The Value of Things
That Make Us Unhappy

When people have asked me what I want for my kids, I have usually shied away from being too specific. I want my children to make up their own (well-informed) minds, and to decide for themselves – so I often reply I just want them to be happy. I am hardly unusual in this; certainly wishing unhappiness for one’s children would be a bizarre wish from any parent. Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is, furthermore, a well-known phrase that identifies happiness as a fundamental good. So I think happiness is a fairly natural and well-established goal.

But a moment’s thought, and a look at some of the data, shows that this is a problematic notion:

• What do we make of the evidence (Ford et al, 2014) that obsessive pursuit of happiness is associated with a greater risk of depression?
• What would we make of someone who said I got more happiness from this action than the unhappiness it caused other people as an excuse for poor behaviour?

Looking at our own behaviour and that of the people around us, it’s hard to cling onto a belief that people generally do attempt to maximise their happiness, or that happiness is a good life goal. We all do things we know are not likely to make us happy! 

As we think about guiding our children and students toward what we hope is a happy life, we can perhaps identify two elements:

• Do we know what will make us happy?
• Do we have the discipline and determination (self-imposed or externally demanded) to act in the ways that we think will make us happy?

These are both really interesting questions for parents and educators; in general society leans to the second one, with the assumption that the answer to the first is either obvious, or too philosophically tricky to define. So we ignore the first question and focus on the second; and as a result we end up with lots of advice (social media!) on how to get ahead, how to succeed, how to defer gratification and so on. And all these are focussed on acting in ways that will (supposedly) lead to happiness. There is some attention to the first question, but it tends to appear in the philosophy, religion or self-help section of the book shop, and not necessarily be widespread. Schools are – or at least should be – places to spend time on the first question; examining our values; looking at what matters to us; thinking about difficult stuff like what makes something meaningful? We do a lot of that – and our alumni tell us that it makes a difference over the course of their lifetime.

But does this lead to happiness? If we can help students know what would make them happy and help them with steps to achieve those things, then surely they would be happy?

Alas, such a linear approach may not work, because when we get what we seek, it often doesn’t turn out to be what we thought it was. Things look different from a distance. Arthur Brooks tells the story of Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain, who, at aged 70 wrote: I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call. I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot. They amount to 14.

So even great success may turn out not to bring happiness.

Another profound, though less often addressed, question is whether or not we should even be focussed on happiness as a goal in the first place.  Would you ever consciously choose a path that you thought would make you less happy? And if you did, might that sometimes be the right choice? The answers to both these might seem to be obviously no, but psychologist George Loewenstein writes fascinatingly about his economics PhD students who are trying to decide whether to have children, and who are at the same time disturbed by the research (Twenge et al, 2003) that shows that people with children tend to become less happy, on average.

How many people, knowing in advance that by having children they would be less happy, would go ahead? If the stresses and strains of parenting are not outweighed by the joys, might a wise choice be to avoid having children in the first place? 

Even to ask the question seems odd (even vaguely offensive to us parents!), showing that somewhere deep down we know that happiness cannot be the only thing we value. And I think many, many people would still choose to have families. One reason for that is, of course, that couples with children often find more meaning in life. So a reasonable conclusion would be that any lack of happiness is outweighed by additional meaning.

But that’s not the conclusion that Loewenstein draws. He argues that we should avoid this natural tendency to simply take a balance of the good and the bad. Taking a very different and rather interesting approach he suggests that maximising happiness is the wrong approach; that parents can talk about the trials and tribulations, lifelong responsibilities and burdens and also the joy over the newborn, or watching an older child take care of the younger, or witnessing the first time they walk, talk, ride a bike, and so on as both valuable and not on some linear scale. These are not, he suggests, opposites to be weighed up against each other in some cosmic balance. 

His idea is that looking at the average or the balance of these things simply misses the point, and he instead argues that we would be better off maximising the breadth of experience. In this sense, both sides of the balance count positively, and are not to be traded off against each other. As mentioned last week, it’s not about avoiding the hard, because sometimes the hard is good! Loewenstein goes on to suggest that the point of being alive as to be more alive, with all the good and bad that comes with that (within reason, I think).  And because hard things are often good things, the hard work of raising kids, of caring deeply about people outside of ourselves provides the liberation of not being only obsessed with your own happiness. Which means that happiness is not the goal, and pursuit of happiness is a burden to free ourselves from. Freedom from self is hardly a popular idea in this era of self-gratification, but it is one that resonates in many philosophical and religious traditions.

This idea of valuing a range of experiences, of which happiness is only one and unhappiness may be another, might allow us to relax a little more. Of course, there are some appalling experiences that are unequivocally bad and certainly to be avoided; no disagreement there. But to see the vicissitudes of fortune, and the inevitable ups and downs of life as a feature, not a bug, in life, is surely liberating, and it’s as true of the small things as well as the big things. It’s an approach we take with students, all the time. Last year I was speaking with my son about his Extended Essay (a 4000 word independently undertaken academic research project undertaken over many months – not an obvious route to happiness). He’d made great progress, and I asked him if he was enjoying it. He smiled, and said well, it’s frustrating at times, and writing essays is not exactly enjoyable. I asked if doing it made him happy; he smiled and said no, not really.  But when I asked if he wished he hadn’t had to do it, he wouldn’t commit, and simply shrugged. So the happiness question was the wrong one that just missed the point. Similar considerations apply to many, many areas at school, work and family life. We should not be obsessed by happiness, though it’s a welcome by-product from time to time.

This is a different point to simply deferring gratification (which still means an overall accounting over time); it’s about accepting the value of unhappy experiences. So from the sublime (parenthood) to the mundane (essay writing); we should not exclusively measure our experiences by the extent to which they make us happy, even in the long-term. That may sound odd in todays because you’re worth it world but really it’s old news. In the early seventeenth century J S Mill wrote: Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all institutions and opinions you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you? and suggests that a moment’s reflection shows that the answer is unambiguously ‘no’. Having thought that achieving one’s goals would make one happy, his reaction was one of dismay: My heart sank within me and the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down,

Mill was left with the problem: What makes me happy then, if it’s not being successful in the pursuit of happiness? And it’s hard to know what the answer is, or even what it could be. But in fact, the dilemma is easily solved by simply adopting a richer approach to life than simply the pursuit of happiness.