The Happiness Delusion
Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness
The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to access some of those files, and perhaps the “film quality” is degraded over time, but it’s all there. Which would explain why we can often recall extremely vivid memories from years earlier, right?
Except that’s not how memory works at all. The common challenge I mentioned – accessing all those files – points to the problem itself: there’s no way we’d have enough room in our brains to store the vast reels of captured experience we’ve all lived.
As it turns out, memory isn’t like shooting video, but rather is closer to an ordinary camera, storing the occasional still shot, capturing only a few slivers of a much larger experience.
So how do we recall all those episodes of our lives in such brilliant detail? Because while our brain may have limited storage capacity, it has infinite creative abilities. In short, we make it up. Not totally – at least usually not totally! – but we do fill in lots of details, comparing one scene with others, making educated guesses about what really happened, accessing other stored memory-photos and emotions, referencing our overall outlook and expectations about life, and thereby construct a pretty detailed account surrounding the isolated photograph our memory has stored – all in a few milliseconds!
Which is why memory is fragile. As Daniel Kahneman pointed out in last Wednesday’s TEDTalk on memory and happiness, while our “experiential self” is far more accurate than our “remembered self,” memory almost always trumps experience because our memory creates and brings to bear such powerful (if often inaccurate!) stories.
And here’s where things get interesting – and problematic – because memory is susceptible, as both Kahneman and Gilbert point out, to so many outside influences, including the stories around us. We often remember inaccurately, that is, because of the stories others tell us and, ultimately, the stories we tell ourselves.
All of which helps to explain why, even though we know from experience that money doesn’t bring us happiness, we often don’t act that way – it’s because our memories have been influenced, even seduced, by another story. A story that money does, indeed, buy happiness. Indeed, a story that the more money you have the happier you’ll be. This story is both pervasive and powerful because it’s told by a culture and economy that depends upon the telling – and believing! – of that story in order to survive.
As Gilbert writes,
the production of wealth does not necessarily make individuals happy, but it does serve the needs of an economy, which serves the needs of a stable society, which serves as a network for the propagation of delusional beliefs about happiness and wealth. Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being (241-242).
What I find fascinating about Gilbert’s theory is that there is apparently substantial benefit to the perpetuation of the story that money makes us happy, even though it doesn’t. Which would explain, in part, why we can easily get confused about our relationship to money.
So here are my questions, and I’d love to have you chime in as I think about how to make sense of this in relation to thinking about our money in relation to our faith:
1) Does the fact that there is societal benefit to our mistaken ideas about money and happiness change the way we think about this problem? That is, does recognizing that there is some benefit to our mistaken connection between money and happiness make us more positively disposed to our penchant, or at least more understanding?
2) If this connection between our mistaken beliefs and societal stability, presumably, has always been the case, has it changed recently? Has it, that is, gotten more extreme lately with our increased reliance on consumer spending to power our economy?
3) If we are dissatisfied with the cultural story about wealth and happiness, what counter stories can we offer, and do they also have societal benefit?
Enough for now: over the next week or two, I want to explore this cultural story in more depth and think about ways to respond. In the meantime, thanks for your help!
Post image: “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” by Colleen Brown (detail)
Interesting article David, thanks. Echoes here of The Matrix and The Truman Show. Our understanding of reality is shaped by the stories that we hear. They can be stories told (for example, by a dominant culture) and stories that we tell ourselves (from carefully selected and filtered and reinterpreted memory). So when John tells us that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, is he (in part) offering us a different story, and the only one by which we might discern what is really real? And in this story Jesus says, a man’s worth is not bound up with what he possesses. Does that make sense?
That makes a lot of sense, Ashley. I think the story we adopt – or are drawn into – not only shapes our experience but sets the boundaries for what is possible. I think Jesus’ preaching of the kingdom is an invitation, as you put it, to a different story. Whether it is more “real” or not is a matter of debate, but it’s the one we believe leads to a different kind of life, abundant life.
Thanks for your comment.
Thank you for the thought provoking post,and questions Dave! Since you asked…
For the majority of American wage earners, the idea that money and happiness are connected is not entirely mistaken. Toward the end of his TED talk Kahneman quotes $60,000 /year as the income level above which money has less of an impact on happiness. But at lower income levels money makes a difference! In 2010, when Kahneman’s study was reported on by Time magazine, the number was $75,000. Based on Social Security Administration w-2 income statistics, 81% of us earn less than $60,000 per year. So for 122,480,403 of wage earners, there’s a pretty good chance that more money will buy an additional degree of happiness.
I think the real mistaken belief is that it doesn’t matter how money is earned. For many the belief goes, “if it pays a lot of money, it’s good work.” In contrast, the church often defines “good work” as using our gifts in (voluntary) service. Meanwhile, the work we do for money (out there in the real world) is often far removed from whatever “good” might be being produced. So, as we labor for money, we are either disconnected from the good and happy feelings of doing good work, or worse, we feel deep down that we labor for something that’s contrary to God’s commandments. Either way we are dissatisfied with our work and seek ever higher levels of money as compensation for our suffering and loss.
But doesn’t Luther tell us in A Treatise on Good Worksthat any work done in faith (which is the primary good work of a Christian) is pleasing to God? If we remain faithful to God, and follow God’s commandments, we please God in all that we do, whether for pay, or in voluntary service. It is good work to labor for the common good or in our various trades for pay.
The problem now is finding good and meaningful work for meaningful pay. Because, pursuing meaningful work for less than meaningful pay can be as corrosive to our happiness as pursuing meaningless (soul killing) work for ever increasing levels of pay.
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.
Thanks very much for your thoughtful comments, Tom. I think you’re absolutely right: the connection between income and satisfaction, happiness, purpose, fulfillment (or whatever else we might call it) is complex. In fact, vocation is complex, in some ways more so than in Luther’s day because, as you point out, we are so much more disconnected from the fruits and outcome of our labor. This gets even more complex in an advanced capitalist society embedded in a global economy.
So…lots to talk about, think about, pray about, and all the rest. Thanks for keeping the conversation going.
Thank you, David, for opening up this most intriguing conversation about money and happiness. As I read and think about all of this I’m drawn back to three concepts.
First, I think that people can go down a career path (and get stuck on this path) that doesn’t fit their giftedness. So even if the career is lucrative, happiness may be elusive.
Second, I feel it is imperative to seek to understand the identity narrative that influences us, and then act on it. As a Christian, my identity comes with being a child of God, claimed in baptism. Further, that my life has a purpose that is not necessarily what I do for a living. That I have a vocation, and part of my purpose is figuring out what that is, and that vocation may be different from one season of life to another.
And the last concept swirling around is Brene Brown’s TED talk about worthiness and shame. This seems so at the core of what happiness might look like that no amount of money can buy.
I look forward to this ongoing conversation.
Thank you for this insight, Dee. You are onto something important: understanding and acting on our identity narrative. The story we believe about ourselves is a good guard and measure of our ability to be in the world but not of the world.