Choice and Happiness

The other day I was responding to a post by David Foster, with a discussion aimed at the unhappy youth. Specifically, I was trying to offer some advice on how to take charge of your happiness and become happier. I held that good philosophy can help you with that, as can bold practical actions:

The thing about anxiety is that it turns out to be one of the things you really can do something about. Stoic philosophy is a practice that tackles the problem of anxiety by helping you identify what you can control, what you can't control, and ways of focusing on the former. This does a great deal to eliminate anxiety from your life, because your focus ends up on things you absolutely can master. As you learn to let go of the other things and focus on your area of control, anxiety will diminish because you care less and less about the things outside your control....

Also, ride horses or motorcycles. As Aristotle teaches, you get virtues by practicing them. Get out and practice taking risks, being courageous, doing dangerous things. You'll get better and better at the things, but you'll also get better and better at handling risky situations in general.

I remember on reflection how exciting Aristotle was to me when I was young, and facing all the uncertainty of youth. Then one day I encountered a professor who told us, “Aristotle says that happiness is an activity, and the particular activity is using your reason to align your vital powers in the pursuit of excellence.”

That was a revelation to me. Happiness was in my hands. All I had to do was do it. The Stoics refined that picture, but that’s the truth. There’s no reason to be anxious. Just go do. 

Now it happened that just a day or so later AVI wrote a post on happiness that contains an implicit challenge to this view. 

Neuroticism decreases as we age.  Stated the other way, our sense of emotional stability increases as we get older. Fewer things bother us. We give a rat's ass about less and less stuff.  Put it however you want to, we calm down....

Because we are all moving in the direction of improved mood anyway - your 50s will likely be your happiest decade and your 60s your second-happiest - it gives us the impression that "when all is said and done, I made mostly right choices."  People who married feel vindicated because they feel emotionally better at 55 than at 25. But people who did not marry are also quite sure they made the right choice. 

(James had a theologically sound comment at that post, by the way.)

So the implicit challenge is that young people just are unhappier than older people; and thus, that adopting a good philosophy or having grand experiences merely correlates with a natural process of declining neuroticism. Correlation is not causation. Of course, getting older is itself also a correlation: it's just one of those things that happens to us -- at least, those of us who get ahold of our mental health sufficiently to avoid suicide or death by drug overdose. Susceptibility to those things may also be heavily influenced by genetics, though, and so also not necessarily the product of good philosophy or activity.

Epictetus tells us in Enchiridion V that misery is in our hands, because we can choose to take a view even of death that is not terrible (as, he points out, did Socrates). He goes on to say one of the most striking things in the whole book, which I think relevant to today's discussion: "It is the action of an uninstructed person to reproach others for his own misfortunes; of one entering upon instruction, to reproach himself; and one perfectly instructed, to reproach neither others nor himself."

This is meant to apply to misfortunes, but it applies just as well to good fortune. I am happier now than I ever was, and I ascribe this to adopting a better philosophy as well as to having trained myself for action. Maybe I should not credit myself for this happiness, nor my teachers (nor, as per AVI's post, even my long-suffering and patient wife). Maybe it's just something that happened to me, like all the other things.

That's more Zen than Stoic, which brings me to a strong counter-argument: Richard Strozzi Heckler's In Search of the Warrior Spirit, his account of teaching Zen meditation to US Special Forces. He did so as part of a program that was meant to create improved capacities for things like marksmanship and stealth in these already-capable men. They absolutely hated the practice of meditation, which went counter to their nature as men of action. However, the practice did in fact increase their scores on the objective tests of their marksmanship and so forth. The practice of the philosophy -- not merely the thinking of philosophcial thoughts, but the union of practice according to philosophy -- did further improve outcomes, in other words. The unity of thought and practice altered their outcomes as predicted.

Of course these were especially excellent men to start with. The fact that they can do it does not mean that everyone can. It does offer hope, though, that it might work. If you happen to be miserable, why not give it a try? The worst that can happen is that you'll get older while you practice, and therefore happier; and in the meanwhile, it'll give you something to help pass the time.