The Unpursuit of Happiness?

It is an oft-repeated, but accurate axiom that “things” are not the key to attaining happiness. For those who have traveled the third world, the smiles of men and women who live on less per year than we make in a few days deal a mighty blow to our notions of the good life and what is necessary to attain it.

We tell ourselves that keeping up with the Jones’ is a fool’s game, but our credit card statements say otherwise.  Like many truths of life it seems that those regarding happiness are often relegated to the later years, after we’ve spent ourselves into oblivion and finally decided that maybe our fathers were right, real happiness is independent of our circumstances.

These reflections came today after reading a great piece in The New York Times by Pico Iyer entitled, “The Joy of Less,” (see full article here) in which he discovers, as so many have, that the roots of happiness are often more subtle than we’d like to believe.  He writes,

“There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.” I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I’d grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn’t buy happiness, I wasn’t convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I’d noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I’d imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can’t think of a single thing I lack.

He goes on to say that the simple life isn’t always easy.  Having to travel an hour to print his latest article, or missing the N.B.A. finals tempt him to return to his previous lifestyle, but it appears the trade off has helped him live his life in the present, something I’ve struggled with for years.  It wasn’t until my daugther came along and showed me how to slow down that I recognized the waste of glossing over the present, constantly dreaming of tomorrow.  I wrote about it here and here.

Iyer goes on to question common sources of happiness, the great job, stability, recognition — the pursuit of these things do not seem to make his friends happy.  What are most of us missing when it comes to the pursuit of happiness?  He concludes,

I certainly wouldn’t recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno’s arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn’t pursued.

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