Page 17 - Introducing The Gratitudes

■ Meaning Trumps Happiness
For several decades, the happiness craze has been building. Over 1000 books on happiness are released every month, including Happy Money, Happy-People- Pills For All, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners. One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including good health, a promising outcome for sure. Many studies have noted the connection between a happy mind and a healthy body – the happier we are, the better health outcomes we seem to have. Researchers breathlessly claim: “Induc- tions of well-being lead to healthy functioning, and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health.” That sounds good, we suppose.
Being happy is about feeling good. Meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. But happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. Research- ers, who looked at a large sample of people over a month-long period, found that happiness is associated with selfish “taking” behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless “giving” behavior.
“Happiness without meaning charac- terizes a relatively shallow, self-ab- sorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided,” the authors of the study wrote. “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need.” While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others or to society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, said, “Partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy.”
Happiness, on the other hand, is defined, as feeling good. People who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives – proverbially, simply there for the party – have the
same expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro- inflammatory response, which is, of course, associated with major illnesses like heart disease and various cancers. “Empty positive emotions” – like the kind we experience during manic episodes or artificially induced euphoria from alcohol and drugs are about as good for us for as adversity.
Hedonism vs virtue is the great philosophical debate, which has shaped Western civilization for over 2000 years, and untimately instructive about the nature of the good life. Does happiness lie in feeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectual descendants, the virtue ethicists, think?
It’s simple. Feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, “The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.” Jung’s wisdom certainly seems to apply to our bodies, our hearts and our minds.
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INTRODUCING THE GRATITUDES Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values
During the Middle Ages the triangular trephine instrument designed by Fabricius of Aquapendente was used for opening and entering the skull, as this 1525 engraving by Peter Treveris illustrates.