Against Happiness | Frameworks #3

Beyond Happiness

“The Lonely Ones”. Edvard Munch, 1899, The Munch Museet, Oslo, Norway.

(this is post #3 of a series on recovery frameworks. For earlier posts: post one, post two.)

We psychiatrists tend to start our first sessions with some variant of the question: “What would you like to change?” People often list negative goals: to be less depressed, stop using drugs, feel less anxious, etc. It’s a start, but we often need more. There is a helpful reframing found in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: no dead person’s goals.

A dead person’s goal is anything a dead body can do better than a living person.

Dead people don’t use drugs. They don’t yell at their kids or their lovers. They don’t feel sad. Dead people are the least stressed people around.

Better to set a living person’s goal: something a live person can do better than a corpse. This is not a small task. In some ways, it’s the most important task in life, and I’m writing about it here on Rat Park because this process of setting one’s own living, breathing, vibrant aspirations for change and for life is perhaps the central task of recovery. This is the work of imagining a life in recovery worth wanting. Without this, what do we have?

Let me confess at the outset that I, like most people, often default to dead person’s goals.

I’ve been a little sick recently. Not terribly sick, but after a few nights of bad sleep, it can feel like all I want in the world is to be free of that snotty, tired feeling. If only I didn’t have to feel this way. Or to spend so much time on taxes, mindless admin, repairs; nonsense. I have to constantly ask myself, like addressing a tantruming child: What is it that you actually want?

A common first pass at a living person’s goal is something like: “I want to be happier.” I often think this myself, so I get it. But it really doesn’t work, not in a meaningful way.

Our default settings for what we think counts as happiness or satisfaction are usually wrong. Even when we are lucky enough to get off automatic pilot, pause, and reconsider, we're often misguided about what is best, or about what true happiness consists of. A useful project, in recovery and life, is to constantly, relentlessly undo this conditioning about happiness.

I don’t need to tell you that the concept of happiness is overused to the point of cliché along with near-synonyms like wellbeing, thriving, and flourishing. A vague conception of positivity doesn’t help too much to orient toward a useful conception of the good life, or of addiction recovery. Why? Well, not just in pop psych but even in the best available scholarship today, we have no idea what “happiness” or “well-being” means. It is a conceptual mess. This is the argument of a very good recent book, Against Happiness, which I found helpful for thinking about the project of recovery, and human flourishing of all kinds, whatever that means.

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In my last longer-form post, I reviewed a few definitions of recovery, most of which landed on the notion that once we’re past abstinence or sobriety, there needs to be some kind of work toward the positive: “wellness,” “improvements in functioning and purpose,” “enhanced quality of life,” and so on. These are good things, as comments on that last post agreed.

Who doesn’t want wellness? But as others commented, recovery definitions that make vague references to “wellness” risk drifting into relativism, just as the vague psychiatric term “biopsychosocial” can devolve into “anything-goes” eclecticism.¹

There is a dilution hazard to these sweeping, lovely words. We need to go beyond happiness, beyond abstinence, beyond stopping. But what is the “beyond?” Does recovery just become positive psychology? And if so, is there any solid ground there?

Against Happiness, featuring moral and political philosophers, philosophers of mind, and researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and sociology isn’t going after the weakest arguments found in the airport books and TED talks; it's taking aim at the best available science and thinkers of our time, finding the gaps and opportunities for improvement.²

The result is a clear explication of how current definitions of happiness and well-being are insufficient and an argument that any definitions of well-being, thriving, or flourishing are necessarily value-laden, bound up in norms— moral, political, or otherwise.

And let me say, yet again, happiness is good. It’s nice to have, nice to work toward, and probably good to study and measure. The authors say this and I agree, everyone agrees. But we’ve been stuck in a cultural mode recently of promoting happiness, wellness, well-being, whatever, in a way that causes more problems than it solves. This problem has polluted some corners of positive psychology, and addiction recovery as well, which is ironic given that addiction often arrives at the end of a long process of pursuing the wrong kind of happiness; and most people who’ve struggled with addiction know intuitively that there are lower and higher forms of happiness.

We know that striving for immediate satisfaction or pleasure doesn’t work. We have painful experience with how poor humans are at judging the good and what’s best for us, and even poorer judges of our own mental states. It is useful to orient instead on what really matters. It’s useful to articulate an aim or a goal for the good life. It’s hard to get better if you are not clear on what you are doing. Again, what, exactly, are you looking to change?

We don’t know what happiness is

Against Happiness objects to a “happiness agenda” that ignores the varieties of happiness worth wanting, promoting happiness as the greatest or supreme good, without any real clarity about what that good actually is. An impossible mission, or as they say, politely, “conceptually disunified.” There are important distinctions between happiness, well-being, quality of life, and what is good in the sense of rightness and justice, just as a starting point.

We know that hedonic (i.e., ,immediate-satisfaction, lower-pleasure) happiness is not the answer. Then what? What do we set as our highest aspiration, and how do we know if we’re making progress?

Consider the constant focus on the “world’s happiest countries;” I saw one of these articles just a couple of days ago, about the supposed lessons of the Netherlands. The implicit message of these types of articles is that certain countries have a better vision of the good life, a better conception of happiness, and if you can align with their worldview, that works in a meaningful way.

…because mustachioed men will feed you morsels by the canal?

Articles like this rely on the idea that good quality research has found the Dutch to be meaningfully happier than others. OK, a crude, consequentialist assessment of emotional well-being, perhaps, but all else being equal, wouldn’t you like to be rating your happiness high on a survey?

But looking more closely at the research, as the authors of Against Happiness did, complicates even this basic argument. There are many ways to measure happiness, and the way that the Netherlands keeps topping the scales is on questions about life satisfaction. If you favor positive emotions, in contrast, the top of the list includes places like El Salvador and Honduras. If you favor balance and peace? The Scandinavians and Swiss do quite well.

The Netherlands do show up across multiple measures, but so do other countries; Finland does quite well overall.

Choosing a variety of happiness to measure, or favor, is not a neutral process. It privileges particular values.

A lot of folks in psychology research, including scholars I’ve spoken to on my podcast and otherwise, prefer this “life satisfaction” measure, or something like it. It seems to them like the most objective and scientifically rigorous way to measure a meaningful, flourishing life, without straying into values and subjective judgments. (Ed Diener is the granddaddy here, and many follow him.) The point that Against Happiness makes, in contrast, is that life satisfaction cannot be value-neutral yardstick for a flourishing life. Just by choosing life satisfaction, we are already straying into the territory of values and norms.

In other words, if we want to get beyond hedonic happiness, which we need to do for a meaningfully flourishing life, we are already in the world of values and norms.

And, by the way, life satisfaction is too thin and impoverished for our purposes anyway.

From the book: “The concepts of a good life, well-being, and happiness—are normative. They are like such concepts as physical health and mental well-being. They embed norms and ideals and express values. A person lives a good life, lives well, is happy relative to some standard. The standard can be one the person herself endorses, or one endorsed by others—her community, culture, nation-state—or by certain experts, theologians, philosopher, psychologists, or policy wonks.”

Different cultures prefer different types of positive emotions. European Americans value “high-arousal positive emotions” like excitement, while East Asians prefer “low-arousal” emotions such as serenity and peace. Choosing which types of positive emotions to measure or promote is a value-laden process.

This is a problem, but it’s also an opportunity. Clinicians should not be in the business of promoting certain values, but good therapists are in the business of helping people to live their own values-based lives, with intention, consciously choosing what it means to them to live a well-lived life, whatever that means to them. We shouldn’t promote our own values, but it necessarily becomes a normative project to seek the kind of flourishing or well-being worth wanting. We must go there.

Value-Based Components of Well-Being

This is where the book suggests positive, constructive lessons to me. Several conceptions of well-being are strongly normative: they insist that certain value-based elements are necessary conditions of a life well lived. You cannot be happy in the Aristotelian, Christian, or Confucian way, for example, unless you are good according to the Aristotelian, Christian, or Confucian prescriptions. Looking across different theorists of well-being, we can describe different, essential components of a good life. All are normative, and all are hotly debated, but the outlines of the debates at least give us a starting point: some possible components of a meaningfully flourishing life or recovery. For a lot of folks, a definition of recovery that doesn’t include at least some of the following is impoverished.

• Morality. Can you flourish if you’re doing terrible things? There are long traditions of practical ethics that insist that doing good and being moral is an essential component of personal well-being and flourishing, but others disagree. This argument goes back to Plato’s Gorgias, in which Callicles argued that an immoralist could be happy as a clam. Imagine Genghis Khan, thriving and living his best life precisely because he gets what he wants and is doing exactly what he wants. In contrast, many other thinkers, such as Aristotle, say that moral goodness is good for the good person, and true happiness requires moral excellence. This, by the way, is a central preoccupation of traditional mutual help recovery like 12-step groups. Even in secular and other forms of non-theistic recovery, there is a focus on “cleaning house” (i.e., setting right moral harms) and helping others.

• Virtues. Moral excellence wasn’t the only virtue in Aristotle’s view. Aristotle’s eudaimonistic theory says that flourishing is and consists of achieving virtues and excellences: demanding intellectual and character traits, physical and artistic gifts, and the like. Important to this post, Aristotle was famously an elitist about this. The proper theory of well-being, he thought, was a matter for experts to determine. Aristotle would scoff at “life satisfaction” measures like the ones above. He thought the hoi polloi were awful judges of what is good, true, and excellent. Being subjectively happy is good only if the person is happy about a life that is excellent to some standard.

• Meaning: Meaningfulness crosses into existentialist territory, and it usually means: “living authentically” and “engaging in activities especially in the domains of work, friendship, love, and communal life that are genuinely meaningful…. Meaning involves a sense of engaging in worthy projects that are existentially satisfying over time.”

There is disagreement today about which of the above, if any, are necessary for true well-being. For example, to the modern, striving mind, perhaps “meaning” is relatively unobjectionable. Zen Buddhists, however, caution us that one needs to be wary of how the ego or small self reaches after meaning or purpose. For me, striving after “meaning,” or what I think is meaningful, is often more trouble than its worth. Each of the above, and other components too, are worth considering deeply.

In the next couple of long-form posts, I’ll talk about theories of well-being and addiction both, to consider what other specific components might belong in a framework of recovery.

For now, I find it powerful, as a starting point, to reject the false promise of pleasure and satisfaction, and to pause on the consideration of what is a truly good recovery and a good life. This, in my experience, requires judgment, skepticism, guidance, and constant practice.

The point for today is: measuring happiness and well-being—and by extension recovery—cannot be a purely scientific endeavor. It must include judgment about wisdom, and also be sensitive to personal and cultural considerations. A clinician shouldn’t insist that people ascribe to a particular version of morality, of course, but to ignore the moral life altogether is dangerous.

Today I’m thinking in a clinical mode, which simplifies things. In an ACT therapy framework, a very simple version of the question could be as simple as: “Can you talk to me about what a ’good life’ means to you?”

We could do worse than asking that question of ourselves, often.

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Thanks for reading and sharing, and special thanks to those who are commenting and writing. Rat Park is still a new project for me, and I’m genuinely enjoying your feedback and comments.

1. Furthermore, the definitions run the risk, as one commentator specifically noted, of taking ideas, practices, and arguments that belong to the bigger cultural worlds of craft and art and draping them in the language of evidence. In other words, what do we lose, and what do we obscure, by taking recovery, well-being, and happiness and framing it solely in the language of the clinical or reductionistic? Where do values and morality come in?

2. Some of the more recognizable names are Joseph LeDoux and Owen Flanagan, as well as Daniel Haybron, a very good philosopher of well-being.