Feature Article |
Happiness Is:
a. Something we understand better thanks to the booming new field of positive psychology. b. Something that can be learned from Harvard’s Tal Ben-Shahar, who’s becoming one of positive psychology’s biggest stars. c. Something any of us
By Luke Dittrich
- Can happiness really be taught, and does this man have the answers? Photo by Dana Smith.
HAPPY TALK
Download this test to determine your official happiness level. Plus, check out the happiness scores of local celebs including Terry Francona and Ming Tsai.
Download this test to determine your official happiness level. Plus, check out the happiness scores of local celebs including Terry Francona and Ming Tsai.
There’s something uniquely miserable about having to cram for a happiness exam. For days now, the exam has been squatting in my inbox like an unpaid bill, and at some point, when I feel I’m ready, I’m going to have to open it, print it out, sit down somewhere quiet, and test myself. Then I’ll send it in to be graded. It would be one thing if the exam were about, say, the history of Djibouti, a subject I’m more or less unashamedly ignorant of. I could fail a Djiboutian history exam and the pain would stick with me for a day or two, at most. But this exam is different. This exam will test me on the human quandary: what happiness is and how to achieve it. If I fail—a distinct possibility—what will that say about me?
In the midst of my anxiety, I hear a voice. It’s the voice of my happiness professor, a rising star in a new academic field dedicated to demystifying the mysteries of joy. I’m in the process of watching him give 23 videotaped lectures, each almost an hour and a half long, all on the subject of, as the course catalog puts it, “the psychological aspects of a fulfilling and flourishing life.” In the past several days I’ve heard his voice in a higher concentration than any other, ever. And what’s my professor telling me tonight? He’s trying to comfort me. He’s doing so by repeating a phrase I’ve already heard from him, I’d hazard to guess, roughly 373 times.
“Learn to fail,” he says, “or fail to learn.”
We Americans birthed this country partly to protect our right to the pursuit of happiness, and this pursuit has since led us to gorge ourselves on serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting pills and to frequent a restaurant chain called Hooters. Traditionally the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of an academic degree have been mutually exclusive, as even a cursory look at the average gloomy grad student reveals. University classrooms are typically where we steep ourselves in macroeconomics, linear algebra, postmodern literary theory, and any number of other subjects better suited to obliterating joy than achieving it. That changed in 1998, when Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, announced he was founding a whole new branch of psychology. Old-fashioned psychology, he said, focused too much on the negative, on the dysfunctional, on the pathological. (Interestingly, Seligman’s most significant prior contribution to psychology was a series of experiments in which he demonstrated that if you shocked caged dogs long enough, most would become so demoralized they wouldn’t leave the cage even if you opened the door.) Seligman wanted a psychology that would focus on the brighter sides of human nature. Specifically he wanted a psychology that would illuminate, in a scientific way, what makes people happy. He called his creation “positive psychology.” Eight years later, as many as 200 universities nationwide offer courses in the subject.
My professor’s name is Tal Ben-Shahar. Nearly 850 Harvard undergrads registered for his introductory course in positive psychology this spring, making it the most popular class of the semester and the most highly attended psychology course in school history. Ben-Shahar is one of positive psychology’s first disciples and, by virtue of his sway over all the young gonna-bes at Harvard, its most influential proselytizer. When I first read about him, I loved the idea of hundreds of Harvard kids squeezing into venerable Sanders Theatre to hear him hold forth on a subject that, while undeniably important, has until now been mostly ineffable.
As someone whose outlook is perennially partly cloudy, I figured I might be an ideal guinea pig to test whether positive psychology delivers what it promises. With the semester nearly over, I asked Ben-Shahar to let me crash-audit his course by watching all the videos of his lectures, which Harvard archives online, and then taking his final exam. He told me he would. My goal was to learn as much as possible about the science and practice of happiness in two weeks, upping my own happiness stats in the process. But now I’m swamped, the reality of my task hitting me like a satchel of unread textbooks. Ben-Shahar himself nails my predicament during one of the lectures I just watched, in which he uses a simple PowerPoint flowchart to illustrate the dangers of setting unrealistic goals: “Too much to do => Stress (feeling overwhelmed) => Depression.”
We meet in person for the first time at Herrell’s in Harvard Square, a place that has brought me much joy over the years. Having gotten used to watching a byte-size Tal Ben-Shahar intone the secrets of happiness while ambling back and forth across my laptop screen, I find it a bit jarring to have the real thing sitting across from me, eating soy-based fake ice cream. He doesn’t smile often or make much eye contact or come across as a very happy guy, but I don’t really want to dwell on his apparent glumness because it seems too obvious a shot to take and, anyway, you assumedly don’t have to be as peppy as Katie Couric to be a happiness expert. If you ask Ben-Shahar whether he’s happy he’ll wriggle out of the question, saying, “Oh, I’m happier now than I was five years ago,” or he’ll take issue with the question itself, telling you happiness isn’t a state of being, it’s a process, or something like that.
Ben-Shahar is 35 years old. He’s of medium height, trim and fit, with thick dark hair and pale skin. He used to be Israel’s national squash champion, and his achievements on the squash court, he says, taught him a lot of useful stuff about happiness. The most important thing he learned was that championship titles didn’t make him happy. Oh, they made him euphoric, temporarily. But happy? No. The high quickly faded, and what replaced it was the sickly knowledge that he’d invested all that sweat into a transient goal, and now that the goal had been achieved, he had to find another. And another. And another. Until it seemed his life risked becoming a grim slog punctuated by moments of ecstasy as he collected each new trophy. That sort of living, Ben-Shahar realized, was never going to make him happy. He got to wondering whether what was true of squash trophies might also be true of T-notes and Beemers and Oscars and all the other potential fruits of our performance-driven lives—would any of them actually boost a person’s happiness in a meaningful and permanent way? Which was when he started reading and thinking, seriously, about what true happiness is.
After completing his service in the Israeli military, Ben-Shahar enrolled as an undergrad at Harvard, majoring in psychology and philosophy. His sophomore year he took professor Philip Stone’s course in organizational behavior, and after graduation he decided to stay in Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D. in the field. His doctoral studies coincided with the emergence of positive psychology, and when Stone, who had become his mentor, began exploring the new discipline, Ben-Shahar followed suit. (Although positive psychology has become a popular undergrad offering, the University of Pennsylvania is the only school that offers a graduate degree in it. Among that program’s first wave of graduates this spring was the comedian Yakov Smirnoff.) Ben-Shahar began applying some of the principles of positive psychology to his own life, and found his “base level” of happiness slowly tilt upward. When Stone started offering classes in positive psychology in 1999, Ben-Shahar became his teaching assistant. He took over the class in 2005.
Ben-Shahar is passionate about his work, views it as a vocation, a calling. “We need to build a trans-formation highway, not just an information highway,” he tells me, and though he’s speaking, not writing, I’ve by now seen enough of his Power-Point slides to know he almost always hyphenates the perfectly-good-without-a-hyphen word “transformation.” Excessive hyphenation is one of Ben-Shahar’s quirks, and is complemented by a love of clunky neologisms: In one lecture he tells his students it is important to maintain a good balance of reflection and action, a balance he describes as “reflAction.” (The word strikes me as both gimmicky and dim. Or should I say it’s “dimmicky”?)
Ben-Shahar also has a habit of repeating certain phrases so often as to mantra-ize them. I’ve already mentioned “Learn to fail or fail to learn,” which is probably his favorite. No joke: A few days ago I was listening to one of his lectures while writing a short e-mail to a friend, and I started noting how many times Ben--Shahar said the “learn to fail” thing. I counted seven before hitting the send button. There are other phrases he uses almost as often: “Fake it till you make it.” “It feels good to feel good.” “Say ‘yes’ by saying ‘no.’”
It’s easy to think of Ben-Shahar as a sort of Ivy League self-help guru, an egghead Tony Robbins. He would object to the comparison, since he believes the self-help movement lacks the academic rigor that underpins positive psychology. Still, he admires the popularity of Robbins and other successful self-helpers, noting how many self-help books appear on bestseller lists. By contrast, Ben-Shahar likes to say, the average academic journal article is read by only seven people. (Imagine how morbidly depressing it would be to write the academic journal article based on that finding!) But Ben-Shahar knows his admiration of the self-help movement’s large audience needn’t sour to envy: Recent books drawing on positive psych-ology have done very well, and in some cases—Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, for example—have become bestsellers themselves.
That the academic field of positive psychology should be gaining a mainstream following is hardly surprising. It’s a marketer’s dream, an intertwining of two of the prime factors that influence every purchasing decision we make. You know how it works: When we buy anything, from a new car to a pack of gum, we’re staking our cash on the hope that the purchase will make us at least a little, and perhaps a lot, happier. If we’re on the fence, we look to expert opinions (Consumer Reports, J. D. Power and Associates, Four out of Five Dentists, et cetera) for advice and encouragement. What positive psychology does, brilliantly, is cut out the middleman: It promises you the scientifically certified road map to happiness itself, not just some expert-endorsed widget that may in a roundabout way bring you closer to that ultimate goal.
Between spoonfuls of midafternoon dessert, Ben-Shahar exults in the burgeoning popularity of his chosen field. “We’re building a bridge from the ivory tower to Main Street,” he declares, employing another phrase I’ve already heard a good twenty-umpteen times during his lectures.
Today I finished watching the videos of Ben-Shahar’s classes. Now I’m slogging through The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden, a former paramour of Ayn Rand and an acquaintance of Ben-Shahar. Branden’s is one of two books Ben-Shahar requires his students to purchase. The other is Ben-Shahar’s self-published The Question of Happiness. (Given Ben-Shahar’s slightly supercilious stance regarding self-helpers, he can’t approve of the Harvard Coop’s shelving Branden’s book in its self-help section.) Anyway, the book is slow going, and now seems a good time to put it aside and sum up what I’ve learned so far about the science of happiness. I’ll do so by cribbing from Ben-Shahar’s final lecture, in which he lists the “Top Eleven” lessons of positive psychology. Here they are with, when necessary, parenthetical explanation:
1. Oh, the questions you’ll ask. (Meaning you should always keep your mind active and inquisitive.)
2. Believe—in yourself and others.
3. Learn to fail or fail to learn. (No surprise there.)
4. Give yourself the permission to be human. (This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but it’s worth noting that in a nice bit of synergy, Permission to Be Human is also the title of a book Ben-Shahar is in the middle of writing.)
5. Open up. (Express your feelings, either in a journal or to another person.)
6. Cultivate the merit-finder. (That is, be optimistic.)
7. Simplify.
8. Cultivate relationships.
9. Remember the mind-body connection. (Exercise is good for you, so pound the pavement, pummel the heavy bag.)
10. Differentiate yourself. (When you’re in a relationship, you should maintain some independence.)
11. Introduce behavioral change now.
This is good advice, but I can’t help feeling I’ve heard it all before. Honestly, I would have liked to find something really strange and unexpected on the list: “12. Feast on the steaming liver of an orphaned penguin.” Instead, many of positive psychology’s secrets to happiness are just reformulations of the platitudes you’d gather if you spent a half-hour reading bumper stickers in the Whole Foods parking lot. And you can’t help wondering whether its ascent bodes ill for the impressionable young minds who are buying into it.
Sam Siner is one of Ben-Shahar’s favorite students. He’s a 19-year-old kid who sings baritone in the Harvard Glee Club and is the first person I’ve ever met whom I’m actually tempted to describe as “freshly scrubbed.” We’re meeting in a coffee shop, chatting about a club Sam is starting. He’s drinking apple juice.
The club is called HAPPI, which stands for “Harvard College Applied Positive Psychology Initiative.” Sam has already completed the paperwork required by the Harvard bureaucracy, and now he’s just waiting for final approval. He’s says he’s optimistic about his chances, which I suppose is appropriate. He tells me he’s starting this club because he wants to spread the good news of positive psychology to as many people as possible. He hands me a copy of the club’s carefully formulated vision statement, which describes some of the specific ways Sam wants to raise the happiness quotient of Harvard students, such as “improving mental health through physical means, including rest, physical activity, and hugs.” He has also drafted a longer document, the club’s constitution, but didn’t bring it with him.
I ask Sam to tell me about the happiest and unhappiest times in his life.
His low point: the two years after second grade, when he skipped a grade and found himself smaller and younger than his classmates. His high point: “getting into Harvard.” And now? “I still have problems.... Like when I’m playing a video game, if my friends tell me to stop, I get upset....”
There is a base and surly part of me that believes Sam would be far better served, over the long run, by dropping his big HAPPI plans and spending the rest of his college years engaged in recreational debauchery.
But what do I know?
If the ability to maintain and cultivate happiness is any indication, not much. Whether due to my history, my brain chemistry, or my inability to give myself “permission to be human,” happiness and I have had a series of fairly tempestuous flings, but have so far been unable to conduct a mature, long-term relationship. I summit little peaks of joy all the time—while sweating out a hard run, reading a solid sentence, eating Tabasco-drenched eggs—but spend most of my time sliding down or trudging up. One of the things that my inability to hold on to happiness has left me with is a resistance to giving people guidance on how to become happy, and that’s probably left me with a corollary skepticism of people who impart that species of advice.
Not long ago I was sitting on a dock by a muddy river in Ecuador watching a bright blue butterfly, big as a fruit bat, lazily patrol the opposite bank. My girlfriend was a few feet away, my skin was sunburned, the butterfly was absolutely beautiful, and if anyone had asked, I would have said I was happy. I couldn’t have explained exactly why, not without thinking about it too much, and thinking about it too much would have had the same effect as pinning that beautiful butterfly to a corkboard. Tal Ben-Shahar is a very good teacher. I’m just not sure if what he’s teaching is teachable.
I took the final exam yesterday. Harvard prevented me from taking it alongside the course’s actual students, which was just as well, since the e-mailed alternative gave me a few extra days to catch up. By the time I got around to testing myself, Ben-Shahar was cleaning out his office and preparing to move, along with his wife and young son, back to Israel. He plans to finish writing Permission to Be Human there, then return to Cambridge in time for the 2007 fall semester, when he’ll teach his positive psychology course again.
Some of the exam’s questions required written responses: “What are two things someone can do to become luckier?” Others were multiple choice: “According to Nathaniel Branden and Tal Ben-Shahar, the antidote to perfectionism is: A. Self-responsibility; B. Living purposefully; C. Self-acceptance; D. Living consciously; E. Self-assertiveness.” With a mix of dread and relief I hadn’t felt since my college days, I e-mailed my answers to Jessica Glazer, one of Ben-Shahar’s 15 teaching fellows, who had agreed to grade them.
She breaks it to me gently.
In her e-mail, Jessica kindly includes excuses I could use to feel good about my results. “Please keep in mind that had you a) actually taken the class, b) attended a weekly discussion session, and c) had time to absorb the material rather than ‘cram’ online, you would certainly have done very well,” she writes, adding that she was “impressed by the guesses that you made, even if they were wrong.” Then, after the sugar, the salt: My score was “in the B-/C+ range.” That sounds about right. I’m good at some things, bad at others. And, like most of you, I’d guess, still trying to get this happiness thing figured out.
In the midst of my anxiety, I hear a voice. It’s the voice of my happiness professor, a rising star in a new academic field dedicated to demystifying the mysteries of joy. I’m in the process of watching him give 23 videotaped lectures, each almost an hour and a half long, all on the subject of, as the course catalog puts it, “the psychological aspects of a fulfilling and flourishing life.” In the past several days I’ve heard his voice in a higher concentration than any other, ever. And what’s my professor telling me tonight? He’s trying to comfort me. He’s doing so by repeating a phrase I’ve already heard from him, I’d hazard to guess, roughly 373 times.
“Learn to fail,” he says, “or fail to learn.”
We Americans birthed this country partly to protect our right to the pursuit of happiness, and this pursuit has since led us to gorge ourselves on serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting pills and to frequent a restaurant chain called Hooters. Traditionally the pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of an academic degree have been mutually exclusive, as even a cursory look at the average gloomy grad student reveals. University classrooms are typically where we steep ourselves in macroeconomics, linear algebra, postmodern literary theory, and any number of other subjects better suited to obliterating joy than achieving it. That changed in 1998, when Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, announced he was founding a whole new branch of psychology. Old-fashioned psychology, he said, focused too much on the negative, on the dysfunctional, on the pathological. (Interestingly, Seligman’s most significant prior contribution to psychology was a series of experiments in which he demonstrated that if you shocked caged dogs long enough, most would become so demoralized they wouldn’t leave the cage even if you opened the door.) Seligman wanted a psychology that would focus on the brighter sides of human nature. Specifically he wanted a psychology that would illuminate, in a scientific way, what makes people happy. He called his creation “positive psychology.” Eight years later, as many as 200 universities nationwide offer courses in the subject.
My professor’s name is Tal Ben-Shahar. Nearly 850 Harvard undergrads registered for his introductory course in positive psychology this spring, making it the most popular class of the semester and the most highly attended psychology course in school history. Ben-Shahar is one of positive psychology’s first disciples and, by virtue of his sway over all the young gonna-bes at Harvard, its most influential proselytizer. When I first read about him, I loved the idea of hundreds of Harvard kids squeezing into venerable Sanders Theatre to hear him hold forth on a subject that, while undeniably important, has until now been mostly ineffable.
As someone whose outlook is perennially partly cloudy, I figured I might be an ideal guinea pig to test whether positive psychology delivers what it promises. With the semester nearly over, I asked Ben-Shahar to let me crash-audit his course by watching all the videos of his lectures, which Harvard archives online, and then taking his final exam. He told me he would. My goal was to learn as much as possible about the science and practice of happiness in two weeks, upping my own happiness stats in the process. But now I’m swamped, the reality of my task hitting me like a satchel of unread textbooks. Ben-Shahar himself nails my predicament during one of the lectures I just watched, in which he uses a simple PowerPoint flowchart to illustrate the dangers of setting unrealistic goals: “Too much to do => Stress (feeling overwhelmed) => Depression.”
We meet in person for the first time at Herrell’s in Harvard Square, a place that has brought me much joy over the years. Having gotten used to watching a byte-size Tal Ben-Shahar intone the secrets of happiness while ambling back and forth across my laptop screen, I find it a bit jarring to have the real thing sitting across from me, eating soy-based fake ice cream. He doesn’t smile often or make much eye contact or come across as a very happy guy, but I don’t really want to dwell on his apparent glumness because it seems too obvious a shot to take and, anyway, you assumedly don’t have to be as peppy as Katie Couric to be a happiness expert. If you ask Ben-Shahar whether he’s happy he’ll wriggle out of the question, saying, “Oh, I’m happier now than I was five years ago,” or he’ll take issue with the question itself, telling you happiness isn’t a state of being, it’s a process, or something like that.
Ben-Shahar is 35 years old. He’s of medium height, trim and fit, with thick dark hair and pale skin. He used to be Israel’s national squash champion, and his achievements on the squash court, he says, taught him a lot of useful stuff about happiness. The most important thing he learned was that championship titles didn’t make him happy. Oh, they made him euphoric, temporarily. But happy? No. The high quickly faded, and what replaced it was the sickly knowledge that he’d invested all that sweat into a transient goal, and now that the goal had been achieved, he had to find another. And another. And another. Until it seemed his life risked becoming a grim slog punctuated by moments of ecstasy as he collected each new trophy. That sort of living, Ben-Shahar realized, was never going to make him happy. He got to wondering whether what was true of squash trophies might also be true of T-notes and Beemers and Oscars and all the other potential fruits of our performance-driven lives—would any of them actually boost a person’s happiness in a meaningful and permanent way? Which was when he started reading and thinking, seriously, about what true happiness is.
After completing his service in the Israeli military, Ben-Shahar enrolled as an undergrad at Harvard, majoring in psychology and philosophy. His sophomore year he took professor Philip Stone’s course in organizational behavior, and after graduation he decided to stay in Cambridge to pursue a Ph.D. in the field. His doctoral studies coincided with the emergence of positive psychology, and when Stone, who had become his mentor, began exploring the new discipline, Ben-Shahar followed suit. (Although positive psychology has become a popular undergrad offering, the University of Pennsylvania is the only school that offers a graduate degree in it. Among that program’s first wave of graduates this spring was the comedian Yakov Smirnoff.) Ben-Shahar began applying some of the principles of positive psychology to his own life, and found his “base level” of happiness slowly tilt upward. When Stone started offering classes in positive psychology in 1999, Ben-Shahar became his teaching assistant. He took over the class in 2005.
Ben-Shahar is passionate about his work, views it as a vocation, a calling. “We need to build a trans-formation highway, not just an information highway,” he tells me, and though he’s speaking, not writing, I’ve by now seen enough of his Power-Point slides to know he almost always hyphenates the perfectly-good-without-a-hyphen word “transformation.” Excessive hyphenation is one of Ben-Shahar’s quirks, and is complemented by a love of clunky neologisms: In one lecture he tells his students it is important to maintain a good balance of reflection and action, a balance he describes as “reflAction.” (The word strikes me as both gimmicky and dim. Or should I say it’s “dimmicky”?)
Ben-Shahar also has a habit of repeating certain phrases so often as to mantra-ize them. I’ve already mentioned “Learn to fail or fail to learn,” which is probably his favorite. No joke: A few days ago I was listening to one of his lectures while writing a short e-mail to a friend, and I started noting how many times Ben--Shahar said the “learn to fail” thing. I counted seven before hitting the send button. There are other phrases he uses almost as often: “Fake it till you make it.” “It feels good to feel good.” “Say ‘yes’ by saying ‘no.’”
It’s easy to think of Ben-Shahar as a sort of Ivy League self-help guru, an egghead Tony Robbins. He would object to the comparison, since he believes the self-help movement lacks the academic rigor that underpins positive psychology. Still, he admires the popularity of Robbins and other successful self-helpers, noting how many self-help books appear on bestseller lists. By contrast, Ben-Shahar likes to say, the average academic journal article is read by only seven people. (Imagine how morbidly depressing it would be to write the academic journal article based on that finding!) But Ben-Shahar knows his admiration of the self-help movement’s large audience needn’t sour to envy: Recent books drawing on positive psych-ology have done very well, and in some cases—Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, for example—have become bestsellers themselves.
That the academic field of positive psychology should be gaining a mainstream following is hardly surprising. It’s a marketer’s dream, an intertwining of two of the prime factors that influence every purchasing decision we make. You know how it works: When we buy anything, from a new car to a pack of gum, we’re staking our cash on the hope that the purchase will make us at least a little, and perhaps a lot, happier. If we’re on the fence, we look to expert opinions (Consumer Reports, J. D. Power and Associates, Four out of Five Dentists, et cetera) for advice and encouragement. What positive psychology does, brilliantly, is cut out the middleman: It promises you the scientifically certified road map to happiness itself, not just some expert-endorsed widget that may in a roundabout way bring you closer to that ultimate goal.
Between spoonfuls of midafternoon dessert, Ben-Shahar exults in the burgeoning popularity of his chosen field. “We’re building a bridge from the ivory tower to Main Street,” he declares, employing another phrase I’ve already heard a good twenty-umpteen times during his lectures.
Today I finished watching the videos of Ben-Shahar’s classes. Now I’m slogging through The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden, a former paramour of Ayn Rand and an acquaintance of Ben-Shahar. Branden’s is one of two books Ben-Shahar requires his students to purchase. The other is Ben-Shahar’s self-published The Question of Happiness. (Given Ben-Shahar’s slightly supercilious stance regarding self-helpers, he can’t approve of the Harvard Coop’s shelving Branden’s book in its self-help section.) Anyway, the book is slow going, and now seems a good time to put it aside and sum up what I’ve learned so far about the science of happiness. I’ll do so by cribbing from Ben-Shahar’s final lecture, in which he lists the “Top Eleven” lessons of positive psychology. Here they are with, when necessary, parenthetical explanation:
1. Oh, the questions you’ll ask. (Meaning you should always keep your mind active and inquisitive.)
2. Believe—in yourself and others.
3. Learn to fail or fail to learn. (No surprise there.)
4. Give yourself the permission to be human. (This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but it’s worth noting that in a nice bit of synergy, Permission to Be Human is also the title of a book Ben-Shahar is in the middle of writing.)
5. Open up. (Express your feelings, either in a journal or to another person.)
6. Cultivate the merit-finder. (That is, be optimistic.)
7. Simplify.
8. Cultivate relationships.
9. Remember the mind-body connection. (Exercise is good for you, so pound the pavement, pummel the heavy bag.)
10. Differentiate yourself. (When you’re in a relationship, you should maintain some independence.)
11. Introduce behavioral change now.
This is good advice, but I can’t help feeling I’ve heard it all before. Honestly, I would have liked to find something really strange and unexpected on the list: “12. Feast on the steaming liver of an orphaned penguin.” Instead, many of positive psychology’s secrets to happiness are just reformulations of the platitudes you’d gather if you spent a half-hour reading bumper stickers in the Whole Foods parking lot. And you can’t help wondering whether its ascent bodes ill for the impressionable young minds who are buying into it.
Sam Siner is one of Ben-Shahar’s favorite students. He’s a 19-year-old kid who sings baritone in the Harvard Glee Club and is the first person I’ve ever met whom I’m actually tempted to describe as “freshly scrubbed.” We’re meeting in a coffee shop, chatting about a club Sam is starting. He’s drinking apple juice.
The club is called HAPPI, which stands for “Harvard College Applied Positive Psychology Initiative.” Sam has already completed the paperwork required by the Harvard bureaucracy, and now he’s just waiting for final approval. He’s says he’s optimistic about his chances, which I suppose is appropriate. He tells me he’s starting this club because he wants to spread the good news of positive psychology to as many people as possible. He hands me a copy of the club’s carefully formulated vision statement, which describes some of the specific ways Sam wants to raise the happiness quotient of Harvard students, such as “improving mental health through physical means, including rest, physical activity, and hugs.” He has also drafted a longer document, the club’s constitution, but didn’t bring it with him.
I ask Sam to tell me about the happiest and unhappiest times in his life.
His low point: the two years after second grade, when he skipped a grade and found himself smaller and younger than his classmates. His high point: “getting into Harvard.” And now? “I still have problems.... Like when I’m playing a video game, if my friends tell me to stop, I get upset....”
There is a base and surly part of me that believes Sam would be far better served, over the long run, by dropping his big HAPPI plans and spending the rest of his college years engaged in recreational debauchery.
But what do I know?
If the ability to maintain and cultivate happiness is any indication, not much. Whether due to my history, my brain chemistry, or my inability to give myself “permission to be human,” happiness and I have had a series of fairly tempestuous flings, but have so far been unable to conduct a mature, long-term relationship. I summit little peaks of joy all the time—while sweating out a hard run, reading a solid sentence, eating Tabasco-drenched eggs—but spend most of my time sliding down or trudging up. One of the things that my inability to hold on to happiness has left me with is a resistance to giving people guidance on how to become happy, and that’s probably left me with a corollary skepticism of people who impart that species of advice.
Not long ago I was sitting on a dock by a muddy river in Ecuador watching a bright blue butterfly, big as a fruit bat, lazily patrol the opposite bank. My girlfriend was a few feet away, my skin was sunburned, the butterfly was absolutely beautiful, and if anyone had asked, I would have said I was happy. I couldn’t have explained exactly why, not without thinking about it too much, and thinking about it too much would have had the same effect as pinning that beautiful butterfly to a corkboard. Tal Ben-Shahar is a very good teacher. I’m just not sure if what he’s teaching is teachable.
I took the final exam yesterday. Harvard prevented me from taking it alongside the course’s actual students, which was just as well, since the e-mailed alternative gave me a few extra days to catch up. By the time I got around to testing myself, Ben-Shahar was cleaning out his office and preparing to move, along with his wife and young son, back to Israel. He plans to finish writing Permission to Be Human there, then return to Cambridge in time for the 2007 fall semester, when he’ll teach his positive psychology course again.
Some of the exam’s questions required written responses: “What are two things someone can do to become luckier?” Others were multiple choice: “According to Nathaniel Branden and Tal Ben-Shahar, the antidote to perfectionism is: A. Self-responsibility; B. Living purposefully; C. Self-acceptance; D. Living consciously; E. Self-assertiveness.” With a mix of dread and relief I hadn’t felt since my college days, I e-mailed my answers to Jessica Glazer, one of Ben-Shahar’s 15 teaching fellows, who had agreed to grade them.
She breaks it to me gently.
In her e-mail, Jessica kindly includes excuses I could use to feel good about my results. “Please keep in mind that had you a) actually taken the class, b) attended a weekly discussion session, and c) had time to absorb the material rather than ‘cram’ online, you would certainly have done very well,” she writes, adding that she was “impressed by the guesses that you made, even if they were wrong.” Then, after the sugar, the salt: My score was “in the B-/C+ range.” That sounds about right. I’m good at some things, bad at others. And, like most of you, I’d guess, still trying to get this happiness thing figured out.
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