Newspaper Article

The secret of happiness is a well-kept secret

HALICKS, RICHARD

2005

Overview

A. Well, exactly. It's a real revelation to be able to work through these things. You start with Plato and Aristotle, and if you've looked at those books any, you'll know that happiness is a central concern in Greek philosophy. In book after book, it just seemed to jump off the page. This was in the 1990s --- the Roaring Nineties, I like to call them --- when thought about happiness seemed to be everywhere. Clinique, the cosmetics company, came out with a perfume sometime around then named Happy. You literally spray it on yourself. Happiness just seemed to be everywhere in the public media --- the sort of thing where you walk into a bookstore and go to the self-help section and there's just thousands of books there. And so I thought, wow, this would be a really interesting subject to look at historically, which is the way I like to come at things. It became apparent very quickly that everyone's looking for happiness in one way or another. It's a subject that's of interest not just to scholars and fellow professionals but to my parents, my friends, and, you know, ordinary folks. A. Yeah, happiness in a pill, or happiness in our genes. The [study of genetics led to] a whole type of thinking that our capacity for pleasure, joy, positive affect, subjective well-being, is genetically determined and that there's maybe not a whole lot we can do about it. Most people would agree now that one's genetic makeup has a lot to do with how we feel. If that's the case, and we live in a culture in which good feeling, positive outlook is thought of so highly, it raises the question immediately, will people accept the limitations of the genetic lottery, will they accept the limitations of their genes? My feeling is no, they won't. I think the drug companies --- and I always joke about this because my wife works in that industry --- they have a very clear interest in fulfilling a demand but also in nurturing it as well. What I think is slightly disturbing here is that, in the same way that we can't define what happiness is, it's impossible to say what normal happiness would be. Everyone's always feeling dissatisfied in some way and it's pretty easy to open a magazine and see smiling people and think, hmm, maybe I'm really not as happy as I should be. Maybe I got screwed at birth genetically or maybe I could just give myself a little lift. I don't mean to make light of this --- I'm somebody who understands the hell of mental illness and how liberating some of the drugs, the SSRIs and so forth, can be for people. The danger is when you cross the line from therapy to a kind of lifestyle enhancement. I don't think that line is by any means clear and is probably becoming less so. A. I have this line in my preface and I often joke that, when I first started this project, and I got a sense of how big it was going to be and how much work it was going to take, I started to feel the pain and figured out that writing a book on happiness was a way to make yourself miserable. But you work through that. I liken writing a book to long-distance running. There's a lot of grunting and sweating and pain. But then there are these highs. In some ways I think that's a good metaphor for the pursuit of happiness as well. Anything that we care about in life --- I always tell this to students, because they get this. I say, look, you think of happiness as something you should have all the time. But you wouldn't go out and think I'm going to be a great tennis player, I'm going to be a great football player, or whatever it is, without doing a lot of work. All you athletes in the room --- 'cause in Florida there're a lot of athletes --- know that there's an incredible amount of sacrifice and suffering that go into achieving that end. Well, happiness is the same way, I think. Finding one's peace with the world is an ongoing project that's at times painful.

• Publisher: Atlanta Journal Constitution, LLC
• Subject: Books-titles / Happiness / Happiness: A History / McMahon, Darrin M