Is It Happiness I'm Looking For?

What is the ultimate manifestation of your time on earth?

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of presenting to a group of fellow co-workers during a portion of the all-day-run of events my company put on for analysts and senior analysts. When I joined this company in February, we had to do an “elevator” introduction of ourselves to the other new joiners and the orientation lead (why would a senior manager want to hire you for their project if you could only talk with them in the elevator ride before they started their day). During that three minute pitch I mentioned my outlet of creative writing on this website. For some reason just having a logo and observable proof of work got me tabbed as “the brand guy” for the rest of orientation.

Once orientation was over, I then moved to “the bench” which is the consulting term for fun-employment. I was getting paid but wasn’t actually on a project yet. While looking for work, I reached out to the leads of this all-day event that was taking place and said I would be willing to talk about my “personal brand” (because it was drawing so much attention) and how I’ve been forged into the individual I am today. My orientation lead had told them I would be a good addition to the team. They gave me full creative license to basically talk about anything I wanted, and to also then find other individuals within the company to share authentic stories/unique traits that they bring to the company to create a whole hour of presentations for people to come listen to and be inspired by.

As I began thinking about my journey the last 28 trips around the sun, and reflecting on the worldly perspective changes I’ve experienced in that time, I seemed to keep returning to the misguided approach/idea of “maximizing my life.” I wrote in the previous article “Eastern vs. Western Thinking” how for nearly my whole life I was of the mindset that I needed to accumulate more in the form of knowledge, wisdom, experience. I lowered my sights on monetary goals very early in college when I realized that was going to be an inherently slippery hedonic treadmill to get stuck running on, but the competitor in me still wanted to win at life. Or ‘live the best life.’ Which I equated to having the most experiences or the most awareness of worldly phenomena. Be up to date with the news, read all the books, listen to podcasts about various subjects. Be the complete modern renaissance man basically.

Coupling this mindset with my economics/mathematical brain was a recipe for disaster because I told myself, well I have a fixed timeline. I won’t live forever. So to win in this life, I must then optimize everything based on that constraint. If I master time, I master life. I had this perception that if I just maximized and optimized all areas of my life that I would be successful. Or I would at least be successful in having a handle on life to one day feel relaxed enough to enjoy it.

When I had that perspective on life, everything turned into a cost-benefit analysis. What tv show would give me the greatest pleasure for the next 30 minutes? What restaurant will bring me the most satisfaction for $30? How do I relax in a way that maximizes my relaxment? Some of you probably resonate with this. You can’t even enjoy your downtime because you’re working to figure out how to best enjoy the downtime. A weird catch 22.

While writing out my presentation, I made a note in the margin that it might be good to add the following caveat as a display of my evolving perspective/mindset regarding the whole theme of “Western”/maximizing thinking. Here’s what I noted, “As of today, I don’t know what the definition of a good/best life is. It’s something that is individualistic but also very complex when you really dive into it. That’s a topic for another discussion.”

I never actually said that piece during the presentation, but it has been glued to my mind ever since the day I wrote it in the margin. Because I really don’t know right now what I’m searching for in my life.

During my prep for the presentation and sketching out the flow of ideas, I had this vision of a graph where I was maximizing ‘area under the curve’ much like the following.

I wanted to show a concept in which the independent variables of time (X-axis), knowledge, and wisdom produced a curve, and it was then your responsibility as a human to live your life in such a way to maximize the area under it. That would equate to a successful life. If that’s too much math for you, just think the more blue in the picture above the better. That was how I internally conceptualized the philosophy of “maximizing life”, so I was trying to visually replicate that for the audience. The problem I was running into was I didn’t know what variable to label the Y-axis. The dependent variable. What was I actually trying to maximize at the end of the day? I had to scrap that slide because I didn’t have it flushed out.

At first you think it’s straight forward. Happiness. We all want to maximize our happiness on earth. The self-help world of books and podcasts all seem to preach an idea of happiness. Hell, two of my favorite books to date, by Arthur Brooks, “From Strength to Strength,” and “Build the Life You Want,” are predicated on increasing the happiness you experience in your life.

In short, the ultimate incentive driving our decisions and our actions can “ladder up” to the goal of achieving happiness. “Laddering up” might be best understood with an example.

I work hard in school to get good grades so that I can get a good job. I want to get a good job because I want to have financial security. I want financial security so that I don’t have to stress about basic human needs. Not having to stress about basic needs will give me the ability to relax. I want to relax so that I can be present and be happy in this world.

Good grades then ladders up to happiness. (Full disclosure, this is just an example and might not even be applicable to you, but it’s intended to show the intrinsic connection between action and incentives, even if you’re not consciously drawing the parallels between the two in that current moment of time.)

This way of thinking is very similar/ if not identical to the Five-Why’s exercise where you explore one piece of human behavior/a problem and then peel the layer back and ask “well why is that the case?” And you do that three more times. By the end of the exercise you should have a core insight that allows you to view the original problem in a new light.

I’ve done this exercise with friends and family of mine to see if there is a commonality to our “ultimate life goal.” There wasn’t a unanimous ladder-up to “happiness” per say, but the themes were all very similar/correlated. “A sense of fulfillment.” “A feeling of satisfaction in life.” “A healthy family.” etc

In one of the newsletters I get weekly from Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom he was describing a phenomena that seemed to link with the above findings and which I’ll flush out some more later.

Chris said, “I’ve become obsessed with the belief that life’s duties will one day be out of the way and you can then finally start doing the thing you want to and living your life fully. This is a myth. It’s a lie.”

He then mentions Marie-Louise von Franz’s definition of ‘the provisional life.’ “There is a strange feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being, one is doing this or that… [but] there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about.”

Chris brings in another idea from Gurwinder Bhogal called the ‘Deferred Happiness Syndrome’ which says, “The common feeling that your life has not begun, that your present reality is a mere prelude to some idyllic future. This idyll is a mirage that'll fade as you approach, revealing that the prelude you rushed through was in fact the one to your death.”

It seems as though maybe that feeling we are chasing is that sense of “aha, I’m finally in control.” The sense that everything is now under wraps, the fires have been put out and we can manage my time/energy with 100% autonomy from the influence of the outside world.

Another writer who’s ideas I enjoy engaging with is George Mack, who writes the 0.1% of Ideas newsletter. Though he wasn’t responding to the previous thoughts, his article “Adults Don’t Exists” offered a strikingly plausible answer/insight as to why that feeling we are chasing exists.

He writes, “There’s a Peter Pan perception of reality that has been frozen in time from childhood; the belief in a god-like adult class that runs the world. The high agency individual was told the same story in their childhood — but they began to see behind the curtain. Some gradually saw it — others were forced to see it all at once: The adults of the world aren’t a god-like superior class that have figured everything out, they’re just giant children putting on a show…Deep down, everyone is just a child that has aged, with sensory inputs each day trying to figure out what reality is. If you could see behind the curtain of everyone, you’d humanize these people. They are not gods. They eat, sleep, cry and visit the bathroom just like you.”

Where I see this explaining the feeling we are chasing is in the formative years of our childhood and youth, we see adults as superheroes, or at least idolized versions they’ll never be able to fully live up to. When you’re young and meet someone who is 18, 21, 25, 30, 40, 50, you think they are a different creature to you. You can’t imagine what it’s like being that age – but you’re convinced you’ll have everything figured out by the time you are that age. You then hit these age milestones yourself – and notice you’re still the same creature yet, you haven’t achieved the feeling of ‘figuring it all out.’ So then you set back out to conquer it in the next portion of your life adventures.

As I sat with these thoughts and tried to untangled them, I’ve come to a quasi check-mate scenario against happiness. The first piece of the check-mate is the understanding that happiness is fleeting an elusive. As humans, we are exceptional at returning to equilibrium. We are great at establishing a new norm in a foreign environment, and/or adapting to the changes that life throws at us. The same thing happens when we achieve/encounter happiness. Eventually it goes away. Either it’s because whatever is producing that happiness is not sustainable indefinitely, or your nervous system adjusts to the new state of normal that you’re living in. Happiness, in the initial state that we experience it, can’t last forever. You’ll lose appreciation or fulfillment from the cause of that happiness from pure human psychology/biology perspective.

Which then ushers into the second piece of the check-mate on happiness. We can only feel the effects of happiness by spending time in its absence. Which is to say, we need to experiences the pains of life in order to appreciate its beauty. The highs won’t feel as high if you never experience the lows.

This is why it was so hard for me to feel comfortable creating a chart that ‘maximized’ happiness. Because it wasn’t able to reflect the need for moments that were suboptimal in order to maximize the feeling of those moments at the more optimal points. Which then got me asking myself, ‘well how low is too low, or what is the optimal suboptimal point to which you aren’t experiencing happiness so that you’ll still have the chance to experience it, but you’re not so low that life is just kicking the living crap out of you too.’ I think this is where it really comes down to the individual. But it’s also why my vision of the graph above is totally misguided. You might not actually want to ‘maximize’ anything.

That being said, as I’ve spent time in corporate America, as I’ve discussed life with individuals across many generations, and as I’ve witnessed meme’s trending on social media, I’ve found comfort in the realization that we really are all just humans on earth. Those who are successful in one aspect of their life might be struggling tremendously in another. Even if you reach a point of financial security that allows you to cover for basic needs, and maybe even many of your wants, life still finds a way to induce stress/anxiety/chaos into your life. And if life doesn’t, your mind will create/imagine it for you. How fun is that! That’s pretty much the only guarantee I can promise you in life: nothing lasts forever.

I haven’t yet wrote a follow up piece to my article “A Journey to Faith,” but Faith played an increasingly important role in my life the last eight months, and has afforded me new perspectives through which to view life from.

One plausible explanation for all that I’ve written about here came from reading C.S. Lewis’ book “Mere Christianity.” He wrote the following, “Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want something that cannot be had in this world—the Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.’ —If I find myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

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A good read on happiness.

Happiness and the pursuit of a good and meaningful life