The Quest For Happiness

To the modern eye, the Mona Lisa’s hint of a smile is the picture of subtlety. She is pleased with something, yet she’s no poster child for laugh-out-loud happiness.

At the time the portrait was painted, however, that same smile was seen as a shocking explosion of emotion. Until then, a true smile was rarely seen in paintings.

“The next time you go to (New York’s Metropolitan Museum), look around. The only people in paintings who are smiling are those known to be blessed,” said Darrin McMahon, author of “Happiness – A History.” (That meant only saints and the Virgin Mary.)

We assume we know happiness when we see it – yet its definition has varied greatly during different eras of human history. What the ancient Greeks viewed as the result of a rare good luck, later Christianity saw as a sign of godly approval.

Now, of course, people assume it’s an entitlement – and those who fail to achieve it blame themselves or their chosen medications.

“Happiness is now a burden, a modern pressure we put on people. I think it’s incredibly liberating to be told that it’s OK not to be happy. Most of humanity hasn’t been,” said McMahon. “Unhappiness was built into the natural fiber of life. That sounds grim, but it freed you up to grab the moment when something good happened.”

There have been rises and dips in the level of human happiness through the centuries. For example, Londoners who endured the Great Plague one year only to see a great fire destroy their city the next could be forgiven for being a bit deflated.

By contrast, folks were pretty darned pleased with themselves during the Age of Enlightenment, having unlocked the mysteries of everything from electricity to gravity.

Happy times don’t make a big splash, though. As the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it, “The periods of happiness … are the blank pages of history.” In other words, history books are filled with the bad stuff because that tends to be more memorable.

(This is just as true for individuals. No one says, “Remember the Christmas nobody got food poisoning?”)

What has really changed – forever – has been our understanding of what brings about happiness.

Earlier centuries assumed a certain amount of unhappiness would come your way: Your crops would fail, disease would randomly strike one of your children, or marauding armies would ravage your village.

“Call no man happy until he is dead,” observed Herodotus, the Greek historian.

By contrast, happiness in modern America is obvious: a yellow smiley face, or a belly laugh. It is an individual goal – and people who can’t achieve it are deemed failures.

In ancient civilization, being happy was the same as being lucky, said McMahon. Given life’s daunting journey through floods, fires, pox and pestilence, only a lucky person would even have a shot at happiness. (In many languages, he noted, older words for “happiness” have their roots in the word for “luck” or “chance.”)

Consider Aristotle’s required ingredients for happiness: “Good birth, plenty of friends, good friends, wealth, good children, plenty of children, a happy old age, also such bodily excellences as health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers, together with fame, honor, good luck and virtue.”

Whew!

Needless to say, that put a lot of folks out of the running: slaves, the poor, the sick, the ugly, the short and the clumsy.

“The happy are ‘the happy few’ – that’s Aristotle’s phrase that Shakespeare took,” McMahon said.

After the introduction of Christianity, happiness again was redefined. Now, it came in its purest form only in the afterlife, and only to the virtuous. John Calvin – the guy who said our fates were predetermined – saw happiness as an outward sign of God’s grace. Martin Luther said, “All sadness is from Satan,” and told others his goal was to “seek and accept joy wherever I can find it.”

While the theologians argued about how to achieve happiness in the next life, happiness in this life was another matter.

On his visit to America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was puzzled by the broad unhappiness he encountered: “so many lucky men restless in the midst of abundance.” He chalked it up to the country’s equality, which meant that bounty was up for grabs. The lower classes now dared to yearn for it, while the rich feared losing it.

Both were unhappy.

Since then our quest for happiness has taken us to either the therapist’s couch or the pharmacy – or both. And while many sources of unhappiness have been removed from our lives, evolutionary psychologists believe we may be doomed to trudge along on something called a “hedonic treadmill.” No sooner do we acquire something that makes humanity happier – from indoor plumbing to epidurals – than we take it for granted and find something new to complain about. Two steps forward on the treadmill, then a silent slip backward.

“You can’t imagine life without a cell phone,” McMahon says. “But you didn’t miss it when you didn’t have one.”