I read the article l’il dubin suggested (here). It’s largely a compilation of other stuff I’ve read, with the author’s personal slant. She (along with happiness researchers) considers New York to be a perfect storm of unhappiness-making due to the difficulty of finding community, the prevalence of singlehood, the too-many-choices for everything, and its encouragement of unsatisfiable material aspirations. I think this is a bit unfair to New York. At least from my point of view, I do not think that New York is universally isolating, and I think it is a bit naive to blame the city for the psychological failings of its most stereotypical residents.
I do find that living in New York encourages me to spend more money, and not only because things are more expensive; I also buy more clothes, pay to go to more events, eat more dinners out, and in general do more stuff. (Does money really not buy happiness? It certainly buys pleasure, and while this is different it doesn’t hurt.) For me, now, this is fine, since I have no responsibilities and little desire to throw (any more) perfectly good money into the black hole that is “saving for the future” in this economic climate, but I see how some people can get carried away. There is certainly more to buy in New York than I or most other people can afford. But isn’t aspiration - “someday, when I’m rich, I’ll shop at Gracious Home” - part of the fun?
The too-many-choices is something that I see is a problem for a lot of other people, and it certainly affects me in the form of feeling that I “should” be out appreciating New York instead of doing things like working and living my life. But I would really think that a couple years of living in the city would inure people to this issue; they would develop habits and routines for everyday - which gym to go to, which restaurants to eat at regularly, where to shop - and also metahabits for breaking the habits - like that Saturday is the day to go to a museum or explore the city, and Thursday nights you try a new restaurant. It is true that it would take decades to fully explore the multidimensional space of the city, but I do think a reasonable spanning is possible in a couple of years and without huge inconvenience. People who walk around perpetually feeling that they are just around the corner from the slightly better dinner spot and the slightly better nightclub and the slightly better boyfriend and the slightly better life are not suffering from the nefarious variety of the city; they are suffering from their own insecurities. It is not the city’s fault that so many of the people in it pride themselves on being neurotic.
Of course, I have just been complaining about New York. But while my complaints are particular to the city, or at least to cities, I do not think I would necessarily be happier if I lived somewhere else. Was I happier in Amherst? No, I don’t think so. I was miserable at times there, and content at other times. I was content because life, if I ignored certain things, was easy there. It was an easy town to navigate. I had a nice apartment, and a car, and a lot of spare time, and total freedom. I had a quiet, comfortable life of long mornings at the gym and Saturdays at the bookstore and occasional road trips to quaint New England locales. I read a lot of books and watched a lot of movies. I ran a marathon and learned to like grains with weird names. It was not a bad life, and if it hadn’t been for my terrible work situation and near-total isolation I probably would have enjoyed it very much. But I worked for a man who made no secret of hating me, had little intellectual intercourse with anyone, and felt unchallenged and discouraged; I also had very few local friends and no excitement in my life. These two issues were sometimes very hard to distract from. My life is improved now, with regards to these two issues; the work situation is better (although not because of NYC), the social situation is as well (largely because of NYC), and my life is much more interesting and exciting (entirely because of NYC). However, in New York life is not easy; there is more stress, more to worry about, more crowds and more danger and far more potential badness. I do not have time for really long workouts during the week, and the gym is always crowded; the bookstore doesn’t have enough space for sitting in; I spend a lot of time feeling like somehow the city just does not contain enough air.
So, would living somewhere else fix the problem? Maybe. I do not think Manhattan is the exact-perfect place for me to live and work, but I do not think it is the worst place. But it is also unfair to judge it at this point because over time I might get used to the negatives or stop appreciating the positives. I think the real thing I suffer from, living here, is not New York but the fact that I have just moved to New York. If I had been here since college, I would likely be very well-acclimated to the hustle, and not bothered by scary people in trains, and not afraid to take the bus at night, and would know how to get to everywhere. Also I would likely have figured out which neighborhood I wanted to live in and would have found a number of places - stores, restaurants, places to hang out - that I really liked (I do have some places I like already, but I would have more and more-suitable ones). Most noticeably, and perhaps most relevant to my happiness level, I would have a much broader and deeper local social network. I do not know how this network would accumulate, but it would; even in Amherst, I was starting to know people by the time I left. In Champaign, where I remember being happier (although perhaps I was not always so), what I remember is knowing people. It wasn’t just that I had friends but that I had a community, in part because the town was small and I had a definite place in it, and in part because I stayed there long enough to start to meet people outside my first-order niche. What I mean by this is that after a few years I didn’t just know my classmates from grad school, but also people from my book club (and a couple of the people they knew), people I had dated (and a couple of their friends), people I saw around town. Building that sort of network takes time, especially for someone like me (i.e. quiet, shy, not very social), but I think it is really important to feeling connected to life. I don’t have a network like that in New York, and I don’t think it’s something you build on purpose (although people do talk about trying to meet other people, which seems silly and fake to me); it develops organically over time. I’m pretty sure if I’d stayed in any one place for the last eight years - Champaign, or Amherst, or New York, or for that matter Prague or Boise - I’d have a fairly solid network. And I think that if all of these unhappy New York people would stay in one place for six seconds, instead of always running around looking for the coolest new this and the hottest new that and the most exciting person or place or thing as they are purported to do, they would probably find themselves growing well-connected too.
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Some people are just not very happy people. Maybe it’s a brain chemistry thing, or a long-term circumstance. Or maybe it’s just that some people have unrealistic happiness expectations. I think it can be very freeing to give oneself permission to feel bad. It is okay to have some days on which one doesn’t feel happy. Or weeks or months. It is okay to have things in one’s life one isn’t happy about. I am not saying that people should not hope or strive for improvement. But sometimes a lot of improvement comes directly from just saying, “I am not feeling good today,” or “I do not like X and have not liked it for a long time.” I think a lot of people are unhappy only partly out of being unhappy, and that the other part of unhappiness is due to concern over the fact that they are unhappy. They feel guilty for not being more happy, or like they are doing something wrong, or that they are inadequate compared to people they perceive as happier, or that it is unfair or somehow wrong that they do not feel good all the time. There is not an instruction manual for being human, so we don’t know how happy we are “supposed” to be, but there is no reason to think that any person’s particular level of happiness is wrong. Perhaps this is just me and I am not making any sense, but I find that many problems are diminished simply by acknowledging their existence. It sort of scales them down to the real imperfections they are, rather than the epic traumas they sometimes become in one’s head.
And you should own your unhappiness; it should be something you can appreciate. Some of the best art - and most of the best humor - comes from unhappiness. Why forfeit all your power to it?
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The issue of art, as well as accomplishment, frequently arising from unhappiness comes up in the article. And it begs the question of what the point of happiness is. If you were happy but unproductive and useless throughout your life, would that be better than being unhappy but truly great? If so, then perhaps happiness is not really what people want - or perhaps we are misdefining happiness. I think most people consider true happiness as having some component of satisfaction; to be optimally happy, one would be doing good work that one felt was useful. (Of course, many artists that are viewed as great in retrospect were not appreciated in their lifetimes, and/or were not satisfied with their own work.) The happiness that is most often talked about, though, is more along the lines of cheerfulness: it is having a positive sense of things, feeling good on a minute-to-minute basis. And that is important too, I think. But it seems to be sometimes the case that there can be too much of it: feeling too good leads to complacency and perhaps separation from reality; feeling too bad, on the other hand, leads to demotivation and demoralization. Perhaps an optimally happy life, in a broad sense, involves a certain amount of feeling unhappy. The question, then, is how much.
Even more than how much is when, or rather controllability. Optimal happiness, I think, must come not from the absence of negative circumstances (although that would be nice, right?) or from the absence of negative thoughts and feelings (which would be a lobotomy) but from the ability to control the negative thoughts and feelings, to entertain them to a productive extent and then to turn them off when they are no longer educational or motivating, when they are unrelated to reality or when nothing can be done about their causes, or when they are interfering with something else. The optimally happy person is not the person who never feels bad, but the person who has mastery over her bad feelings, who accepts them as information about the world and indication of her response to it, but who doesn’t allow them to proliferate, to infiltrate other areas of her thoughts, or to control her.
I am starting to sound like those cognitive science people, even though I think there are limitations to those ideas. I do not think, for example, that all unpleasant feelings result from negative thoughts and that those negative thoughts can be changed. But I do think it is true that many unpleasant feelings come about this way and are changeable this way; I also think that many of the other unpleasant feelings, that come from things that happen in the world, are important. It is the mind’s way of feeling pain; just as it would be unfortunate to have a body that could not feel pain - you’d never know when you were harming it - but also unfortunate to have a body that felt pain that did not result from a circumstance you could change, it would be unfortunate to never have bad feelings that came from outside, and I think dangerous to pretend that all bad feelings are devoid of information, analogous to putting your hand on a hot stove and insisting that the pain is the result of your nervous system generating spurious feedback.
So, really, the key is figuring out which bad feelings come from outside, and are possible and perhaps very important to address by changing one’s life in some way, and which bad feelings come from inside, and can be safely eliminated by training oneself in different habits of mind.
Perhaps, speaking of training, the analogy goes further. In one’s physical body there is good pain and bad pain. Good pain is the pain of your body slowly getting stronger, for example through a hard workout. Bad pain is the pain of your body getting hurt. Sometimes the distinction between good and bad pain is a matter of type, other times a matter of degree. But there are good and bad emotional pains too: good pain - mild loneliness or ennui or dissatisfaction or fear - often helps people grow, or is the acceptable side effect of growth, and practicing feeling this way helps people become stronger, better people, who can deal with more difficult circumstances. Bad pain, or too much pain, paralyzes people, or injures them, or screws up their lives.
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I went to the
website of one of the researchers profiled in the article; he offers many tests to help you figure out how happy you are, if you somehow don’t already know. Of course it is multiple choice and much of the time none of the responses are quite right, or even nearly right. I scored 3.13, out of five, slightly higher than the average. My score is very near the midpoint for all users, all women, all “other professionals” (they didn’t have scientist or even engineer) and within my zipcode. I am slightly happier than the average person of my age and slightly less happy than the average person with graduate education. But still I am near the middle of these groups - what I take this to mean is that either I am a very averagely happy person, or (more likely) this is not a very discriminating test.
There are other tests on the website. According the the Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire, which has two questions, I am on average happier than about 60% of people, and happier than 2/3 of people in my zip code, but when broken down into percentages I am happy less of the time than most people. This suggests that I do not answer these questions the same way as other people do. Probably because when I was thinking about how often I am happy I was imagining coming out of my apartment on the way to work, when I am generally at my least energetic. Possibly I would feel like a happier person if I ate breakfast earlier.
buy chicken and rice from cart; don't eat rice. but the rice is the good part.
