Being Happy In Your Life And Being Happy With Your Life
Researchers who study happiness—or “subjective well-being,” as they call it—have long distinguished between two kinds of happiness. “Even the earliest social scientists,” the cognitive scientist Dr. Laurie Santos (a professor at Yale University and a leading researcher on happiness and fulfillment) explained, “divided subjective well-being into these two parts. There’s the emotional part: how you feel in your day-to-day life. And then there’s the cognitive part: how you think about your life, how you think your life is going.” Or more simply: “there’s being happy in your life, and there’s being happy with your life—that basic dichotomy has been there since the very beginning of folks studying happiness scientifically.”
Being happy in your life and being happy with your life—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
A Strategy No One Plans To Pursue
In the late 1990s, one of the biggest, most successful businesses in the world was a company called Lucent. They made the technology that phone companies like AT&T used to run their networks—the switches, fiber, chips, and other hardware that connected calls. Then an upstart company called Cisco came along making routers built for the Internet that eventually displaced that older technology “and ultimately killed Lucent,” said Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard professor best known for developing the theory of “disruptive innovation,” which explains why successful companies are so often taken out by smaller competitors. When Christensen and his team looked at what had happened to Lucent, he recalled, “We asked ourselves, I wonder who decided at Lucent that they should go out and get killed? And when was the date on which they decided they would get killed?” The answer, of course, was that no one had decided on that outcome. Instead, they were doing what Christensen found successful companies tend to do: putting more of their resources into products and projects with the clearest near-term returns rather than ones that might not pay off for ten or twenty years. “When summed up,” Christensen said, one short-term decision after another “sums up to disaster.” “Well,” Christensen continued, “when I go back to my Harvard Business School reunions,” he would see the same pattern. At the five-year reunion, “Man, everybody was happy.” They were married, doing well in their careers, starting families. But at the ten-, fifteen-, twenty-, and twenty-five-year reunions, “Oh my gosh, my friends were coming back not happy with their lives.” Many had made lots of money and built impressive careers, but were divorced, estranged from their children, and unhappy with where their lives had ended up. And just like none of those employees had intended for Lucent to end up where it did, “I guarantee that none of my classmates ever planned when they graduated from the business school to go out and get divorced and have children who hate their guts. And yet, a very large portion of my classmates actually implemented a strategy that they never planned to do.” It was a strategy driven by “the very same mechanism” that his theory of disruptive innovation described in business: a series of short-term choices summing up to disaster. We tend to put more time and energy into whatever seems to offer “the most immediate evidence” of a payoff or return. But the things that tend to ultimately sum up to being happy both in and with our lives are things that “don’t pay off for a very long time,” Christensen said. “As a consequence, the way we invest our time and energy and talents can cause us to implement a strategy that we wouldn’t at all plan to pursue.”
Micro- And Macro-Contentedness
In his twenties, Tim Urban had a great job. He liked the work, he liked the people he worked with, and he liked getting to have the weekends totally off. But since he was a kid, he had wanted to do something creative. “I wanted to make stuff,” he said. “And I wanted to connect with people through stuff I was making.” So although he was happy in his life, he wasn’t happy with his life. Or as he put it, “I was micro-content and macro-miserable.” Eventually, he started the wildly popular blog Wait But Why. “Now,” he said, “I’m making stuff and I’m connecting with lots of people with what I make—that’s all I wanted. I have it. In a macro sense, I have no complaints.” But “in a micro sense, like on a typical Tuesday,” there were all sorts of struggles and frustrations: the writing rarely came easy, progress was hard to see, there were no coworkers, none of the structure of an office, no clear end to the workday or workweek. He was now happy with his life, but not always happy in it. “But if I have to choose one of the other,” he said, “I will take macro-contentedness over the micro because I think it’s a little easier to work on and improve the micro.” He started creating more structure around his work, clearer boundaries around when the workday ended, more visible markers of progress, and more ways to make the work more collaborative. And those micro changes have summed up to “having more good Tuesdays.”
Get To Boring First
In 2012, after a little over two years of marriage, the musician Ben Gibbard and his wife divorced. When asked when things started to go wrong, Gibbard couldn’t point to a specific moment or event. It wasn’t a sudden falling out. “It was very, very exciting,” Gibbard recalled about the early days of their relationship. At the time, both of their careers were taking off, and their lives were filled with the thrill of fame, fortune, and everything that came with it. When their two worlds collided, the excitement doubled. “And we didn’t do what I think everyone needs to do: you need to get to boring,” Gibbard said. “I wouldn’t call anything in our life together a mistake, but if there was one thing that would have been good to do, it would have been to get to boring first. Get to boring, and then determine if you’re truly compatible.”
The Good Life Ratio
Shortly before running in the 2016 Summer Olympics, Alexi Pappas had a terrible training session in which she was well off the pace she expected herself to hit. The timing of her poor performance scared her—with the Olympics coming up, she thought the slow workout meant she’d be slow at the Olympics. “No,” her coach told her. “It’s the rule of thirds.” “What’s the rule of thirds?” Pappas asked. “When you’re chasing a big goal,” her coach told her, “you’re supposed to feel good a third of the time, okay a third of the time, and crappy a third of the time. If the ratio is off and you feel good all the time, then you’re not pushing yourself enough. Likewise, if you feel bad all the time, then you might be fatigued and need to dial things back.” (The ratio wasn’t off: at those 2016 Summer Olympics, Pappas set the national record in the 10,000 meters). This struck me as a useful way to assess a life, too: a certain number of bad days is normal, but if they badly outnumber the good days, that lopsided ratio may be telling you something.
The Overall Character Of Our Lives
In The Timeless Way of Building, the architect Christopher Alexander wrote, “Of course, some events happen once in a lifetime; others happen more often; and some happen very often indeed. But although it is true that a unique event can sometimes change our lives completely, or leave its mark on us…by and large, the overall character of our lives is given by those events which keep on recurring over and over again.”