The happiness myth Why what we think is right is wrong : a history of what really makes us happy

SO far as I know, Attila the Hun had nothing to say on the subject of happiness. In this, he appears to be unique among notable (and not so notable) figures from antiquity on down to the present day. He's absent from those lists of quotable happiness quotes that litter self-help books and the Web, and he isn't among the many dozens of sources cited - from Ecclesiastes to Thomas Jefferson to Willy Wonka - in Jennifer Michael Hecht's new book, "The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong." Hecht takes a historical approach to a topic by now as thoroughly fetishized as that of God (whom she wrote about in her 2003 study, "Doubt: A History"), in an effort to prove that "the basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are nonsense." What you think you should do to be happy, like getting fitter and thinner, is part of a "cultural code" - "an unscientific web of symbolic cultural fantasies" - and once you realize this, you will perhaps feel a little more free to be a lot more happy. Exposing the half-baked fads of the present by illuminating the even less baked ones of the past can be a lot of fun, and Hecht, a historian and poet, entertains us with some classics. ("Fletcherizing" - pulverizing your food with lots and lots of chewing - was thought by the 19th-century American health reformer who invented it to "calm you down and make you happy," while eating cereals could liberate you from your desire for meat and sex.) She also uses the past to suggest we might be overlooking important happiness-producing activities of the present, like going to the mall, joining in mass hysteria over dead princesses or dressing up for costume parties. Every culture provides its daily dose of dubious imperatives, and negotiating them is a full-time job that can be dangerous if you choose the wrong mores to spurn. Yet even as she condemns the "myths" of modern culture, Hecht seems also to want us to embrace them - or some of them anyway. "Maybe we can stop feeling so conflicted about shallow American culture," she advises in her concluding chapter, "and recognize that we are lucky to have something shallow to share." So which shallow bits are we lucky to share? Which should we reject? And why? This book is an unreliable guide. Take the chapters on money, that stuff we're told can't buy us happiness. Hecht rightly points out that no one really believes this, that of course money can buy at least some happiness (and up to the poverty line, it can buy a lot). But spending money at the mall as a replacement for those supposedly precious 19th-century Tocquevillian associations we lost? "Drive into the medium-sized cities in this country on a weekend," Hecht writes, "and you see deserted streets. The people are not all at home watching television. Go to the mall, and you find everyone." (Everyone? How does she know this? From that Saturday in Muncie knocking on doors?) As our "central public pleasure," she contends, shopping allows us to "communicate with each other in the symbolic associational meanings of our ever shifting wardrobes and possessions." Then there are our obsessions with certain dead or missing women and girls - Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, Princess Diana. Such orgies of public fascination are, Hecht says, "helping us do our psychological work" in just the way women in ancient Greece used the Demeter myth in festivals to help them cope with grief and worry: "People show their mutual grief because they have mutual grief; they show it in these eruptions when there are insufficient ways to show it scheduled into the regular calendar." Which of our cultural compulsions are portrayed positively (news vigils, shopping) and which are not (exercise) seems arbitrary. The modern "cult of the body" with its "drudgery going nowhere" in the form of the treadmill, Hecht writes, "keeps people too busy for rebellion." But can't the same be said of all that shopping and watching 24-hour Diana coverage? The reader of both "The Happiness Myth" and "Doubt" is left with another nagging concern. Not only are many of the same sources used in both - perhaps understandable, given Hecht's historical focus - but often the same quotations. There, they illuminated the progression of religious doubt, here they illuminate that of happiness. This is surely one of the perils of histories of this sort - the scavengerwriter can pick through Plato and Aristotle, Montaigne and Hume, Willy Wonka and the script for "Moonstruck" in search of insights on doubt and happiness, boredom and anger, ankle boots versus sandals, but risks losing any narrative thread to ad hockery. Hecht concludes with a chapter chock-full of the kind of wholesome advice your mother might give you even if she hadn't made the link to Greek rituals, medieval carnival or Tocqueville: "Try a parade, a spa, a roller coaster. Talk to neighbors. Do something in the community and for the community. Go to a show." (The lists go on.) Or you might be better off taking the advice of that great barbarian, Attila, the king of the Huns, who famously said: " ." Feeling down? Try shopping, joining in mass hysteria over dead princesses or dressing up for a costume party. Alison McCulloch is a former editor at the Book Review.

The Happiness Myth The Historical Antidote to What Isn't Working Today Chapter One Know Yourself Know yourself. This is the key to all philosophy, the center of all wisdom, the one thing that decides if you are the actor in a tragedy or a comedy. This chapter points out three major interpretations of this singular injunction. The first is the Socratic, and it has to do with knowing what you believe. The second is Freudian and has to do with knowing who you are. The third is lonely and has to do with training yourself to take your intellect as your own companion. In the Apology , Plato has Socrates explain that the only happiness is figuring out what real virtue is, and enacting it. People who behave badly may seem happy, but they are not, no matter how rich they get, and people who act with virtue are certain to come into happiness and, very likely, come into money as well. As he put it: "I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or properties, but first and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private." Coming to know yourself and re-creating how you experience the world is a more efficient way to get comfortable than directly altering the world. An angry person on the subway scowls and pushes, other people scowl and push in response, and quarrels ensue; a smiling person offers seats, takes inconveniences with patience, offers to share cabs, and has merry encounters. The angry person has no idea how much his or her anger colors the way other people act. A sunny disposition is no guarantee they won't steal your wallet, but some of what we don't really know about ourselves gets bounced back from the world and radically conditions how we see things. The Socratic claim that the unexamined life is not worth living is so commonplace that we forget how harsh it is. Vicious even. Think of all the good, sweet fools you know! Isn't it possible to be a decent, gentle, productive person without a jot of philosophy or self-examination? The Socratic answer is resolutely no; the examination of oneself and one's manner of living is the only good life and only cause of happiness. The happiness thus achieved cannot be stolen away by any means. Given the pitiless vagaries of life, the internal nature of philosophical happiness is one of its big selling points. Socrates insisted that we ask ourselves how we know what we believe. You like democracy, monogamy, American food, sleeping at night, children raised in families, longevity as a life-defining goal. You like a woman of five foot ten to weigh about a hundred forty pounds. Set a goal of convincing yourself of something you oppose. Pick a hot-button subject, and a reward for yourself if you can shake your own faith in your convictions. I have strong political convictions, but I'm not rallying for them right now. I'm suggesting you pull a Socratic trick on yourself and ask yourself all the questions you usually avoid thinking about. If the thought is unbearable, it tells us something about the way we believe, and think, and live. We live in little cognitive comas. Or rather, we cavort in cognitive fields surrounded by electric fences: we all think we are free to go where we wish, but we are struck by a lot of pain when we try to think past our boundaries. Politics are real, but the odds are that if you had been raised in a different U.S. state (let alone China!), you would be not the Democrat or Republican that you are now, but instead a Republican or Democrat. Even though those people make your blood boil. Odds are odds. If you want to know yourself, you are going to have to rough yourself up a little. Socrates and Plato both held that this kind of ruthless thinking makes you happy in the process. When Plato does imagine an arrival, a coming to the most profound knowledge, it is blissful. But most of the time this is all about happiness as a process, as an effort. Note that philosophy is unlikely to be effective if you just read it. Socrates so believed that philosophy required conversation with others that he did not write any books, and when Plato recorded Socratic thought, he did so in the form of dialog. Many of the great Socratic dialogs took place at social events; the title of Plato's Symposium means "the drinking party," and that is where it is set. In a sense that book is one of the most idealistic visions ever crafted, and it took place amid food, copious wine, and modest revelry. How do you do philosophy? Discuss it with others, write about it, get locked away with it. The last is the least effective, but it cannot be entirely rejected, because it does work for some people, some of the time. The essence of the philosophical experience, the active verb of doing philosophy, is unlearning what you think you know. And it is much easier to find out what your deep assumptions are if there is someone else there to help you discover them. Alone, your best bet is to try to write what you think, and proceed with scrupulous honesty, imagining your own most skeptical self as the reader. Think of the biblical story where Jacob wrestles all night with an angel and the angel wounds him, and changes his name from Jacob (" who grasps ") to Israel (" who prevails "). Renamed, he can finally ask for his brother's pardon for stealing his birthright, and thus be reunited with him. When you come to something you can't explain, do not gloss over it; stay with it, wrestle it. Confusion is your quarry. Rejoice when you find it, bear with the pain it inflicts, and don't let it go until it gives you a new name. By the way, later, the sun, that symbol of true wisdom, heals Jacob's injury. The Happiness Myth The Historical Antidote to What Isn't Working Today . Copyright © by Jennifer Hecht. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Happiness Myth: The Historical Antidote to What Isn't Working Today by Jennifer Michael Hecht All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.