Why the “Pursuit of Happiness” Is a Bad Idea

23:49It's 1831, just 55 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And a young French aristocrat by the name of Alexis de Tocqueville has just landed on the bustling streets of New York City. Over the next few months, Tocqueville would embark on a famous anthropological study of how things were going for our new young republic in the half century since it gained independence. He's charged in the 1830s by the French government to come to America to study prisons so that he can help carry out prison reform in France. And so he comes to America, really for only a number of months, but it produces this magnum opus published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, which is his series of reflections on the democratic experiment in America, really seen as a vision of what the world will become for Europe.

24:37And he sees America and the American experiment as a kind of image of the future. What did Tocqueville think when he observed this new American experiment? Well, let's just say Monsieur Alexis would probably have been very supportive of this week's happiness hot take. You know, he has this wonderful line there where he says that Americans find themselves in the most fortunate conditions. And he says no one could work harder to be happy. He has this line where he says an American will build a house, you know, and before the roof is on, we'll move on to the next one because he's constantly pursuing happiness.

25:09He says that preachers there, and he gets this exactly right, give sermons, and it's hard to tell whether their goal is happiness in this life or salvation because the two are so conflated. And yet in the midst of this ceaseless, restless desire or pursuit of happiness, he finds what he calls a strange melancholy. Tocqueville identified two distinct problems with 19th century America's pursuit of happiness. The first is one that historian Darren McMahon alluded to before the break. Americans in the 1800s seemed to be forgetting the forefathers' double sense of happiness, that the good life involved not just striving for personal pleasure, but also seeking out the public good through virtues like kindness and self-restraint.

25:51But Tocqueville also noticed a second problem with Americans' pursuit of happiness. It just didn't seem to be working. Democracy in the 1800s had bestowed Americans with more opportunities for prosperity and social mobility than was had by nearly any other country in the world at the time. But America's newfound freedom to pursue a better life seemed to come at a cost. As Tocqueville put it in his famed double volume Democracy in America, there is something astonishing in the spectacle of so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance. He continued, it seemed that a cloud habitually hung on their brow.

26:26They seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures. Americans, he said, were in such a rush to obtain happiness that they clutch everything but hold nothing fast. and so lose grip as they hurry after some new delight. That continues for each American, Tocqueville explained, until death steps in in the end and stops him before he has grown tired of this futile pursuit of that complete felicity which always escapes him. In a world of frenetic, ceaseless energy where we're constantly working to be satisfied and never are, you know, that creates a kind of fatigue. Tocqueville was one of the first to notice a deep irony in Americans' pursuit of happiness.

27:06The more we seek happiness out, the less happy we seem to become. Unfortunately, it would take 200 more years before scientists thought to test whether Tocqueville's hypothesis was actually right. Despite the fact, and perhaps even because of the fact, that we pretty intensely strive to be happy, we fall short of it. So there's a self-defeating nature within the pursuit of happiness. I'm chatting with Iris Maus, a psychology professor at UC Berkeley. Iris is an expert on what we get wrong in our quest to feel happier. And in fact, it's even been shown that the more intensely people strive to be happy, the more likely they are to get away from happiness.

27:53Iris has christened this phenomenon the paradox of happiness. And I think a lot of the bad effects of the pursuit of happiness come from that sense of obligation that we put on ourselves and maybe also on other people. The moment you say that it's at least somewhat in people's own control, the idea arises that people maybe should or ought to strive for their own happiness. Iris has studied the paradox of happiness in a series of clever studies. In one experiment, she brought subjects into the lab and had them read different theories about the importance of feeling happy. In what we call the obsession with happiness condition, we had participants read an article that really extolled the importance of being really happy and being really happy most of the time.

28:48So they read sort of a fake newspaper article that backed this up with a lot of real signs, except for we very much emphasized the idea that you should be happy all the time. And in the control condition, participants read a similar article, but happiness wasn't mentioned. And then participants watched a couple of emotional film clips. One film clip was really sad, and the sad film clip showed a husband losing his wife. Very sad film clip. In the happy film clip, participants saw a figure skater win the Olympic gold medal. And it was actually Sarah Hughes who won the gold medal in 2002. But the scene was really similar to what we saw recently when Elisa Liu won the gold medal.

29:44So it's like pure joy. She realizes she's just like knocked it out of the field and celebrates with her coaches and the audience goes wild. Both groups of participants, the experimental group who were told that they should feel happy all the time and the control group who read the non-happiness related article, were asked to fill out a survey about how they felt after watching the videos. Now, in the sad film clip, there was no difference between the two experimental conditions. No matter how highly participants valued happiness in that moment, they all felt really sad. But in the happy film clip, we saw a really interesting difference between the two experimental conditions, such that the group that was led to highly value happiness actually felt less happy after watching Sarah Hughes win the gold medal.

30:37Participants who thought they were supposed to feel happy wound up feeling less positive after witnessing a good event. In this and other studies, Iris has observed that, paradoxically, the more we think we're supposed to be pursuing happiness, the less we seem to obtain it. People almost feel like an obligation to reach that state of happiness. And so they're evaluating how they feel compared to where they think they should be. And we actually assessed that idea with a question in the study where we had asked our participants also how they felt about their own feelings. So a question like, how disappointed were you with how you felt when you watched the film clip?

31:20And people who were in the valuing happiness condition, they actually were more disappointed about how they had felt. So there's something about the idea that here happiness is within your reach. You're seeing this really lovely, beautiful, joyful film clip. It's within reach, and yet you're falling short. And so people judge themselves for that. But why does seeking out happiness, expecting to obtain it, paradoxically make us feel worse? Iris says that we can gain some insight by looking at what happens when we set our sights on any big objective. Happiness is a goal. And from that perspective, you can see the pursuit of happiness as goal pursuit.

32:05And we have quite a bit of understanding of the sort of like steps that people walk along as they pursue goals. Psychologists argue that our minds go through four distinct steps when pursuing a new goal. The first step and the first spot where we could go wrong is in choosing a goal. Iris has found that there are better and worse ways to set a goal from the perspective of feeling happier. You can think of that goal either in terms of how intensely you want to be happy, but also in terms of how often you want to be happy. And most people set pretty high goals for being happy. They want to be pretty intensely happy, but also pretty frequently happy.

32:49So is this the step where people go wrong in terms of pursuing happiness? So for a while, people, including myself, thought that if we set the goal too intensely, too highly, we're like striving really hard to be happy, that that in itself is harmful or self-defeating. But when you take a really close look, it turns out that just being motivated to feel happy in and of itself, we sometimes call it aspiring to being happy, that alone is not necessarily inherently harmful. And so we've moved away from thinking that the goal itself is what's harmful to thinking that it's rather how people go about pursuing that goal that reveals the pitfalls of pursuing happiness.

33:47And step two in how people go about pursuing that goal is what psychologists have called affect regulation. And that's just the idea that people will regulate their own affective or emotional states to be more in line with their goal. If your goal is to feel happier, you'll probably be motivated to change your situation or what you're paying attention to in order to improve your mood. You may also try to regulate your affect by actively suppressing your feelings. And Ira says that this is a point in the goal pursuit process where people tend to go wrong. One really common mistake that people make, maybe because it's so easy, is to simply not show how they feel on the inside.

34:30I might feel a little bit sad and I might decide, oh, it's easiest not to show that. But it turns out that that's actually really harmful to happiness, in part because it disconnects us from other people. And so the idea is that emotion suppression might feel like a quick fix in the moment, but it actually cuts us off from one of the main pathways to happiness, which is social connection. So step number two, this affect regulation step, is a spot where we need to be careful. We're prone to suppressing our feelings more than we should. We also tend to go wrong in the next step of the happiness goal pursuit process, step number three, which Iris calls monitoring.

35:17So basically, we check in. How am I doing? Am I getting further along on my path? Am I falling back? Am I falling behind? But the mere act of posing these monitoring questions can also be a recipe for unhappiness. happiness. There's a saying, ask yourself whether you're happy and you cease to be so. And that encapsulates that very idea that you will destroy the very thing you're seeking when you're kind of checking in with yourself. Am I happy yet? How happy am I? Studies have shown that monitoring our happiness too frequently can make us less happy. One experiment used what's known as an experience sampling procedure in which people are pinged at random times and asked to report what they're thinking about and how they're feeling.

36:05Participants reported feeling happier when they were not thinking about their own happiness. Results like these are common, but Iris says they don't necessarily mean that we should abandon monitoring altogether. No monitoring at all can't be the answer. Of course, you have all these, you know, like happiness tracking devices these days, right? And a lot of people use them to great effect because asking yourself in a really systematic way, how happy am I, can give you really important clues as to what makes you happy and how can you do more of the things that make you happy. So there's a tension here when it comes to monitoring, where monitoring is sometimes bad and sometimes good for happiness.

36:57One factor, Ira says, is when you do the active monitoring. Are you asking yourself, how happy am I, how happy am I during a positive event? Or do you check in after a positive event has ended? Studies show that the former type of monitoring makes us less happy than the latter, in part because the act of monitoring takes us out of the present moment. But monitoring how an event feels after it's over doesn't seem to hurt our happiness as much. So step number three, monitoring, isn't all bad, but it's also a spot where we need to be careful about our technique. And that brings us to step number four of the goal pursuit process, one that Iris has found often goes awry when it comes to the pursuit of happiness, what psychologists call the response phase.

37:37We respond to and pass judgment on what it means to be off track from our goal. One very frequent reaction could be to ask ourselves, what does it mean that I'm less happy than I want to be? And a really common answer is, I think there's something wrong with me because I'm less happy than I want to be. This is the step, Ira says, in which the paradoxical effects of pursuing happiness creep in the most, in part because it involves a lot of what she calls meta-emotions. So meta-emotions are just emotions, feelings that we have about our feelings. That's the meta part. I'm guessing that even if you haven't heard the term meta-emotions, you're probably very familiar with them.

38:20Think judgment, shame, disappointment, frustration, all the negative reactions you have when you don't feel the way you want to feel. And Iris has found that meta-emotions explain a lot of the paradox of happiness. In one study, she surveyed a group of participants about how much they valued happiness. She then asked each subject to keep a detailed diary of all the things that happened to them throughout the day. And they told us about the happiest event of their day for 14 days. And then we also asked them about their meta-emotions. How disappointed were you? How judging did you feel about your own feelings?

38:59The subject's happiest moments included lots of different positive events. get-togethers with friends and yummy meals and birthday parties. But how much subjects enjoyed these good events depended on how much they valued happiness. Subjects who said they worried most about happiness were also the ones who showed the most negative meta-emotions during their happy events. Those participants spent even the most positive moments feeling disappointed and judgy. These results suggest overthinking and judgment can spoil the very moments when happiness is most in reach. The final part of goal pursuit isn't exactly a step per se, but it's something Iris thinks is super important for understanding where we go wrong when it comes to striving for happiness.

39:39And that is the cultural context in which we find ourselves whenever we're trying to pursue a goal. Just like people have ideas about happiness, so do societies and cultures. And that context is actually incredibly important. It can really facilitate and take pressure off individuals, but it can also work against them. As a German immigrant currently living in Berkeley, California, Iris has seen firsthand just how different two cultures can be when it comes to the pursuit of happiness. I mean, I've been here for a while, but I still remember sort of like when I first moved to the U.S. and that was actually California, which might be a special relationship to the pursuit of happiness within a country that has a pretty special relationship to the pursuit of happiness.

40:26It's small things, but I remember the first time somebody said to me, enjoy. And I just noted that that struck me as almost a little bit funny. It's that notion that, number one, it's important to enjoy, which is a little bit suspect to a German. But also, number two, that it's very much in your control. You're going to make it happen. And Iris's observations about these cultural differences have been borne out by research. There's actually a really lovely systematic study by a psychologist named Birgit Koppenholm, where she compared systematically American and German attitudes toward emotions.

41:11And she analyzed condolence cards that people send if somebody has lost a loved one. Both of them acknowledged grief and loss and mourning, of course. But the American condolence cards would also highlight an element of a silver lining. They would say something like, I hope you find comfort and so forth. So some positivity coming back in, whereas the German condolence cards would like all the way lean into the morning with phrases like in deepest sadness and tiefster trauer. And there was no element of, you know, a silver lining. There is something more important to happiness in American culture, and we're a little bit more tolerant or embracing of sadness and unhappiness in German culture.

42:09So let's recap. Iris argues that to understand where we go wrong in the pursuit of happiness, we need to understand the steps our minds take during any goal pursuit. And those four steps are setting a goal, regulating your affect to meet that goal, monitoring how you did, and then responding as needed if you got off track. And that entire process of goal pursuit is embedded within a particular cultural context, which can make the process easier or harder. So where do we go wrong when it comes to these steps? Sometimes it's during affect regulation. We preemptively shut off our negative emotions, which prevent us from connecting with others.

42:43Sometimes it's in the monitoring step. We get so obsessed with asking ourselves if we're feeling happy that we pull ourselves out of the present moment. And sometimes it's in that final response phase when we get stuck judging whatever experience we're having with lots of nasty meta-emotions. And if all these steps happen in a culture that heavily emphasizes how happy we should be, that demands we enjoy and find silver linings all the time, that can make it hard not to feel bad about ourselves whenever we fall short of expectations. So that's what we get wrong when it comes to our goal pursuit of happiness.

43:15But is there a way we can engage in that pursuit more effectively? Well, we'll find out when The Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.

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47:04Psychologist Iris Mouse has spent her career trying to understand what we get wrong in our quest for happiness. Before the break, she explained the science of goal pursuit and where we tend to go wrong when it comes to the four steps of pursuing happiness. Now that we're back, I've asked Iris to teach us what the same science shows about how we can do better. Her first piece of advice involves a more effective way of handling affect regulation. Rather than trying to suppress and avoid negative emotions, Iris says we should focus on the positive by intentionally engaging in happier activities. And this idea of prioritizing positivity was introduced by a researcher named Lana Catalino.

47:43And I mentioned positive activities because it's really about the things that you do. So you're less in your mind and you're actually able to just live your life. It's structuring your days to make it more likely that you're going to have positive things happening to you. Another spot where Iris says we can do better is during the act of monitoring. Those moments when we ask ourselves, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Iris has found that we can monitor in a healthy way if we use different questions, like, what went well today? Or what are some things that I enjoyed? Savoring is the idea of paying attention, thinking about positive, pleasurable experiences that we've had.

48:28So basically, if you're once in a while checking in with what experiences you have in your life and how they contribute to making your life better overall, that's actually okay. And it actually predicts greater happiness. A third change we can make while pursuing happiness is in that final response phase. Rather than judging how off-track you've gotten, Iris recommends embracing what researchers call radical acceptance, the act of non-judgmentally accepting your current situation just as it is. And people have pointed this out for a long time. There's Buddhist notions of mindfulness. There's acceptance and commitment therapy, one of the core active ingredients of which is emotional acceptance.

49:17And those things bring people greater happiness. But the most important recommendation Iris has for pursuing happiness more effectively is a suggestion I'm pretty sure Jefferson and our forefathers would be proud of. We need to rethink the particular kind of happiness we're trying to pursue. There's sort of like two types of happiness that we distinguish. One that's more about feeling good, hedonic happiness. And the other that's more about leading a good life, sometimes called eudaimonic happiness. And that happiness helps us avoid some of the pitfalls that we fall into when we're single-mindedly focused on the more hedonic aspects of happiness.

50:00New research has observed a bunch of reasons that pursuing that virtuous, eudaimonic happiness feels better than going after personal pleasure. First, lots of studies have shown that focusing on other people's happiness tends to make us feel better than focusing on our own. There's also evidence that the good feelings we get from doing nice things for others tends to stick around longer than the boost we get from selfish actions. Psychologists have long known that hedonic pleasure is subject to what's called hedonic adaptation, the tendency for good feelings to go back to baseline after a positive event.

50:32But studies show that we tend to adapt less quickly to the positive feelings we get from actions that benefit other people. Kindness just isn't as subject to hedonic adaptation, which is kind of cool. Finally, research shows that we tend to have more realistic expectations about how good we'll feel after purposeful activities than hedonic ones, which means that seeking out eudaimonic goals leads to less judgy meta-emotions than going after hedonic pursuits. It's a pretty young area of research, but we're beginning to see that people who see happiness more in terms of these eudaimonic, virtue, value-based, pro-social-based aspects tend to be more likely to achieve lasting and sustainable happiness compared to people who predominantly see happiness in more hedonic terms.

51:28Now, I really want to emphasize something that I find really important and interesting, and that's that sometimes we sort of jump to the conclusion that those two types of happiness are sort of mutually exclusive. Like you're either going to be miserable, but super virtuous or kind of like the happy pig that Socrates talked about. And psychological research actually indicates that that's not the case. They can be distinct. You can pull those two aspects of happiness apart, but usually they coincide. So having a value-driven life also feels good to people. And I think that's a really lovely and hopeful conclusion that you don't have to choose between one or the other.

52:21Hmm. Iris's hopeful idea that you don't need to choose between personal pleasure and the public good seems suspiciously similar to what the forefathers were trying to tell us 250 years ago. To paraphrase Jefferson, if happiness is our aim in life, then virtue is the foundation through which we achieve it. Happiness is not just about pleasure-pain calculus, although it's about that as well, but it's also about crafting and cultivating a life. Could returning to that 18th century notion of happiness, that it necessarily involves both the personal good and the public good be the key to pursuing the good life more effectively?

52:57Historian Darren McMahon thinks so. In fact, Darren says that this same solution to our faulty pursuit of happiness was proposed over 200 years ago by the scholar who first observed the paradox at the heart of this week's happiness hot take, the OG critic of our country's pursuit of happiness, Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville is critical in some ways, but he's also a great admirer of America. There's just no question about that. And he's constantly looking for ways that this experiment can be preserved. And he has this wonderful phrase where he says that Americans are good at what he calls self-interest rightly understood.

53:32Tocqueville noticed that even though the citizens of our new republic had a passion for material pleasures, they still understood, as he put it, when to sacrifice some of their private interests to save the rest. They still had what he called an enlightened regard for themselves, which could prompt them to assist one another and the state. Tocqueville ended his historic visit still feeling hopeful that future Americans would discover what the forefathers knew well and what modern psychological science has now shown so clearly, that feeling good is deeply intertwined with doing good. And he sees in the 1830s still a great deal of that around him and he has confidence in some ways that this will preserve America and the American an experiment.

54:14I'm not sure if he were with us today, you know, how optimistic he would be. I think he would see, like we all do, the kind of evisceration of that eudaimonic side, the evisceration of the link that the founders saw profoundly between the pursuit of individual happiness and the pursuit of social happiness, the recognition that those two go together. And that ultimate divorce, I think, would really worry Tocqueville as it worries many of us. Like Darren, I am pretty worried about this ultimate divorce, that people today don't always remember this important connection between the pursuit of individual happiness and the pursuit of social good.

54:51But like Tocqueville observing our American experiment back in the 19th century, I still think there's lots of reason for hope. And that's why I was so excited to share this week's happiness hot take, that the pursuit of happiness, at least as we tend to do it today, is a bad idea. We assume that the pursuit of happiness is all about us, that hedonic pleasure is the path to feeling good. We also get wrapped up in this idea that we're supposed to feel happy, that our pursuits of the good life are supposed to succeed. And when they don't, we tend to freak out about what went wrong and judge ourselves with lots of painful meta-emotions.

55:25But the science shows that a healthier, more effective pursuit of happiness requires acknowledging what our forefathers knew so well, that we have an unalienable right to strive for happiness, but not necessarily to obtain it, and that our pursuit will go a lot better if we remember that cultivating other people's happiness is the most effective path to achieving it for ourselves. So on this 250th birthday of the American experiment, an experiment that I really hope will still be going strong 250 years from now, I hope that all my listeners will take this week's happiness hot take to heart and embrace the kind of happiness that really is worth pursuing.

56:03And since I wanted to share something extra special for my listeners in honor of Fourth of July this year, I'll be continuing my conversation with happiness historian Darren McMahon next week. But next time, he'll be interviewing me. You'll get to hear the conversation I had with Darren at his home institution at Dartmouth College as part of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth's Public Conversations on the Pursuit of Happiness. That's all next time on The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

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