A previous essay chastised contemporary people, or so it seemed, for desiring short-term forms of happiness. Most of us, I argued, are fascinated by life’s passing moments. We want to feel ourselves on the edge of our society’s – and our own - life history, to be involved in goings-on that are exciting and new. Those experiences, sometimes centering on the most basic sensations, will not last. We know that. Indeed, transience is part of their appeal. We look forward to days marked by the ups-and-downs of sports events, stock market trading, visits to the produce section, and surprises at the shopping mall. We enjoy tittle-tattle about prominent politicians, actors, and other media figures. Tonight, our group of friends will be gathering at the usual place, where we will discuss such matters and make projections for the days ahead. In such ways, we move ourselves from moment to moment, preoccupied with the triumphs and tragedies of occasions.
Stuffily, and in the tradition of the classic philosophers, I suggested that we may be focusing too much on transient satisfactions. Furthermore, being overly conscious of our own experiences – crudely, what we “get” or do not get out of our own involvements – is problematic. Perhaps, we should emphasize instead longer-term commitments to persons other than ourselves. Perhaps satisfaction is something to be discovered rather than invented intentionally.
All that having been said, every fair-minded person knows that the activities – and experiences - of life come in many shapes and sizes. Momentary pleasures are important. So are hard-won, even grueling satisfactions. There are times to applaud the flashy and insubstantial, and times to ponder the eternal. Self-regard is not a fool’s ambition; but too much of it blinds one to deeper forms of regard.
This essay continues to explore the different meanings of happiness. As I stated in the last writing, I believe that happiness is a pattern of awareness centered on “self-in-world functioning,” when we affirm both our own standing and the worldly conditions that support that standing. Happiness is not one of the more basic emotions (like surprise or disgust) where we react to external goings-on – and declare those occurrences to be good or bad. It is a broader, and more complicated, assessment what takes into account our own role in what is occurring. Like Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, happy people (however comprised) allow themselves to say “yes” to the circumstances of their own living.
Still, there are different patterns of saying yes – and different life-conditions that we avow and disavow. In that light, one of the most important figures in positive psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has emphasized that pleasure and enjoyment are quite different matters. Pleasure, in his view, is equivalent to feelings of contentment, stability, and equilibrium. To be pleased is to have the sense that needs – or, and more complexly, desires – have been met. The pleased person basks in the moment of completion. The meaning of the event at hand now feels closed rather than open.
Pleasure also centers on the individual, how “I” (as a relatively self-contained element of the world) am doing now. By contrast, enjoyment is a pattern of engagement with that world. For such reasons, it shifts attention from the individual to the quality of relationships that are developing. Enjoyment involves a commitment to openness of meaning, to the uncertainty of what will happen next. It requires a much higher investment of energy than pleasure does. When we enjoy something we invest ourselves in it. Typically we push that event forward, both by imposing our own demands on it and by responding to what it demands of us.
Pointedly, we can be “pleased” by events that occur, and sometimes pleased with ourselves. But we cannot, at least in ordinary English usage, enjoy our own selves. We need something else, something beyond us that anchors, directs, and responds.
In what is now a famous formulation, Csikszentmihalyi claims that the pattern of deep engagement he calls “flow” is a principal source of feelings of enjoyment. In conditions of flow, people commit themselves to a situation where they are seeking to accomplish something. Under best conditions, their own skills closely match the challenges of their circumstances. Like rock climbers, surgeons, artists, shoppers, videogame players, and other groups he has studied, people in flow do not think about matters beyond the here-and-now. Indeed, they do not think of themselves as independent, functioning persons. All that matters are the demands of engagement.
Csikszentmihalyi’s view of enjoyment stresses balanced interactions. Participants are intrigued by the quality of give-and-take, the trading of equivalent gestures. I agree with most of this, but I also think that enjoyment – and happiness, as the broader assessment of a life – can be conducted on different terms, some of them less “balanced.” Let us look at four of these patterns, all different routes to happiness.
Happiness 1: Work/Pride. A first pattern of satisfaction is produced by work. When people work, they try to accomplish things, be these objects, relationships, or experiences. The process of doing – and often in this case, making – is less important than the result. Commonly, workers try to perfect their techniques, conducting activity in the most effective - and efficient - ways. Repetition is an important part of work, so is the delay of gratification. After all, the end-product – a paid bill, washed shirt, completed exercise, and so forth – is what matters.
Is happiness to be found in work? Certainly, but it is of a certain sort. Work centers on controlled processes and on belief in the individual’s ability to maintain that control. To recite my own theory here, work starts with the feeling-of-anticipation called “self-confidence.” The actual interaction features the feeling-of-exploration termed “interest” alternated with the feeling-of-restoration termed “satisfaction.” At the end of the activity one looks back with the feeling-of-remembrance termed “pride.” Failed experience, of course, produces opposite feelings. But the central theme here is that work, understood in the most basic way, keys on processes of self-direction or “mastery.” Accomplishment of that sort leads to a sort of enjoyment (“Look at what I’ve done”). But work – and pride – is only one pathway.
Happpiness 2: Play/Gratification. A second pattern of enjoyment is found in play. Unlike workers, players live in the moment. Quality of experience is more important than quality of production. Although players usually rely on skills they’ve already established, they are also highly interested in expanding those skills and in testing their implications. Players love contest, uncertainty, and novelty. As work closes and controls meaning, so play opens and dissimulates it. Play theorists – and I am one of these – like to say that play is ambiguous and even paradoxical. Players may accept frameworks of rules but they use these to focus their strategies of teasing, testing, and destabilizing. Like children building sandcastles, players create and destroy – and then repeat this process again and again.
What sort of happiness does this produce? Initially, players are oriented by “curiosity” They want to know what a particular situation has in store for them or, more accurately, what they can do in – and to - that situation. That feeling-of-anticipation is followed by the feeling-of-exploration most of us call “fun.” We enjoy being unsettled, particularly when we are active participants in that unsettlement and feel we have some control over it. Such destabilization is followed by the feeling-of-restoration called “exhilaration,” the experience of being pleasurably played or laughed out. In play, people engage and pause, engage and pause. Finally, there are the feelings-of-remembrance I call “gratification.” Looking back, we find satisfaction in having been part of a process that resulted in such an array of experiences. We did not achieve all these experiences by ourselves – instead, they arose from the interaction. But we played active roles in that. We had, or better said, “made” fun.
Happiness 3: Communitas/Blessedness. Play emphasizes people’s role as active creators of events. But in many other events, we are the receivers – or just the observers – of things that are going on around us. We feel we are “part” of these settings, but our role is often modest, even passive. Indeed, the events seem to change us more than we change them. Think about sitting in a park and watching the children play, viewing a sunset, taking a bath, or going to a ball game. Concerts, parties, fairs, and reunions offer similar experiences. At such times, we enter and inhabit settings that we do not control.
I call activities of this type “communitas.” During communal occasions, we sense the importance of otherness – other people and conditions – in our lives. Being receptive to those situations - especially when they meet or exceed our expectations for them - can be a source of great happiness. Once again, think about a loved one returning from a long journey and surprising you by their appearance. That is a satisfaction that expands, even transforms, the self.
Ideally, people enter positively envisioned situations of this type with the feeling-of-anticipation called “hope.” That feeling reflects two beliefs: that we do not control the course of what is going to happen and that the happening itself is unpredictable. Once the occasion begins, it alternates between the feeling-of-exploration we can call “delight” and the feeling-of-restoration called “joy.” Delight signifies pleasing unsettlement (if by events we do not control) and joy marks the completion and fulfillment of our hopes. Finally, there is the feeling-of remembrance called “blessedness.” Under best circumstances, we look back and feel grateful for what occurred. It was only our good fortune that caused that day in the park, ball game, rock concert, or visit from our long-absent child to turn out as well as it did. Failed communitas is extremely distressing; but successful communitas leads to a profound sort of happiness.
Happiness 4: Ritual/Reverence. The adjusting or accommodating role that people play in communitas is magnified in ritual. Rituals encourage us to surrender ourselves to the forces of otherness and to follow their prescriptions for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Sometimes, rituals involve submission to social and cultural patterns as in the examples of church services, marriage ceremonies, or everyday greeting rituals and dinnertime routines. We also have our own “personal” rituals (many only habits) that we maintain, like the practices we follow to get ready in the morning. In every case, rituals prepare the self. When we practice them, we turn ourselves over to already-established directives. Small rituals (like tooth-brushing) are just devices to free our minds for other matters. Major ones (like weddings) are willing acknowledgments that we are about to be changed and must be treated differently in the future.
The feeling-of-anticipation that marks rituals is “faith.” We believe that we can count on external people and processes to guide us. Once ritual begins, we sometimes have the feeling-of-exploration called “enchantment.” We sense that something important or wonderful is happening to us. The completion of that unsettlement involves the feeling-of-restoration called “rapture,” the awareness of being transported to a new (and higher) status. At the conclusion of this change-process, we may look back with the feeling of “reverence.” We feel grateful to have been touched, transported, and altered in this way. We acknowledge the legitimacy, even the superiority, of the powers that changed us. We feel that that we can count on the guidance of these forces in times to come.
If work centers on feelings of “mastery,” ritual emphasizes feelings of “mystery.” Once again, the guided person experiences a kind of happiness – essentially the assurance that comes from newly located vision – self-directed persons cannot manage on their own.
I am not arguing that one of these forms of happiness is superior to the others. But I do believe that the four types represent different kinds of excitements and assurances. All are valuable, if limited in their applications. The wise person does not rely on one pattern to the exclusion of the others. That lesson seems especially pertinent in societies that celebrate individual control – and thus, work and play – as the avenue to a satisfying life. None of us constructs our lives just as we like. We depend on the commitment and support of others and are nurtured by the forms of happiness those relationships provide.
References
Csikszentmihalyi, C. (1991). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row.
Henricks, T. (2105). Play and the human condition. Chicago: University of Illinois.
Henricks, T. (2012). Selves, societies, and emotions: Understanding the pathways of experience. Boulder, Co: Paradigm.
Joyce, J. (1992). Ulysses. New York: Modern Library.
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