Note: This is a 6-part series. See the introduction to the series for links to other posts in this series.
Since I've brought up the whole topic of happiness and toxic positivity and why it's hard, it's probably prudent to give some more context. My framing of the problem so far was inspired by Camus, and my approach has been philosophical, i.e. pushing intuitions to their breaking point. But another approach to the topic of happiness is through systematic and mechanistic psychology.
While I've been using "How to choose happiness?" and "Why not choose happiness?" to explore the range of ideas and conflicting tensions that inextricably get tied together when discussing happiness, the practical answer to "How to be happier" is probably something along the lines of Laurie Santos's popular "Course on Happiness" (technically it's called the "Science of Well-Being", but it's marketed as happiness, more on that later). The course presents pertinent psychology literature on the topic, and retells the lessons learned from psychology via 5 main questions:
What do we think will make us happy? And evidence that we mispredict.
What makes us mispredict what makes us happy (and unhappy)? Cognitive intuitions and biases.
How to overcome biases? Working on (re)framing and working with the brain.
What actually makes people happy?
How to put in the psychological work to be happier?
Even if you don’t take the course, it is a great resource pointing to the breadth of psychology research on the topic. In particular, I have enjoyed the writings of Martin Seligman, sometimes termed the "father of positive psychology." The history of the field of positive psychology is fascinating,1 especially as told through the maturation of his views on the topic. Interestingly, in his writings Seligman discusses problems with the word "happiness" (and how his editor forced him to call his first book "Authentic Happiness").
In short, popular use of the word happiness is inextricably bound with casual notions of cheeriness ("If you're happy and you know it clap your hands!"), but we also use it to refer to that elusive something that the Dalai Lama told us to pursue. As Seligman puts it, "when there are too few variables to describe the rich nuances of the phenomenon in question, nothing is answered," and we need to do the hard work of finding new words to express detail.
Instead, Martin Seligman has sought to better articulate what this elusive happiness is, which became a more general study of "well-being" and "what humans choose when uncoerced."2 This is now known as the "PERMA" categories of well-being:
Positive emotion
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Achievement
By breaking down well-being and human choice into more concrete pieces, Seligman encourages us to avoid the pitfalls of monism and unbalanced ideas focusing on THE ONE TRUE SOURCE OF HAPPIENSS. Well-being is not just happiness (in the cheery/pleasure sense) and not just meaning. It's all that and more. Similarly, reflecting his systematic studies on the efficacy of therapy and medical intervention, Seligman writes that mental health involves two independent skills: both 1) managing negative emotions (e.g. doing anxiety-reducing exercises or taking anti-depressants) and 2) building well-being. Neither can stand alone.
Seligman's ideas may sound obvious. In fact, I would be surprised if you have never heard of the importance of any of the pieces of PERMA, or thought that prozac is the complete answer to depression. But when we are lost in the moment and looking for a solution it can be easy to forget that a coin has two faces and dice have even more. Unfortunately, daily life often forces us to simplify, and the world around us does the same: prozac doesn’t market itself as just “half the solution.” Seligman reminds us to hold more complete pictures in mind.
For learning more about happiness I highly recommend the above resources. But, this is not a happiness blog, so we will now chart on to new waters and questions. Consider this: in some sense we already know what answers to happiness and meaning can look like, and have known for a long, long time.3 So why is there still a never-ending demand for self help books and never-ending conflict in the world? Do we or don't we have all the answers? If “complete” answers like religion have existed for millenia, then how are we still “uncovering” new insights, e.g. via psychology? What does an answer even look like? What should progress look like? What and where are the stumbling blocks?
From the way Seligman tells it as a study of “choice”, it does look like a multivariate, multifaceted version of the over-simplified “utility” that economics and utilitarianism runs on, which tries to collapse everything down to one number.
E.g. religion, philosophy, positive psychology studies, and what our parents tell us. Arguably all the ingredients and ideas are out there, but we all have to discover what the right “mix” and recipe is for ourselves. To take this analogy further, our taste might change over time and so too do we have to adapt what we cook and serve ourselves.