Happiness, Success, and the Soul

Positive Psychology is an approach to psychology that seeks to understand what factors are at work in healthy states. It seeks to make a scientific understanding of things like happiness, taking the position that happiness is not the absence of unhappiness, but a positive state that can be cultivated and increased. Recently I was directed to a video on the TED website in which the lecturer, Shawn Achor, discussed what Positive Psychology has learned about the connection between happiness and success. 

Here is one of the main take-away points from the lecture:

"[We assume] that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. 

I've traveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And what I found is that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.

And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades,you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we've done is we've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.

I don't know enough about Positive Psychology to adequately comment on it, but it is clear that there is an overlap between the perspectives of Jungian Psychology and the Positive Psychology movement. There are differences of course, particularly Jung's emphasis of shadow and the unconscious. Gary Trosclair does a nice job comparing the two approaches in his post, A Jungian Analyst Takes Positive Psychology for a Test-Drive. 

In a 1960 interview, C.G. Jung enumerated the factors that he felt could produce happiness:

     1. Good physical and mental health.
     2. Good personal and intimate relationships, such as those of marriage, the family, and friendships.
     3. The faculty for perceiving beauty in art and nature.
     4. Reasonable standards of living and satisfactory work.
     5. A philosophic or religious point of view capable of coping successfully with the vicissitudes of life.

Jung, however, expresses caution about the pursuit of happiness. He reminds us that the factors that can produce happiness can, under certain conditions, produce just the opposite. He warns that "the more you deliberately seek happiness the more sure you are not to find it." In an often repeated quote from this same article, Jung makes the point that "even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."

Ultimately Jung offers this advice regarding the happy life: "It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity."  Today this advice would fall under the heading of mindfulness.

What appeals to me about Jung's perspective is that it is not about the pursuit of happiness for it's own sake, or for some secondary benefit like "success," which is something that will have different meanings for different people. The five factors that Jung lists have to do with qualities and experiences of the human soul. Happiness proceeds from a life lived soulfully and deeply and with an awareness and acceptance of its highs and lows, its light and its darkness.

Alan Watts offers a point of view on this subject that I like a lot. He expresses the same ideas about the pursuit of success as that of Positive Psychology, yet in a very different way. His perspective is not  a scientific study of happiness, but a spiritual view of life in the world. The findings of Positive Psychology are exciting and valuable, but for my part, it is the life of the spirit and the depth of the soul that truly sings to me. Here are Alan Watts thoughts (with animation from the South Park guys just for fun) on the subject: