Bad case of the affluenza going around

It's official. Too much money can indeed be detrimental to you mental and emotional health. It doesn't take Motley Fool to understand, though this respected source of financial related advice recently reviewed the book Affluenza: how to be successful and stay sane.



According to MF:

In his travels around the world, which took up most of 2004, Oliver James discovered that a worldwide surge in material affluence, coupled with the demands of 21st Century living, appears to increase our vulnerability to emotional distress. Thus, in societies where people place a high value on acquiring money and 'designer' brands, looking good in the eyes of others, and wanting to be famous, the incidence of anxiety, depression, personality disorder and substance abuse is high.

It is not surprising that this chase serves to place happiness further out of our reach. The deep irony is not lost on us here at OFD. That when the search for happiness is an outer-directed one, in can take one to the furthest corners of the globe but one is destined not to find it, because it is an inner-directed journey. The capacity lies within us, latent, waiting to be unlocked when we are ready.

Perhaps this calls for a new play for these troubled and typically unsatisfying times. In the spirit of Godot maybe its Waiting for Happiness?.

In a hierarchy of needs happiness is missing

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is an intriguing construct. It attempts to capture the nature of human endeavor in the form of a ladder, arranged according to different types of pursuit, reflected by levels. The theory is that the drive for a higher tier of need only exists once the preceding level has been fulfilled. Thus it is only when the most basic survival needs of food, water and air are achieved that an individual is focused on safety needs.


There are two elements worthy of note:

!. It suggests that the drive for better and 'improving one's lot' is fundamental to human nature. This might suggest that our species is destined never to be happy, with an ever-higher level always calling and always our pursuit. OFT's dear friend Mihaly weighs in appropriately and dissents on the matter:

"This paradox if rising expectations suggests that improving the quality of life might be an insurmountable task. In fact, there is no insurmountable problem in our desire to escalate our goals as long as we enjoy the struggle along the way. The problem arises when people become so fixated of what they are trying to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens they forfeit their chance of contentment,"

2. Where does happiness fit into all this? Given how basic Maslow's ladder of needs appears to be to people's orientation and how they direct their energy, the lack of happiness explains a lot. After all, evidence suggests - as noted in this blog only yesterday - that rising material affluence does not increase happiness, and several poorer, developing countries report a higher average happiness despite lacking further progress up Maslow's hierarachy.

OFD would be intrigued indeed to hear people's thoughts on what form a hierarchy of happiness takes and how it aligns with Maslow's forerunner.

Happiness from flaming lips

"I believe this is something all of us can do: Try to be happy within the context of the life we are actually living. Happiness is not a situation to be longed for or a convergence of lucky happenstance. Through the power of our own minds, we can help ourselves. This I believe."

Check out this endearing account about Creating our own happiness and the possibility of it being within reach of ordinary people when one brings the right understanding and focus. It's courtesy of Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips and NPR's terrific I believe series

Happiness everwhere

A OFD colleague commented here in an ealier posting that raised awareness is often accompanied by a dramatic increase in the frequency of its obervation.

His last post on happeness has had a similarly infectious effect on me, one of which was while watching The Life of David Gage starring Kevin Spacey in which he delivers a stirring perspective that treads on the same turf as the last blog:

...about outer-directed fulfillment

"Fantasy has to be unrealistic because the second you get what you no longer seek you don't - you can't - want it anymore. In order to continue to exist, desire must have its objects perpetually absent, or out of reach. It's not the 'IT' you want, it's the fantasty of the 'IT'"


..about chasing wants and what happinesses truly lies

"Living by your wants will never make you happy. What it means to be fully human is to strive to live by ideas and ideals, not to measure your life by what you've attained in terms of desires but by those small moments of integrity, compassion, rationality, even self-sacrifice. The only way we can measure the signifiance of our own life is by valuing the lives of others"

Life, liberty...but the other pursuit continues to elude us

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his highly engaging book Flow comes to a powerful conclusion. While it is a part of human nature to seek happiness, the reason why we are no closer to attaining it than Aristotle was in his day is that we are looking for it in the wrong place.

His basic thesis is that happiness is an inner-engineered not externally dependent experience. Success depends on the control of consciousness - not the variety of circumstances in the external, physical world.

It is precisely why people are able to reach the state of happiness despite being in situations in which outer conditions are - objectively speaking - difficult or threatening. He gives accounts from interviews with people from third world countries as well as incarcerated in concentration camps, in which remarkably some individuals described moments of serenity and deep inner calm, peace and more than well-being, profound happiness.

A casual stroll through that list of adjectives brings to OFD's mind one activity in particular: yoga. It is the act of yoking mind and body, but most importantly its intrinsic value is in bringing control and order to consciousness, to clear and focus the mind, the inner reality.

It leads us to a hypothesis which we shall venture out to explore. Whether people who participate in yoga regularly are any closer to happiness than other people.

That sound was the tent being unzipped. We're stepped forth into the wilderness, clip boards and interviewing questions at hand and ready to explore the realm of happiness amidst the populous.

We shall report back.

Comfort - Part Two

Once one starts rummaging around for things in the fridge one finds more than one expected. The same is true of heightened awareness of an issue, idea, pattern or a word: it starts cropping up with startling frequency.

So it was a discovery -- but not a surprise -- that the issue of 'comfort'(and discomfort), a topic OFD broached a couple of days ago here suddenly started appearing, one connected to a famous Danish filmmaker and the other to a University of Chicago Psychologist.

Escaping the clutches of comfort is what Susanne Bier seems intent on doing. "I have got this fear of becoming comfortable" she says, carefully pronouncing all four syllables and letting her face, her tone and her body language convey complete distaste.

It does not seem a purposeless focus or restlessness, rather she seems keenly aware that for her it represents losing a vital edge and clarity she brings to her works, among them Open hearts (2002) Brothers (2005) and After the Wedding (2007) the last having received an Oscar nomination.


The other context in which comfort came up is an academic study of the pursuit of happiness. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly in a great read Flow suggests the underlying function of a variety of pieces of cultural machinery - religion, philosophies, arts, rules of social classes, and comforts - help shield our minds from the tyranny of chaos and, as he puts it "help us believe that we are in control of what is happening and give reasons for being satisfied with out lot."

So there we have it. The pursuit of comfort is an illusion, a device to make us feel connected and secure in an uncertain world and fend of the ontological wolves of anxiety from the door.*


Post script
*This is a turn of phrase not an anthropomorphic reference.