Stumbling on Happiness. Daniel Gilbert

of 580 nanometers. If our alien friend at the pub asked us to define what we were experiencing when we claimed to be seeing yellow, we would probably start by pointing to a mustard jar, a lemon, a rubber ducky, and saying, ‘See all those things? The thing that is common to the visual experiences you have when you look at them is called yellow.’ Or we might try to define the experience called yellow in terms of other experiences. ‘Yellow? Well, it is sort of like the experience of orange, with a little less of the experience of red.’ If the alien confided that it could not figure out what the duck, the lemon and the mustard jar had in common, and that it had never had the experience of orange or red, then it would be time to order another pint and change the topic to the universal sport of ice hockey, because there is just no other way to define yellow. Philosophers like to say that subjective states are ‘irreducible’, which is to say that nothing we point to, nothing we can compare them with, and nothing we can say about their neurological underpinnings can fully substitute for the experiences themselves.⁵ The musician Frank Zappa is reputed to have said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, and so it is with talking about yellow. If our new drinking buddy lacks the machinery for colour vision, then our experience of yellow is one that it will never share–or never know it shares–no matter how well we point and talk.⁶

      Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear that song we used to like so much in school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer or get a really good snootful of cocaine. These feelings are different, of course, but they also have something in common. A piece of real estate is not the same as a share of stock, which is not the same as an ounce of gold, but all are forms of wealth that occupy different points on a scale of value. Similarly, the cocaine experience is not the kitten-fur experience, which is not the promotion experience, but all are forms of feeling that occupy different points on a scale of happiness. In each of these instances, an encounter with something in the world generates a roughly similar pattern of neural activity,⁷ and thus it makes sense that there is something common to our experiences of each–some conceptual coherence that has led human beings to group this hodgepodge of occurrences together in the same linguistic category for as long as anyone can remember. Indeed, when researchers analyse how all the words in a language are related to the others, they inevitably find that the positivity of the words–that is, the extent to which they refer to the experience of happiness or unhappiness–is the single most important determinant of their relationships.⁸ Despite Tolstoy’s fine efforts, most speakers consider war to be more closely related to vomit than it is to peace.

      Happiness, then, is the you-know-what-I-mean feeling. If you are a human being who lives in this century and shares some of my cultural conditioning, then my pointing and comparing will have been effective and you will know exactly which feeling I mean. If you are an alien who is still struggling with yellow, then happiness is going to be a real challenge. But take heart: I would be similarly challenged if you told me that on your planet there is a feeling common to the acts of dividing numbers by three, banging one’s head lightly on a doorknob, and releasing rhythmic bursts of nitrogen from any orifice at any time except on Tuesday. I would have no idea what that feeling is, and I could only learn the name and hope to use it politely in conversation. Because emotional happiness is an experience, it can only be approximately defined by its antecedents and by its relation to other experiences.⁹ The poet Alexander Pope devoted about a quarter of his Essay on Man to the topic of happiness, and concluded with this question: ‘Who thus define it, say they more or less / Than this, that happiness is happiness?’¹⁰

      Emotional happiness may resist our efforts to tame it by description, but when we feel it, we have no doubt about its reality and its importance. Everyone who has observed human behavior for more than thirty continuous seconds seems to have noticed that people are strongly, perhaps even primarily, perhaps even single-mindedly, motivated to feel happy. If there has ever been a group of human beings who prefer despair to delight, frustration to satisfaction and pain to pleasure, they must be very good at hiding because no one has ever seen them. People want to be happy, and all the other things they want are typically meant to be means to that end. Even when people forgo happiness in the moment–by dieting when they could be eating, or working late when they could be sleeping–they are usually doing so in order to increase its future yield. The dictionary tells us that to prefer is ‘to choose or want one thing rather than another because it would be more pleasant’, which is to say that the pursuit of happiness is built into the very definition of desire. In this sense, a preference for pain and suffering is not so much a diagnosable psychiatric condition as it is an oxymoron.

      Psychologists have traditionally made striving toward happiness the centrepiece of their theories of human behavior because they have found that if they don’t, their theories don’t work so well. As Sigmund Freud wrote:

      The question of the purpose of human life has been raised countless times; it has never yet received a satisfactory answer and perhaps does not admit of one…We will therefore turn to the less ambitious question of what men show by their behavior to be the purpose and intention of their lives. What do they demand of life and wish to achieve in it? The answer to this can hardly be in doubt. They strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so. This endeavour has two sides, a positive and a negative aim. It aims, on the one hand, at an absence of pain and displeasure, and, on the other, at the experiencing of strong feelings of pleasure.¹¹

      Freud was an articulate champion of this idea but not its originator, and the same observation appears in some form or another in the psychological theories of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Mill, Bentham and others. The philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal was especially clear on this point:

      All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.¹²

      Feeling Happy Because

      If every thinker in every century has recognized that people seek emotional happiness, then how has so much confusion arisen over the meaning of the word? One of the problems is that many people consider the desire for happiness to be a bit like the desire for a bowel movement: something we all have, but not something of which we should be especially proud. The kind of happiness they have in mind is cheap and base–a vacuous state of ‘bovine contentment’¹³ that cannot possibly be the basis of a meaningful human life. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.’¹⁴

      The philosopher Robert Nozick tried to illustrate the ubiquity of this belief by describing a fictitious virtual-reality machine that would allow anyone to have any experience they chose, and that would conveniently cause them to forget that they were hooked up to the machine.¹⁵ He concluded that no one would willingly choose to get hooked up for the rest of his life because the happiness he would experience with such a machine would not be happiness at all. ‘Someone whose emotion is based upon egregiously unjustified