A Rumination on Happiness

I have spent the week thinking about "happiness." Whenever I am "on" a topic, I am compelled to read and listen to all I can find about that topic. Accordingly, I have listened to several lectures and read many articles by the best minds in the world on the psychology, the neurology, and the physiology of happiness. It has been a fascinating study this week. This is what I am learning: one of the key features that distinguish humans from animals is the development of our frontal lobe. In that area of our brain, we have the capacity for imagination--particularly the capacity to imagine the future. Unfortunately, we usually imagine it wrong. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert tells us that "We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy. " But are our future selves grateful for that effort? No.

Like the fruits of our loins, our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they'd like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn't work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.

I get this. I am someone who just can't fathom what my earlier self was thinking. As I reap the harvest I carefully and laboriously seeded 20 years ago, I marvel at what matters to me now, and how little I understood my future self.

What does this have to do with happiness (or the Humanitarian blog)? Linking all of the work I have seen this week, I find some "rules" about happiness that I can drag over to think about in my spiritual life. For instance, one key indicator of happiness is our ability to distinguish between things that are "pleasurable" and things that are "meaningful." Activities that bring us pleasure are good, but they have declining value. The first bite of an extraordinary chocolate cake is really the best bite. Pleasure plateaus and diminishes as we continue in that activity. Too much cake, in fact, can cause distress.

This is not true, however, for "meaningful" or "philanthropic" activities. Psychologist Martin Seligman, finds that our happiness increases when we are engaged in philanthropic endeavors. In layman terms: When we do something nice for someone else, we are happier for longer than when we do something nice for ourselves. So, that takes me back to the idea of service, and how service is essential not only to the recipient of my efforts but also to me. What I do for others fundamentally affects my sense of well-being both today and in the future.

I think that there is something to unpack here. When I spend my time on my future, I am planning for a person who will be thankless and spoiled and even frustrated by all of my misguided attention--me. (That's Gilbert's theory.) When I reach out to others and build relationships and experiences of service, I cultivate activities that create long-term meaning and satisfaction. Maybe this is related to the scripture "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."

We are a church that believes in service and sacrifice. The Plan of Happiness spoken about by Alma and Mosiah requires our commitment to aid and love and serve others. Our modern prophets reiterate the same message in every Conference. The following is a long excerpt from Jeffrey Holland, taken from a 2006 Conference session. I like to think about this as not only an exhortation to act, but also a promise of peace and happiness.

As sure as the rescue of those in need was the general conference theme of October 1856, so too is it the theme of this conference and last conference and the one to come next spring. It may not be blizzards and frozen-earth burials that we face this conference, but the needy are still out there—the poor and the weary, the discouraged and downhearted, those "[falling] away into [the] forbidden paths" we mentioned earlier, and multitudes who are "kept from the truth because they know not where to find it."⁶ They are all out there with feeble knees, hands that hang down,⁷ and bad weather setting in. They can be rescued only by those who have more and know more and can help more. And don't worry about asking, "Where are they?" They are everywhere, on our right hand and on our left, in our neighborhoods and in the workplace, in every community and county and nation of this world. Take your team and wagon; load it with your love, your testimony, and a spiritual sack of flour; then drive in any direction. The Lord will lead you to those in need if you will but embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ that has been taught in this conference. Open your heart and your hand to those trapped in the twenty-first century's equivalent of Martin's Cove and Devil's Gate. In doing so we honor the Master's repeated plea on behalf of lost sheep and lost coins and lost souls.⁸