation.

9. Divinity With or Without God

Liberals are right to work for a society that is open to people of every demographic group, but conservatives might be right in believing that at the same time we should work much harder to create a common, shared identity.

We also have a great deal of innate mental structure that prepares us for hierarchical interactions. Even in hunter-gatherer cultures that are in many ways egalitarian, equality is only maintained by active suppression of ever-present tendencies toward hierarchy.

[..] my research on the moral emotions has led me to conclude that the human mind simply does perceive divinity and sacredness, whether or not God exists.

Eliade says that the modern West is the first culture in human history that has managed to strip time and space of all sacredness and to produce a fully practical, efficient, and profane world. This is the world that religious fundamentalists find unbearable and are sometimes willing to use force to fight against.

People really do respond emotionally to acts of moral beauty, and these emotional reactions involve warm or pleasant feelings in the chest and conscious desires to help others or become a better person oneself.

Oxytocin causes bonding, not action. Elevation may fill people with feelings of love, trust, and openness, making them more receptive to new relationships; yet, given their feelings of relaxation and passivity, they might be less likely to engage in active altruism toward strangers.

Awe is the emotion of self-transcendence. My friend Dacher Keltner, an expert on emotion at the University of California at Berkeley, proposed to me a few years ago that we review the literature on awe and try to make sense of it ourselves. We found that scientific psychology had almost nothing to say about awe.

“Education must be seen as at least partially an effort to produce the good human being, to foster the good life and the good society.”

Many of the key battles in the American culture war are essentially about whether some aspect of life should be structured by the ethic of autonomy or by the ethic of divinity.

10. Happiness Comes from Between

There is no God and no externally given meaning to life, I thought, so from one perspective it really wouldn’t matter if I killed myself tomorrow. Very well, then everything beyond tomorrow is a gift with no strings and no expectations. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail.

White called it the “effectance motive,” which he defined as the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment.

Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves.

People don’t necessarily need to find meaning in their national identity—indeed, in large and diverse nations such as the United States, Russia, and India, religion might hold greater promise for cross-level coherence and purpose within life.

All human beings today are the products of the co-evolution of a set of genes (which is almost identical across cultures) and a set of cultural elements (which is diverse across cultures, but still constrained by the capacities and predispositions of the human mind).

For example, trust and therefore trade are greatly enhanced when all parties are part of the same religious community, and when religious beliefs say that God knows and cares about the honesty of the parties.

Group selection creates interlocking genetic and cultural adaptations that enhance peace, harmony, and cooperation within the group for the express purpose of increasing the group’s ability to compete with other groups. Group selection does not end conflict; it just pushes it up to the next level of social organization.

The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger.

11. Conclusion: On Balance

A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side.