Harvard Business Review And The Chilean Miners: Happiness Is Overrated

OS tripped across this a few days back, and ran it past some friends, who all applauded it. So, here 'tis.

Tony Schwartz, writing for Harvard Business Review, muses that 'happiness', or what we may call happiness--a state of unmolested contentment and well-being--may well be over-rated.

Some years ago, I spent time with a guy who I typically greeted in the most ordinary way: "How are you?" I'd ask.

"I'm WON-DER-FUL," he'd respond, rapturously, and every time I asked. Talk about a conversation stopper. What do you say back to that?

Suffice to say this wasn't a guy with whom I was eager to share a long meal. Here's the paradox: "Happy" people are some of the dullest people I know. And yet happiness is the state to which so many of us doggedly aspire.

Schwartz continues further:

Paradoxically, when we seek happiness as the ultimate state, we're destined to be disappointed. Absent unhappiness, how would we even recognize it? If we're fortunate, happiness is a place we visit from time to time rather than inhabit permanently. As a steady state, it has the limits of any steady state: it's not especially interesting or dynamic.

To seek happiness as a permanent state derives from two primitive evolutionary impulses: avoiding pain (which we associate with danger and the risk of death) and seeking gratification (which helps ensure that our genes get passed on).

But it also turns out that pain and discomfort are critical to growth, and that achieving excellence depends on the capacity to delay gratification.

When we're living fully, what we feel is engaged and immersed, challenged and focused, curious and passionate. Happiness — or more specifically, satisfaction — is something we mostly feel retrospectively, as a payoff on our investment. And then, before very long, we move on to the next challenge.

Engaged and immersed, challenged and focused, curious and passionate. Now that's a definition of happiness, of well-being.

OS hopes his readers don't get bored with him returning to the subject, but he thinks everyone everywhere should view the BBC series 'The Choir'. It isn't about people making great music, although sometimes that occurs. It's about people discovering that they can be engaged and immersed, challenged and focused, curious and passionate about something as wonderful as music, and their lives are thereby transformed. That 'happiness' they may have longed for arrives, because they weren't seeking it per se; they were seeking to tune that chord, memorize that alto line, remember that bit of movement.

The Chilean miners, with much help from their rescuers, kept themselves on a routine, kept their surroundings as neat as they could, kept their minds and hearts engaged, kept about the work of co-operating with their rescuers--they kept themselves engaged with life in horrible circumstances. OS was surprised to see Mr. Sepulveda arrive last night with his bag of souvenirs, and leading the gallery in football cheers.

In retrospect, it should not have been such a surprise. Mr. Sepulveda wasn't a victim per se: he was a miner, a pro, and he stayed engaged with life during his entrapment. He was ready to give out hugs and gifts and lead cheers when he got to the surface. He was one happy guy, not just because he had been rescued, but because he had something to share with everybody on the surface, even if it was just a bag of rocks and a round of hugs and cheers.

Engaged and immersed, challenged and focused, curious and passionate.

Happy.