Happiness, Part II

This is a related post concerning the 60-Minutes story about happiness.
Ben-Shahar says that it's not just those overindulging in work who are unhappy: "There's a lot of unhappiness on college campuses. And it's not just at Harvard. Over 94 percent of college students nationwide are stressed and overwhelmed. And students are paying a very high price for this pressure." I've witnessed this as a high school teacher in a district with extraordinarily high expectations for kids: in athletics, in academics, and especially in getting an acceptance letter to a prestigious college. The problem with competitiveness for getting into college is that it's a game with unknowable rules. As a freshman in high school, you don't know if you're heading to the big leagues or the bush leagues for college choices. You don't know the kind of ACT score you'll get. The ACT will determine if you're headed, generally, the kind of college you're headed to. And even if you could know that you're going to post a 34 on the ACT, you don't know if that's going to land you at the University of Michigan or Standford. So, you try to make sure that you have all the attributes that will shoot you into the highest collegiate orbit -- volunteering at the animal shelter, joining the debate team, the chess team, the Gaussians, Model U.N., and the yearbook. It's the unknowability of the college-selection process that makes it so stressful. You don't know how much is good enough. Maybe you should add another club? Maybe you should START a club? The most strategic students are thinking about maximizing themselves every second of the day.

Denmark is Happiness

The family was driving back from St. Louis on Sunday night from a nephew's graduation when the clouds massed blackly to the west as winds blew a thick river of airborne dirt across I-55. I flipped on the AM radio to find some weather reports (70+ MPH in Peoria, tornado watch across several central Illinois counties), when I came to this "60 Minutes" segment with Morley Safer about the happiest country in the world: Denmark.The story proposes several different hypotheses about why Danes rated first prize in a international survey of happiness.Low Expectations. Professor Kaare Christensen at the University of Southern Denmark did a study of Danish happiness. He says in the 60 Minutes piece, "What we basically figured out that although the Danes were very happy with their life, when we looked at their expectations they were pretty modest." When you don't expect too much, you aren't too disappointed.Sameness and Security. Danish newspaper columnist Sebastian Dorset, claims that, "contentment may stem from the fact that Denmark is almost totally homogenous, has no large disparities of wealth, and has had very little national turmoil for more than a half century. 'We have very little violence. We have very little murders. So people are, feel very safe,' he says." That security is more basic than being less worried about knife attack. It's also about the Danish safety net. One student says:
"I'm being paid right now for not going to school. I'm being paid forparenting," another male student tells Safer. "It's 100 percent paid for by thegovernment for half a year."
Denmark also provides free health care, subsidizedchild care and elder care, a social safety net spread the length and breadth ofthe country.
The cost of these safety nets would be staggering to an American: a 50% tax rate.Anti-materialism. Americans, according to Harvard Psychology lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar, want it all. "In America, part of the ethos, part of the American dream, is that more is better and the more is better usually applies to the material realm. And that doesn't pan out. That doesn't work. It doesn't make us happier," he says. Intead, American are stressed, not happy, because of high expectations. According to the report, "wanting it all is a bacterium that stays with us from youth to old age - wanting a bigger house, fancier car, more stuff. And when we get more, there’s always someone with even more stuff, who's just as unhappy.Brave New WorldThis reminds me of some of the discussions I had this year while teaching Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in my English 2 Honors class. Our discussions kept running into a problem involving the word "happiness." Kids wanted to say that Huxley was suggesting that a life of sex and drugs and pleasure and comfort and outward.... um... happiness didn't really make you... er... happy. Instead, true happiness existed when you were doing something important, like when the character Helmholtz Watson writes poetry out of his loneliness and yearning. It involves going after beauty and truth! John Savage and Watson seem to agree that beauty and truth (and thus happiness) can only come from discomfort and... a-hem!... unhappiness.
Part of our discussion in class involved ferreting out words that would represent better the difference among various kinds of "happiness": "feeling no pain" and "being excited and laughing a lot" and "knowing that you're engaged in something meaningful." In the 60-Minutes story, one Danish student said that Danes don't feel happy, but content. But then why was the survey about "happiness" rather than "contentness"? Weren't the survey-creators smart enough to know the difference? Even in our sophomore English class we were more discriminating than that. There's "content" (laying on the beach in Jamaica, ), there's "joyful" (riding on a roller coaster, watching Spinal Tap), and there's "feeling signficant" (curing cancer, writing a great novel).
So what about this language problem about happiness? Why, in our everyday speech, do we find it hard to discriminate between "happy-content" and "happy-feeling significant"? We have this romantic notion of what "happy" is... which it really isn't (at least completely).
Are you "happy" with your life? Would you describe yourself as "happy"? To answer these questions, you have to call up some images of people you consider happy. Is your image an episode of "Seinfeld"? Is it a photo-op of Hollywood newlyweds? Is it a picture of yourself sipping champagne in a yacht? Celebrating a walk-off homerun in front of sixty thousand fans?
Is a "happy" life a stringing-together of as many joyful moments as possible? as many "content" moments as possible? as many "significant" endeavors as possible?
It's interesting in itself that the original study tried to figure out who was "happiest" rather than "who lived the life most worth living."

Summer's begun

Today I created two new blogs, one for Henry (henrydavidlange.blogspot.com) and one for Charlotte (charlottecatherinelange.blogspot.com). Check them out! Here's a picture of both of them!