PDF Summary:The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt

The Happiness Hypothesis explores the nature of human happiness, blending the philosophical and theological wisdom of ancient thinkers with insights from the field of positive psychology. Our satisfaction is driven by how our mental filters interpret the events in our lives, with the human brain perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between the desires created by our emotions and the attempts of reason to control them. The key to happiness is to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.

(continued)... This will make people value their interactions with you more because you’ll be acting as a genuinely open and empathetic person. And, because of the reciprocity reflex, they’ll start doing the same for you—which will make for better and happier relationships, for you and them.

The Fleeting Joy of Achievement

Many religious traditions teach that self-denial is the route to happiness. Buddhism famously encourages its adherents to break all emotional attachments to things and refrain from all attempts to attain what they don’t have. Striving, according to this view, is the source of human unhappiness. But some things are worth striving for. The key is not to eliminate desire; it’s to start desiring the right things.

Our brains evolved to respond to immediate pleasures like food or sex (which both advance species success) with jolts of dopamine, which serve as a reinforcement mechanism. But the effects of any reinforcement mechanism are immediate and short-lived. The pleasure, instead, comes from the baby steps you take along the way. This is known as the progress principle. As a corollary, no single event is likely to permanently alter your affective style, because you’ll just reach a new plateau. This idea is known as the adaptation principle.

Striving for the Right Things

The progress and adaptation principles have important things to teach us about how we can increase our happiness. They tell us to focus more on the road to achieving a goal, not on the goal itself. Although some conditions of life are beyond the ability of an individual to alter, there are changes you can make to your life circumstances to bring lasting happiness.

Simple things like reducing exposure to unwanted noise, cutting down on commuting time, improving one’s perceived body deficiencies (like being overweight or being too skinny), and introducing more autonomy in one’s life have been shown to make people happier in the long term. Most of all, meaningful and joyful connections to other people are central to happiness. These are the things we should all strive for.

People are happiest when doing a task that is difficult, but closely aligned to their strengths. For a bodybuilder, this might be lifting a heavy weight; for a violinist, it might be practicing a particularly complex piece of music. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow,” or what we might call “being in the zone.”

The key to flow is that you are receiving constant positive feedback; the progress toward the goal sustains you. In flow, the elephant and rider are perfectly synchronized, with the elephant chasing what it wants and the rider guiding it along and spurring it to action.

Another effective way you can boost your happiness through striving for the right things is by shifting from conspicuous consumption to inconspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when we buy visible, materialistic things for the purpose of demonstrating our wealth, prestige, or status to others. Inconspicuous consumption, by contrast, refers to the kind of spending we do for our benefit, on things that make us intrinsically happy. These are things, such as vacations, that we value for their own sake, not for what they convey about us relative to other people.

Embracing, in moderation, the pleasures of life and forging meaningful attachments is a key part of what it is to be human. Happiness can come from within; but it also comes from without.

Attachment Theory

People with lots of meaningful relationships and connections to other people have been shown to have better health outcomes and report being happier. But how do we form those connections? It turns out that a great deal of our relationship success later in life hinges on the quality of our connections as children.

Attachment theory states that children have two primary needs—safety and exploration. From an evolutionary perspective, both are necessary. Safety guarantees survival, while exploration enables children to develop the skills they need to succeed as adults and have children of their own.

This knowledge that the parent will always be there to act as a guardrail gives the child the sense of security she needs to develop independence. Accordingly, when children are deprived of their attachment figures, they become insecure and unable to develop the emotional security and independence needed to thrive in adulthood. Unconditional love does not inhibit the development of independence; it’s what makes it possible in the first place.

Thus, providing unconditional love to children will enable them to form healthy, stable connections as adults. Indeed, the research shows that our childhood attachment styles carry forward into our adult romantic relationships, setting the pattern for how we form bonds with other people for the rest of our lives.

The Case For Adversity

In thinking about how to maximize our happiness, we have to consider what makes us unhappy.

Research suggests that human beings need some amount of struggle in their lives in order to reach their full potential. People who suffer setbacks, even tragedies like the loss of a loved one, often find new strengths as a result of their experience.

Trauma survivors discover that they have a much stronger network of people who love and care for them than they previously thought. This discovery activates the reciprocity reflex—we feel a deeper love for and connection to people in our social network and want to foster even closer ties with them. And because we come to value these relationships more, we devote more of our energies to cultivating them, instead of seeking money or possessions.

Setbacks can alter one’s life story or self-narrative. This is the rider’s domain, the conscious reality we construct for ourselves about who we are and how we got to be that way. The experience of triumph over loss enables us to replace a story about our frustrated hopes or positive experiences turned sour with a more compelling story about overcoming adversity and using that experience to learn compassion and empathy for others. And in the end, this is a more fulfilling story to have about ourselves.

Our teenage years in particular are the period in our lives when our self-narratives begin to truly coalesce and some of our most important life experiences take place. Events that happen during this time are those we revisit the most throughout the rest of our lives, serving as a constant point of self-reference. Accordingly, some adversity in one’s teenage and early adulthood years, if properly overcome, can provide a real character-building boost to people later in life.

Cultivating Virtue

So far, we’ve talked mostly about how our interpretations of events or our relationships with other people influence our happiness. But we should also look inward. What are the innate qualities we should possess if we wish to be happy?

Virtue is defined as the cultivation of the best version of oneself. It is about fulfilling your potential, engaging in constant self-improvement, and striving toward the acquisition of a set of positive attributes or qualities. The specific virtues you aim for depend on your particular strengths and interests. The key to cultivating virtue—and, thus, cultivating happiness—is improvement, be it moral, intellectual, or even physical. And it’s intimately linked to human happiness.

Western moral philosophy, unfortunately, gives pride of place to rationalism and science. This has inculcated in the Western mind an aversion toward ideas of virtue based in feeling and habit. For the celebrants of reason, feeling was something to be conquered and overcome; the rider had to master the elephant, not merely coordinate with it. But you don’t reason your way toward good morals; instead, cultivating virtues leads you to use the powers of reason in a way that will lead to moral actions.

Positive Psychology

Positive psychology links ancient virtue theories with our modern understanding of how the human mind works. Positive psychology attempts to elevate the human experience and cultivate excellence, instead of merely treating disorder. The field identifies six core virtues that are celebrated across all civilizations:

• Wisdom: being intellectually curious and emotionally intelligent
• Justice: being fair
• Temperance: exercising self-control
• Courage: showing perseverance and commitment to principles
• Humanity: displaying kindness and love
• Transcendence: appreciating beauty

The cultivation of these virtues should be a joyful, enlightening experience. You are focusing on things you enjoy, which is intrinsically rewarding. The cultivation of virtue is its own reward.

Elevation and Religion

Some of our most powerful moments of joy come from our experiences with the divine or spiritual. We experience a sense of uplifting when we witness someone doing a good deed; we are often driven by a desire to follow suit and do good deeds of our own. It is often closely linked to religious or spiritual experiences that bring us closer to the realm of the divine. This is elevation, the feeling you get when you are:

• Experiencing awe and wonder by sharing moments of transcendence with others
• Becoming attuned with the most noble parts of yourself; and
• Witnessing phenomena that are larger than yourself and beyond the capacity of your limited mental structures to fully process

The feeling of experiencing God’s love as part of a congregation is a common manifestation of elevation. It’s why religion is found in every culture at every time across the world; it fulfills a basic human need to connect with something greater.

We’ve seen how important attachments and connections are to any individual’s enjoyment of life. By binding the individual to a community, connecting that individual to a higher purpose, and facilitating intrinsically rewarding altruistic behavior toward members of the group, religion has served as a great facilitator of human happiness.

Occupational Self-Direction

One of the essential conditions for a satisfied life is meaningful work. The most meaningful and satisfying work is that which people find intrinsically rewarding. Humans desire occupational self-direction—work that is complex and challenging, engages their interests or talents, and allows for a high degree of independence and autonomy. This kind of work harnesses the progress principle to maximize our happiness, rewarding us for each baby step we take toward the goal.

The Key to Happiness

We are responsible for creating the conditions for our own happiness. It is about finding the right balance between connecting to your community and connecting to yourself. Happiness comes from your attachments to the world around you, but it also comes from the cultivation of inner virtues—training the elephant to explore its full potential, while respecting its power over the rider.

But by aligning the rider with the elephant, you will discover your own path to purpose, meaning, and, ultimately, happiness.