Working Your Way to Happiness
Ever try to look at a star that's too far away? You can't see it until you glance off to the side and catch it out of the corner of your eye. Happiness is like that. Pursue it too directly and it will escape you; approach from an angle, and there you have it, winking in your peripheral vision.
In The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2006), social psychologist Jonathan Haidt examines what philosophers over the centuries have said about happiness and a meaningful life. He draws on ten Great Ideas and compares them to what psychology research has discovered about human nature. Eventually, being a scientist himself, he quotes a formula for happiness-and some of the main ingredients relate to work.
Happiness, so goes the formula, consists of three things. First of all are your own genetics. Apparently we're each born with a capacity for happiness that varies (an optimist will have a greater range possible than a pessimist). Second are the conditions of your life, which include facts you can't change (your age, your race) and facts you can change (your marriage, your job). Mostly you adapt to the conditions of your life, you grow accustomed. But certain conditions you never adapt to and are therefore worth trying to improve. Among them, believe it or not, is the length of your commute to work. Before you experience a long commute, you imagine you'll get used to it. You won't.
Third, and last, are the activities you choose to do (exercise, visit a friend). Because these involve effort, they don't dissolve into the background the way conditions do; and as such, they hold the greatest promise for increasing your happiness. Voluntary activities boil down to two basic kinds: pleasures and gratifications. The more you have of each, the happier you will be.
But what exactly are they? Pleasures are physical delights (chocolate, warm water, neck rubs). You can have too much of these at one time-they tend to satisfy in the moment only, so savour in moderation. Gratifications, however, "are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness" (p. 96). Gratifications can lead to what we sometimes call "being in the zone"-also known as flow. I once had a startling experience of this when a stranger led me on to a dance floor for a waltz. I had just learned the steps. My newfound knowledge clicked into place and my body knew exactly what to do. I skimmed across the floor in moments so perfect that they have frequently returned to me in memory.
My experience was typical of gratifications, which "often come from accomplishing something, learning something, or improving something" (p. 97). I believe that sense of flow is what we inarticulately crave in our work-it's what we mean when we say we don't want to have just a job. We want to love getting up in the morning, we want to have currents of a deep passion moving us throughout our days.
So how do you discover what will gratify you? Haidt's book suggests that you start by knowing your own strengths. You can figure this out yourself or you can register on www.authentichappiness.org and complete a Strengths Questionnaire. Act on your strengths, says Haidt. If your job allows you to use them, they will lead to gratifications, which in turn will immerse you more often in flow. When you enter that state, work becomes like skimming across a dance floor-a dance floor under a sky blazing with faraway stars.
Gillian Derksen, BA, is an Employment Assistant with SCCI Project Restart Ltd, a free 17-day career planning program in Surrey. Published in The Recruit July 21, 2006.