Means to Happiness

The Jakarta Post
Features - March 18, 2007
Published as "Find challenges in our everyday lives, seeking happiness"

Kayee Man & Dewi Susanti, Contributors, Jakarta

While most countries are concerned with their Gross National Product (GNP), Bhutan measures its Gross National Happiness (GNH). To our amusement, The Economist (Dec. 23, 2006) reported that David Cameron (leader of the British Conservative Party) "has espoused the notion of 'general well-being' (GWB) as an alternative to the more traditional GDP".

Happiness obviously is important to us humans. At the beginning of new years and new lives, on birthdays, weddings and anniversaries, we often receive greetings for more happiness to come. But what does happiness mean exactly?

There are many approaches we've seen people take to achieve a happier life: the years off from a stressful career to find oneself, the total switch of careers to be oneself, the turn to philanthropy in one's later years or dedication to community service.

In our younger years, we may think happiness is freedom and being liberated from the strangleholds of family and obligations. In the beginning of our working lives, we may think that happiness is money and our social status.

It is common in the middle or later years for one to seek the route of inner peace to happiness. Does happiness mean different things at different times in one's life? Probably.

So is it possible to find enduring happiness? According to a Sunday Times article titled, "So what do you have to do to find happiness?" (www.timesonline.co.uk), "... [our] brains are designed to crave but never really achieve lasting happiness".

However, there is good news in store. The same article reported that some psychologists are convinced that we can train ourselves to be happier.

The treatments are aimed at "boosting positive emotion about the past, by teaching people to savor the present, and by increasing the amount of engagement and meaning in their lives".

Although what makes us happy may be different, the state of being happy can be characterized by feelings (joy, pleasure, etc.) or a judgment about life in general (life satisfaction).

When we think of the feelings of joy and pleasure, we might make immediate associations with leisure, money, loved ones. Yet how many of us would associate work with happiness?

The Economist went on to report that folks in affluent countries have not gotten happier despite getting richer. So more money doesn't necessarily make us happier.

Research shows that people who make windfalls from lotteries eventually return to the world of work. What about less work? According to the same article, "it is not self evident that less work would mean more happiness" either. And indeed, we can get fairly bored if we are idle for too long.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a prominent psychologist studying the topics of happiness, well-being and creativity, gave us another perspective on happiness with his theory of flow.

Flow experiences are the time when you feel so absorbed in an activity (leisure or work) that you lose track of time, when you feel you are in your own universe and when nothing else but what you are working on can penetrate your mind.

Specifically, flow experiences occur when "what we feel, what we wish, and what we think are in harmony". We feel happy after the experience of a flow activity, because we enjoy the fruits of the experience.

According to Csikszentmihalyi, flow occurs when a person faces a clear set of goals that require appropriate responses, receive immediate feedback on performance, and when a person's skills are fully involved in overcoming a challenge that is just about manageable. Too difficult and the experience will be frustrating, too easy and the experience becomes boring and un-engaging.

Activities that induce flow are therefore a "just right" challenge matched with the demand for a "just right" level of skills for the challenge. Flow experiences become learning experiences because we are "stretching" ourselves during them.

How do we find flow? Csikszentmihalyi wrote that people generally reported "flow" when engaged in a favorite activity, be it listening to music, gardening, bowling, cooking a good meal, talking to friends, driving and even working.

Passive activities such as watching television rarely induce the experience of "flow" because they do not demand a set of high challenge skills nor is the activity itself challenging.

Csikszentmihalyi suggested that the first step in improving one's quality of life was to structure one's day and activities so that one was engaged in flow activities as much as possible.

He went on to say that creative people especially were good at doing this, at engineering "what they do, when and with whom" in order to do their best work.

Kayee was enlightened one day to hear that in response to the question "why do we work?", one 7-year-old child's answer stood out. The little girl had piped up that the reason people worked was "because we enjoy what we do".

Once, during a workshop, when asked what she would be doing if she was given the opportunity to take a break from her work to play, Kayee was stumped. She couldn't think of an activity on the opposite end of the pleasure continuum to her work, because work to her was pleasurable.

Likewise with Dewi. Call her any time during her days off from work and ask her what she's doing, and the likely answer is that she's "working" on this or that. At the end of last year, Dewi spent three weeks of vacation from her usual work to conduct another research work in Bangkok, while exploring the city.

Some of you may think we don't have a life. But what appears to be "work" to some people just doesn't feel like work to us. We include thinking, researching, reading, communicating, playing around with ideas, among other things, to be our work. We moan and groan about certain aspects of our work, yet we constantly seek more work because we both dislike the feeling of "stagnation".

There are many activities at work that we would rather do without, but there are also challenging projects that keep us in "flow" during many of our official working hours. We don't wait for the projects to come to us, we seek them, we sell the ideas to our bosses and we find opportunities to engage in "flow".

Some of us may not be as fortunate to carve out our own projects at work. If such opportunities do not exist at work, we can seek flow from our leisure activities. The most fortunate of us all may not even see the distinction between work and leisure or work and play.

Perhaps we can illustrate this with a very famous example: Albert Einstein. After graduating from the Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein was unable to get the teaching job that he desired.

As a result, Einstein spent the first part of his professional career working in a patent office. He satisfied his own scientific curiosity by meeting close friends with the same interests outside of work.

Together, they read, discussed and tested out ideas with one another. We may think that Einstein would not have enjoyed this period of his life. However, Howard Gardner wrote in his book Creating Minds that Einstein "often recalled this period, when he could concentrate totally on his work, as the happiest in his life".

Thus, we can seek and find happiness throughout our lifespan with one "secret" uncovered by Csikszentmihalyi: find challenges in our everyday lives to work on.