What Happens When All Situational Problems Are Off The Table?
In each season of his hit series The White Lotus, creator Mike White places people of immense wealth, privilege, and power in idyllic settings where, day by day, they grow increasingly dejected, dissatisfied, and miserable. “One of the things the show tries to get at,” White explained, “is what happens when you’re wealthy enough that you don’t have situational problems that have to do with things like money.” Situational problems are those with clear, straightforward solutions: your car breaks down, your phone screen cracks, your dog needs stitches, you suddenly decide you’d be happier living near a beach. There’s some level of wealth at which these sorts of situational problems can be largely eliminated—and if they are, White continues, “then your problems become existential. Like with the setting—if you’re in some gloomy, dystopic place, you can always say, ‘Oh, it’s my surroundings that are making me depressed.’ But if you’re unhappy in paradise, you’re forced to face the fact that it’s not the ambient nature of what’s going on around you. It’s something within you. And so, as somebody who likes to write in an existential way about the questions of happiness and fulfillment or whatever, I wanted to try to take all the situational excuses for unhappiness off the table.”
Situational versus existential problems, excuses, and struggles—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
“I’ve Never Felt Worse In My Whole Life.”
On March 7, 1987, the Beastie Boys’ album “Licensed To Ill” became the first rap album to top the music charts. The group’s lawyer called their producer Rick Rubin and asked, “You have the No. 1 album in the world—how does it feel?” After a few seconds of silence, Rubin replied, “I’ve never felt worse in my whole life.” Rubin was 23 years old when his dream of having a No. 1 album came true. Previous to that point, on and off, he experienced varying symptoms of depression. During low moments, he would think about one day achieving his dream, and that thought gave him hope. “When that happens,” he’d think, “this hole inside me—whatever it is inside me that makes me feel bad—will go away.” When the day came, when the situational excuse was taken off the table, Rubin was overwhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness because…“The thing that I’d been waiting for my whole life, the thing that was going to fill that hole inside me, had happened, and I didn’t feel any better. The hole was still there.” Many rich, award-winning, celebrated people talk about chasing money, awards, or recognition, getting it, and realizing that it didn’t feel like they thought it would. That it didn’t, as Rick said, fill the hole inside them. “Most people who are really driven to achieve something,” he explains, “are doing it because they think it’s going to satisfy something in them. Yet most worldly things tend not to be so satisfying.”
The Source Of A Lot Of Unhappiness
Sonja Lyubomirsky got her PhD in social psychology from Stanford, and on her very first day, she took a walk around campus with her adviser, Lee Ross, a world expert on conflict and negotiation. At one point, they started talking about happiness. What is the secret to happiness? Why are some people happier than others? Can it be cultivated? Can it be measured? “Now, you have to understand,” Lyubomirsky said, “this is 1989.” At the time, no scientists were studying happiness. “It was considered to be a totally unscientific, fuzzy topic to study.” But by the end of that walk with Ross, Lyubomirsky said, “I decided to study it.” Before conducting some of the earliest scientific studies on happiness, Lyubomirsky read what there was to read on the subject. “Even though there was very little scientific research on happiness at the time,” she explains, “there were lots of people talking about it—in books, magazine articles, and so on.” As she immersed herself in this material, she began to realize: “the preoccupation with our own happiness mainly exists in the Western world. It’s mostly in America, Europe, and Australia that we have the luxury to worry about our happiness. If your basic needs aren’t being met, if you’re living with a lot of uncertainty and instability,” if you’re consumed by situational problems, “you just don’t have the time in your day to be thinking, ‘Oh, am I happy? What should I do to be happier?’ I think that’s the source of a lot of unhappiness.”
You know, Nothing In Your Life Would Be Different
In the middle of shooting The Bourne Ultimatum, actor Matt Damon was briefly in talks with director James Cameron for a role in the first Avatar movie. When it quickly emerged that shooting for Avatar was to take place during the post-production stage of Bourne, Damon withdrew from consideration. “Because we always needed more work in our post-production,” Damon said. “So I needed to be around. I needed to be available to do more work in our post-production.” Years later, after Avatar had become the highest-grossing film of all time—with some of its actors earning a percentage of those record-breaking profits—Damon was lamenting to fellow actor John Krasinski about the fortune he’d missed out on. In Damon’s kitchen where the two were co-writing the screenplay for the movie Promised Land, Krasinski said, “You know, nothing in your life would be different if you’d done Avatar.” Damon realized that Krasinski was right: he was well past the point of additional money or recognition making any difference in his life. “So ultimately, it didn’t matter,” he said. “It didn’t matter. If I missed out on anything, I missed out on the chance to work with Cameron. And I hope that comes around because I would do that for free.”
A Sword Cutting Daisies
Three years after the Broadway success of his play The Glass Menagerie made him rich and famous, the playwright Tennessee Williams wrote an essay titled, The Catastrophe of Success, in 1947. “The sort of life that I had lived previous to popular success,” Williams writes, “was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.” It was a hard life, filled with situational problems: Williams worked menial jobs—as a factory worker, a theater usher, an elevator operator, and a manual laborer—making minimum wage, “which covered my [rent] and left me seven dollars for meals,” and writing stories and plays in the margins of his days. “I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed,” he writes. When the situational struggles were removed and replaced with the luxuries of lavish hotel suites, expensive restaurants, and a constant stream of people offering to do things for him—Williams found himself feeling empty and depressed. He grew distant from family and friends, distrustful of people’s motives, and disconnected from his work, resenting it for bringing him fame and fortune. Without the vital efforts that defined his earlier life, Williams writes that he came to “fully apprehend” that “the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation [a state in which basic needs are scarce or lacking] but luxury is the wolf at the door, and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to.”
In Your “Pursuit of Happiness”
“Most people in their ‘pursuit of happiness’ run after good fortune and make themselves unhappy even when it befalls them,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Human Condition. “There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of balance—[such as] great riches and an entirely effortless life—ruins the elemental happiness that comes from being alive.” From having situational and existential problems to struggle against.