The concept of happiness is too big to tackle all at once, so let me look at it from just one angle: I think happiness, so-called, is “being busy doing the things you genuinely love to do.”
That contains two meanings. On the one hand, being busy means you are working hard toward a goal (and ideally, that busyness includes some physical labor). On the other hand, “genuinely love to do” means that completing the activity itself can directly bring you happiness.
Let me explain these separately—
1. Effort and Happiness
Intuitively, happiness seems like it should come from a carefree, comfortable life. But that may be one of our biggest misunderstandings about happiness.
You’ve probably heard the parable of “the fisherman and the tycoon”:
A fisherman was lying on the beach, soaking up the sun, when a very rich man came over and said, “You shouldn’t be sunbathing right now. This is the best season for fishing. If you went out to sea now, you could catch lots and lots of fish.” The fisherman asked, “And then what?” The rich man said, “Then you could make lots and lots of money.” The fisherman asked, “And what would I do with lots and lots of money?” The rich man said, “Then you could hire lots and lots of people to fish for you, and you could buy a big fishing boat.” The fisherman asked, “And then what, after hiring people and buying a big fishing boat?” The rich man replied, “Then you wouldn’t have to go out to sea anymore. You could lie on the beach and soak up the sun.” The fisherman answered, “Take a look at what I’m doing right now.”
The usual interpretation is that, when it comes to pursuing happiness, the fisherman seems to understand the true meaning of a happy life better. The tycoon takes the long way around, making a huge detour only to end up back where he started.
But is that really true? The facts may point in exactly the opposite direction. In terms of how pleasure is achieved, the fisherman gets something for nothing, while the tycoon earns his reward through effort. And our brains are actually better adapted to the latter kind of life.
“Earning rewards through effort” is a clever mechanism evolution gave us. It motivated early humans to keep up the physical and intellectual labor necessary to obtain the resources needed for survival (in early human societies, physical labor obviously made up the overwhelming majority of it)—finding food and fighting off a harsh natural environment. You can imagine that our ancestors rarely had an easy time obtaining enough resources to survive, as the fisherman does; they had to work brutally hard to stay alive and reproduce. When hard work produced the resources necessary for survival, the brain generated an intense sense of satisfaction and pleasure, reinforcing that effort and allowing people’s hard work and diligence to continue. In fact, research has found that this “earning rewards through effort” mechanism is jointly handled in the brain by a circuit made up of the “nucleus accumbens–striatum–prefrontal cortex.” The prefrontal cortex controls thought processes and is involved in most of the higher activities of the human brain; the nucleus accumbens is the brain’s pleasure-and-reward center; and the striatum controls bodily movement[1]. In other words, pleasure is closely connected to physical effort. Without this link, the brain’s reward circuit has trouble connecting, and people naturally have trouble feeling happy.
So what is linked to happiness is, ironically, not comfort but a certain amount of effort. Modern people’s unhappiness may also have something to do with the absence of effort.
For early humans, the connection between working hard and receiving a reward was very direct: kill prey, then get food; sow seeds, work the fields, then harvest grain. That obvious connection may still be more or less intact in agriculture today. But in city life, we don’t need to plant seeds and then harvest food, or raise a cow before eating its meat—we just drive to the supermarket and buy whatever we want. We don’t need to scrub clothes one by one on a washboard; we toss them into a washing machine. And we don’t need to draw water from a well and boil it before taking a hot shower; we just turn on the tap.
Rationally speaking, of course, the money we spend on supermarket food, washing machines, hot showers, water, and electricity is all compensation we earned through hard work. But the link between the two has become so remote that humans can no longer feel it intuitively. In our experience, making money is one thing, and the pleasure right in front of us is another.
So although objectively most people still have to work hard and earn money to buy the resources they need to survive, subjectively we are all the fisherman in the parable, enjoying rewards without any visible effort. We keep skipping over the “effort” link and going straight to the reward. As a result, the brain circuit for earning rewards through effort gets broken: with the striatum, which handles physical effort, left inactive, the nucleus accumbens, which handles pleasure, is also hard to activate.
That may be why modern life is more comfortable than life in any previous era, yet people are unhappy. Research shows that people born in the middle of the twentieth century were ten times more likely to suffer from depression than people born in the early twentieth century. A more comfortable life has not increased happiness; it has instead pushed more people into depression[2]. In psychological counseling, one technique for improving mood is to prepare a plot of farmland for clients to cultivate, allowing them to experience the pleasure of harvesting after hard work. This therapy applies the theory above, whether intentionally or not. If depression keeps spreading, I suspect the favorite form of travel for future urban white-collar workers won’t be “rural tourism” anymore, but “going to the countryside to farm on weekends.”
So in the parable above, the poor fisherman actually resembles today’s wealthy modern people, who can get all kinds of life resources at the drop of a hat. The tycoon’s lifestyle, meanwhile, is more like that of our ancestors, who had to work hard to obtain hard-won resources. By comparison, the tycoon may actually be more likely to find happiness.
2. Interest and Happiness
But the tycoon in the parable may not have found happiness either. After all, what ultimately makes him happy is still lying on the beach all day, not the achievement of his work itself. One reason modern people are unhappy is that rewards bypass effort; another is that the work they labor desperately at isn’t something they genuinely like or find meaningful, so completing the work itself cannot bring them much happiness. For many people, work provides only money, and money is merely a medium for obtaining other rewards.
That doing things you don’t like cannot bring happiness seems to require no further explanation. But if we turn the question around, it may be worth digging a little deeper—why does doing what you like make you happy?
This too is a huge question, and there may be many reasons. For example, we hate stress. Stress triggers a series of neurophysiological reactions that increase negative emotions. The only reason to do something you dislike is more or less that you feel pressured into it, so the psychological stress is relatively strong and your mood naturally drops. When you do something you like, much of the drive may come from internal motivation, which can reduce the psychological burden caused by external pressure. (Of course, if you keep doing something you originally loved under enormous external pressure, you may well end up turning from a fan into a hater. The saying “choose an industry, come to hate it” applies here: an adult-film actor who entered the business because of his own lust may very well retire with no libido left.)
Another important reason may be that we are often able to become truly absorbed only when we are doing something we genuinely love. And focus is a happy experience.
Two psychologists at Harvard University conducted a survey[3]. At random times, they sent prompts to the phones of several thousand participants. Whenever a volunteer received one, they had to log on to a website and answer three questions:
Q1: How are you feeling right now?
Q2: What are you doing right now?
Q3: Are you thinking about the thing you’re doing? (Options: 1. Yes; 2. No, I’m thinking about something pleasant; 3. No, I’m thinking about something neutral; 4. No, I’m thinking about something unpleasant.)
After analyzing the data from several thousand people, the researchers first found that daydreaming is extremely common: people were thinking about something different from what they were doing 46.9% of the time. More importantly, compared with being fully engaged in an activity, people were less happy when their minds wandered. Their happiness dropped significantly when they were daydreaming about something unpleasant or neutral. Even when they imagined something pleasant, they were still slightly less happy than when they were focused on what they were doing. In other words, doing things with focus is the happiest state. The so-called “meditation” practice that has recently become popular is, at its core, really just a way of cultivating focus. (Several neuroscience studies have also confirmed that focus can increase happiness, but I won’t get into that here~)
There’s supposedly a Zen koan that goes like this:
Young monk: “May I ask, Elder, what did you do before attaining enlightenment?”
Elder: “Chop wood, carry water, cook.”
Young monk: “And after attaining enlightenment?”
Elder: “Still chop wood, carry water, cook.”
The young monk snickered. “Then what does attaining enlightenment mean?”
Elder: “Before enlightenment, when I chopped wood, I worried about carrying water; when I carried water, I worried about cooking; and when I cooked, I was thinking about chopping wood. After enlightenment, chopping wood meant chopping wood, carrying water meant carrying water, and cooking meant cooking. That’s what enlightenment is.”
Focus is enlightenment.
Positive psychologists like to call this highly focused state “flow.” People immersed in “flow” often report feeling tremendous happiness during the process[4]. Clearly, unless you are doing something you genuinely love, it is unlikely that you will reach a state of deep immersion.
Digging a little deeper, we can further distinguish among the things we like to do. Some activities bring direct sensory pleasure (good food, sex). When we first do these things, “flow” may be intense, but it may also fade quickly (the adult-film-actor example again~~). Humans are social animals, after all, and more lasting happiness may come mainly from social activities. Repeatedly eating the same delicious food can quickly become boring, while the pleasure of showing off that food on social media may last a little longer. The most sustainable happiness, however, probably comes from things we not only like but also find meaningful (which, naturally, are usually social activities too). As for what “meaningful” means, that’s another enormous question I can’t unpack here.
To sum up, happiness is “doing the things you genuinely love and find meaningful, driven by internal motivation in the absence of much external pressure.”
By this standard, who is happy? I didn’t study history well enough to know much about historical figures, so let me name two fictional characters from films and television that I know better.
Sherlock Holmes is happy.
When watching Sherlock (Sherlock), I had a very strong feeling that Sherlock Holmes is probably the happiest person in the world. It is not because he has Watson by his side *^__^*), but because he can always lose himself in things he finds meaningful. Of course, Holmes is unhappy now and then—for instance, when he cannot get an interesting case and has nothing to do but sit around bored. Whenever that happens, he becomes so restless he nearly goes mad. Holmes simply cannot stand boredom. The moment an intriguing case appears, he throws himself into it completely, and his focused eyes are brimming with happiness. And since physical labor involving bodily movement is more beneficial for regulating one’s state of mind than purely mental labor, Holmes, who believes in putting things into practice, must be happier than those “armchair detectives” who sit by the fireplace and rely solely on their brains to reason things out.
Walter White in Breaking Bad (Breaking Bad) is happy, too.
The timid, mild-mannered chemistry teacher Walter White is driven into a corner by lung cancer and starts cooking meth. Unexpectedly, he makes the purest crystal meth in the world, step by step transforming from a meek, honest man into a criminal kingpin. When he later finds himself in another desperate situation, he confesses to his family:
“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And… I was really—I was alive.”
I think that during those years of cooking meth, Walter White was completely immersed in a state of flow. After wasting his whole life, Walter White somehow found happiness in this sinful undertaking.
Collected
This article is adapted from Chapter 26, “Z for Zealot,” of my book The Alluring Illusion: Psychological Secrets in Film and Television.
References
[1] Lambert, K. G. (2006). Rising rates of depression in today’s
society: Consideration of the roles of effort-based rewards and enhanced
resilience in day-to-day functioning. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews,
30(4), 497-510.
[2] Kelly Lambert. (2009). The More Comfortable, the More Depressed. Global Science, 2009, (1): 46-51.
[3] Killingsworth,
M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
Science, 330(6006), 932-932.
[4] Martin Seligman. (2010). Authentic Happiness (pp. 118-122). Wanjuan Publishing House.
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