What the world says should make you happy

A recent episode of Hidden Brain on NPR discussed the problem of the way we are living our lives when that conflicts with our deepest values. How can we live our most authentic lives? Host Shankar Vedantam talked this over with University of Missouri, psychologist Ken Sheldon, who studies how to pursue how to make yourself happy. Sheldon experienced first hand the problem of trying a job and field of study and still not know what he wanted to do. And while he was flailing others expected him to start using his college degree. He eventually studied psychology and a professor helped him realize the hard question “wasn’t figuring out how to get where you were going, it was in figuring out where you wanted to go.” We often select the wrong goals, goals that don’t lead to lasting happiness. People don’t understand what makes them happy. We listen to voices that tell us what we should want. This is why the episode is interesting to me: Those voices tell us that money, power, and status are what indicate a successful life. These voices are frequent and insistent. We encounter them most frequently in advertising urging us to buy stuff and this stuff will bestow status. So we have a tendency to give it a try. The second loudest voices are parents with assists from teachers and friends. But even parents may not understand what makes us happy. Parents can also push the status message that their child should become a doctor. They think pushing that is the way to love their child. Sheldon worked with Lawrence Krieger, law professor at Florida State University who wanted to understand why some of his best students burned out. They found the students with the highest grades in the first year of law school were given the highest status. Student efforts shifted from earning good grades to maintaining their high status. Their motivation shifted from idealism to self-centeredness. Vedantam said:

Here was a set of ideas to explain why people found it hard, why Ken himself had found it hard, to figure out what to do with his life. By the time a person is in their early 20s and is making important decisions about careers and relationships, they've had a good two decades of indoctrination. Indoctrination from the culture which tells them what's worth striving for and what is not. Indoctrination from parents and well-wishers who have told them what is high status and what is not. And indoctrination from schools that often take passion and enthusiasm for a subject and turn it into a race for grades, certificates, and academic honors. The irony is the better one does at each stage, the harder it becomes to ask if you are actually doing what it is you want to do. Soon, the systems of carrots and sticks that guides us through adolescence and youth is now driving us through our careers. In one study of 6,000 practicing lawyers, Ken found that many of these professionals prioritize things that the world had decided should make them happy, often at the expense of things that actually made them happy.

The world was telling them what would make them happy is money, power, and status. Saying that in a way I’ve used many times in this blog, they’re told what makes them happy is a high place in the social hierarchy. Sheldon said about the studies he did:

We were looking at everything about lawyers that we could think of that might affect their wellbeing, that most people would think are most important. Like, how much money do they make? How high status is their job or did they make partner? But we also included these more psychological variables that we thought would be more important. Like, do they enjoy and believe in what they're doing? Do they feel like they're making a contribution to the world in what they're doing? What we found was that yes, in fact income correlated with happiness, but it was a pretty small effect, a surprisingly small effect. A much larger effect was their motivation for doing the job. Was it something they wanted to do, they believed in it, they felt like they were contributing to the world by doing it? And that was a much larger determinant of how happy a person they were.

They talk about intrinsic motivation, doing something is its own reward. It comes from the inside. That’s different from extrinsic motivation, doing something one doesn’t like because of what one gets from doing it, the reward. It comes from the outside. Alas, intrinsic motivation is fragile. Adding external rewards to intrinsic motivation can destroy it. You may like puzzles – until someone pays you to solve them. Intrinsic motivation is spoiled when a child is paid for grades, given a bump in allowance to take piano lessons, or given a scholarship to play a sport. When intrinsic motivation is destroyed, it can stay destroyed for decades. Sheldon says that scholarship can ruin the love of a sport because the player feels forced to perform to keep the scholarship. They feel controlled. They felt criticized when they had a bad day. Figuring out what we want to do can be hard because our minds hold limited information, and much of that is people telling us what we should be doing. What we need to consult is in the unconscious. And, no, the unconscious is not just the Freudian “nasty stuff.” The goal is to align the conscious and unconscious. To do that Sheldon looked at creativity (his dissertation project). Start by asking yourself a question to which you don’t know the answer. Then think of something else. After a time of incubation you get an inspiration. This may, and may not, be the answer to the question posed. I’ve done this kind of thing when working on a music composition. To help understand what one wants to do with their life the questions to ask can be, “Why am I unhappy? What do I really want?” It is consciously posing the questions that helps the unconscious to relay a solution. Then the solution must be tested. Many of us have spent a lifetime suppressing these subtle thoughts. Mindfulness meditation can help access those thoughts, though it also helps to shut up and listen. Few of us actually ask ourselves the important questions. Once we ask, we don’t listen to what the unconscious says or don’t verify it or don’t act on it. Sheldon noted once we’ve made a choice to act, we no longer question the decision. Now we make plans. Vedantam added we also amass evidence to support the conclusion we’ve made. But if we feel dissonance we should go back to the deliberation point. When achieving a goal is hard and can take a long time, such as hiking the 2600 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, intrinsic motivation can wane. It can be replaced by equally positive identified motivation. This is when something is meaningful and expresses our values. We believe in the journey. Sheldon concluded:

We are self programming organisms. We are creating our lives via our choices, but we are not taught how to do it well. Not taught how to ask ourselves the questions that will get us the answers that we need.