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Do You Need Empirical Support to Be Happy?

image of businesswoman with happiness mask

There is no shortage of advice online about how to be happier. A quick bit of Googling will send you to “ultimate guides” to happiness that will advise you to spend more time with friends, reduce your stress, and eat almonds. Or you might come across articles that claim to be based on the work of behavioral scientists, who challenge us to “conquer negative thinking,” tell us to control our breathing, spend more time in nature, and fold our clothes neatly. Happiness is also sometimes treated like a health issue, with accompanying prescriptions of gratitude practice, exercising more, and ditching our phones for time in nature. There is a cornucopia of tips, tricks, and strategies that are guaranteed to turn frowns upside-down, many of which claim to be supported by cutting-edge science.

A lot of happiness advice online can seem like common sense. Get plenty of sleep, hang out with friends, and make sure you eat well? These seem like no-brainers. Other advice you’ll likely come across can seem much more idiosyncratic, and with less evidence to back it up. Some happiness advisors will tell you that forcing the physical act of smiling will make you happier, although the evidence that this will have any long-lasting effects is mixed at best. Others will make oddly specific recommendations to eat foods like bananas, yogurt, and cottage cheese to boost your mood, although their connections to increased happiness appear inconclusive (and tough luck if you’re lactose intolerant). Some will even tell you that all you need to do is “choose happiness,” which by itself feels about as useful as the advice to just “stop being sad.”

It likely doesn’t come as a surprise that the happiness-improving advice out there varies in quality. What is perhaps more surprising is that recent research suggests that many of the most popular and purportedly science-backed strategies to being happier – including practicing gratitude, mindfulness, exercise, social interaction, and time spent in nature – are either only weakly supported by high-quality experiments, have very limited effects, or lack any evidence for their effectiveness at all. Overall, the current state of happiness research looks bleak.

Of course, the research is not yet fully decided, and an important caveat is that the studies analyzed didn’t deal with clinical populations. In other words, the aforementioned strategies may still be effective when it comes to those who have been diagnosed with physical or mental health disorders.

It is reasonable to expect that a significant number of people who are seeking out happiness strategies online, however, are not part of a clinical population. There thus seem to be ethical concerns around giving out advice that claims to be empirically supported when it isn’t, especially when said advice promises to make one happier. At the same time, even if it does lack the endorsement of peer-reviewed science, a lot of this advice seems unlikely to cause much harm, and it at least has the potential to increase someone’s momentary happiness, even if it hasn’t been shown to be effective in general.

In light of the concerns raised by recent research, what are the obligations of the happiness-mongers, and what should we as happiness-seekers do?

The authors of the aforementioned study themselves raise several potential concerns with continuing to provide happiness advice that isn’t well-supported by evidence. First, given the ubiquity of the most common happiness strategies, researchers must make sure that they’re actually effective. This is not only because of professional obligations, but in order to prevent happiness strategies from becoming a kind of snake oil. After all, while it’s easy enough to find free guides to increasing your happiness online, there are also plenty of books, programs, and courses that are being offered for a fee. If these products feature any of the strategies examined by the researchers and are predicated on having robust scientific evidence supporting them, then people are being misled.

Consider, for example, a critique of mindfulness, one of the most popular approaches to well-being. While many have benefitted from employing mindfulness techniques, many of the benefits that mindfulness may offer only come as the result of dedicated time and practice, something that is typically not emphasized in the bite-sized mindfulness tidbits that are so readily accessible online. Entire industries have also sprung up around the idea of mindfulness as a panacea, resulting in what some refer to as McMindfulness.

The lack of empirical support for happiness strategies combined with their presentation in ways that prioritize quick fixes leads us to another of the researcher’s concerns: when these strategies don’t work, they can lead to discouragement. After all, if you’re told that top researchers and scientists have figured out how you can be happier if you just follow their advice, then when strategies don’t work you risk being even less happy than when you started. Rather than being benign, happiness advice could result in an overall decrease in well-being.

There are other reasons in the vicinity to be concerned about happiness advice. For instance, some who have expressed reservations about mindfulness are worried that conceiving of happiness as a project that is solely meant to be addressed internally risks ignoring broader structural and social factors that contribute to the conditions that made one unhappy in the first place. Philosophers are also likely to push back against the conception of happiness that is prototypical in positive psychology, namely one of “subjective well-being” that is defined by the presence of good feelings and the level of satisfaction with one’s life. For instance, it has been argued that this conception of happiness leaves out whether one has led a morally good life, something that appears to have a significant impact on people’s evaluations of whether one truly is happy.

Of course, no one is saying that you should give up your beloved nature walks just because meta-analyses don’t find them to improve long-term subjective well-being in aggregate nonclinical populations. We should, however, be aware that happiness is a more complex project than it’s often made out to be, and that while common happiness strategies may be worth a shot, if they don’t seem to work for you then you’re not alone.

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Workers’ Well-Being and Employers’ Duties of Care

photograph of amazon warehouse

If you’ve been working from home during the pandemic then there’s a good chance your employer has sent you an email expressing their concern about your well-being and general level of happiness. Perhaps they’ve suggested some activities you could perform from the comfort of your own home working space, or offered Zoom classes or workshops on things like meditation, exercise, and mindfulness. While most likely well-intentioned, these kinds of emails have become notorious for being out of touch with the scale of the stresses that workers face. It is understandable why: it is, after all, unlikely that a half-hour mindfulness webinar is going to make a dent in the stress accumulated while living in a pandemic over the last year.

It goes without saying that the pandemic has taken a toll on many people’s physical and mental health. And while employers certainly have obligations towards their employees, do they have any specific duties to try to improve the well-being of their employees that has taken a hit during the pandemic?

In one sense, employers clearly do have some obligations towards the happiness and well-being of their employees. Consider, for instance, a recent scandal involving Amazon: the company baldly denied a statement that some Amazon workers were under so much pressure at their jobs that they were unable to take bathroom breaks, and were forced to urinate in bottles instead. Great quantities of evidence were then quickly accumulated that such practices were, in fact, taking place, and Amazon was forced to issue a weak conciliatory reply. It is reasonable in this case to say that Amazon has put their workers in situations in which their well-being is compromised, and they have an obligation to treat them better.

“Don’t make your workers pee in bottles” is an extremely low bar to clear, and it is an indictment of our times that it has to be said at all. People working from home offices, however, are typically not in the same circumstances: while they likely have access to washrooms, their stressors will instead be those that stem from isolation, uncertainty, and many potential additional burdens in the form of needing to care for themselves and others. So, as long as an employer is allowing its employees to meet a certain minimal standard of comfort, and assuming that those working from home during the pandemic meet this standard, do they have any additional obligations to care for employees happiness and well-being?

One might think that the answer to this question is “no.” One reason why we might think this is that we typically regard one’s own happiness as being one’s own responsibility. Indeed, much of the recent narrative on happiness and well-being emphasizes the extent to which we have control over these aspects of our lives. For example, consider a passage from a recent Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Forget What You Think Happiness Is,” that considers how the pandemic has impacted how we conceive of happiness:

“Mary Pipher, clinical psychologist and author of ‘Women Rowing North’ and ‘Reviving Ophelia,’ says the pandemic underscored what she long believed: that happiness is a choice and a skill. This past Christmas, she and her husband spent the day alone in their Lincoln, Neb., home, without family and friends, for the first time since their now adult children were born. ‘I thought, ‘What are we going to do?’ We went out for a walk on the prairie and saw buffalo. I ended up that day feeling really happy.’”

If happiness is a choice then it is not a choice that I can make for you; if happiness is a skill then it’s something you have to learn on your own. Perhaps I can help you out – I can help you learn about happiness activities like gratitude exercises, meditation, and mindfulness – but the rest is then up to you. If this is all we’re able to do for someone else, then perhaps the mindfulness webinars really are all we are entitled to expect from our employers.

There are a couple of worries here. First, to say that “happiness is a choice and a skill” is clearly a gross oversimplification: while serendipitous buffalo sightings will no doubt lift the spirits of many, happiness may not be so easily chosen for those who suffer from depression and anxiety. Second, while there is a lot of hype around the “skills” involved in acquiring happiness, empirical studies of gratitude interventions (as well as the notion of “gratitude” itself), meditation, and mindfulness (especially mindfulness, as discussed here, and here), have had mixed results, with researchers expressing concerns over vague concepts and a general lack of efficacy, especially when it comes to those who are, again, suffering from depression and anxiety. Of course, such studies concern averages across many individuals, meaning that any or all of these activities may work for some while failing to work for others. If you find yourself a member of the former group, then that’s great. A concern, however, is that claims that there are simple skills that can increase happiness are still very much up for debate within the psychological community.

Of course, those working from home will likely have much more practical roots of their decreased happiness; a guided meditation session over Zoom will not, for instance, ameliorate one’s childcare needs. Here, then, is the second worry: there are potentially much more practical measures that employers could take to help increase the happiness and well-being of employees.

For comparison, consider a current debate occurring in my home province of Ontario, Canada: while the federal government has made certain benefits available to those who are forced to miss work due to illness or need to quarantine, many have called on the provincial government to create a separate fund for paid sick days. The idea is that since the former is a prolonged process – taking weeks or months for workers to receive money – this disincentivizes workers to take days off when they may need to. This can result in more people going into work while sick, which is clearly something that should be minimized. The point, then, is that while recommendations for how you can exercise at your desk may be popular among employers, it seems that it would be much more effective to offer more practical solutions to problems of employee well-being, e.g., allowing for more time off.

The question of what an employer owes its employees is, of course, a complex one. While there are clear cases in which corporations fail to meet even the most basic standard of appropriate treatment of its employees – e.g., the recent Amazon debacle – it is up for debate just how much is owed to those with comparatively much more comfortable jobs working from home. Part of the frustration, however, no doubt stems from the fact that if employers are, in fact, concerned about employee well-being, then there are probably better ways of increasing it than offering yet another mindfulness webinar.

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Why Didn’t God Make Us Happier?

photograph of smiling gingerbread man relaxing in a cup of hot coacoa

Or if you’re an atheist: why didn’t evolution make us happier? There is insight to be gleaned from reflecting on the nature of happiness during a pandemic. There is no doubt that as a society, we haven’t been this unhappy, depressed, and stressed in decades. We may then wonder about the nature and value of happiness — presumably we could be happier, so then why aren’t we? And to be clear, by the term ‘happiness’ I’m referring to the affective state of happiness; the subjective happiness that you experience ‘from the inside.’ This should be clarified because Ancient Greek philosophers had a wider notion of happiness they called eudaimonia: the idea that subjective happiness is only part of human flourishing and well-being, along with things virtue, fulfilling work and relationships, and so forth.

Why think we could be happier? There is evidence from psychology that (subjective) happiness could be ratcheted up and down based on how underlying psychological processes are tweaked. The first is what psychologists call ‘optimism bias’: we have a positively distorted perspective of our lives in the past, present, and future. Sometimes I’m nostalgic for my time in high school, but then remember that those times weren’t that great. This optimism bias distorts what we remember, how we think about the future, and how we compare to our peers, toward the positive. And we find this bias across culture, sex, class, and so on — it seems baked into our biology.

Second, there is affective resilience: baseline affect (how things feel to us ‘from the inside’ across time) is mostly stable across time. We may think winning the lottery would raise our levels of happiness far into the future; but that isn’t so. People tend to return to their prior level of happiness within months; the same holds of the bad stuff too. As the philosopher, Dan Moller, points out:

“The results of empirical investigation thus seem to conflict with a widely held view in our culture that the loss of a partner or spouse is invariably or at least usually an agonizing blow with long-lasting and significant impact. Contrary to this folk view (and certain non-empirical bereavement theories), empirical research seems to show that most people manifest what the author above refers to as resilience in the face of loss: although they are initially traumatized, they quickly recover and manifest little long-term distress. And, again contrary to folk wisdom, this does not seem to be the result of repression or of having had an unfulfilling relationship; most people simply adapt far better to their loss than we tend to believe.”

This affective resilience, while it may dampen the positive, insulates us from the bad; it allows us to carry on in face of defeat, pain, loss, disappointment, and so forth. And with some tweaks to our psychology, we could be happier than we are. It would be hard then to see how we could ratchet up our optimism and affective resilience, we would be much happier. And if we could be happier than we are, then why aren’t we happier?

It could be that there isn’t a good explanation, but there may be a good reason: think about a world where everyone is extremely happy and content; in that world little would get done. Think about yourself when you’re happy and contented; those mental states are nice, but they can rob us of motivation to change, improve, and innovate — to give but a few examples. Pain and discontent can motivate personal growth, invention, and artistic expression. As the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, observed:

“The great end of all human industry, is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.”

There are insights here that illuminate the question we began with: discomfort is motivating, and too much happiness isn’t. Happiness is like knowledge and ignorance: it faces a goldilocks problem in that you don’t want too much or too little. To be too happy, in the subjective sense, would be to undercut the value of other aspects of the good life: creating art, cultivating virtue, inventing a technology, and growing in a relationship. We often think of unhappiness as a problem that needs addressing, but that misses the good of the right amount of discomfort and subjective unhappiness. And it puts pressure on us not to assign too much value to subjective happiness, and instead assign more value to a broader notion of happiness that better accords with the concept of eudaimonia — thinking about happiness in broader terms like flourishing.

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Sparking Joy: The Ethics of Medically-Induced Happiness

Photograph of a sunflower in sunshine with blue sky behind

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

Happiness is often viewed as an ephemeral thing. Finding happiness is an individual and ever-developing process. Biologically speaking, however, all emotions are the simple result of hormones and electrical impulses. In a recent medical breakthrough, a team of scientists has found a way to tap in to these electrical impulses and induce joy directly in the brain. This kind of procedure has long been the stuff of speculation, but now it has become a reality. While the technique shows a good deal of promise in treating disorders such as depression and post-traumatic stress, it also presents an ethical conundrum worth considering.

On initial examination, it is difficult to point out anything particularly wrong with causing “artificial” joy. Ethical hedonism would prioritize happiness over all other values, regardless of the manner in which happiness is arrived at. However, many people would experience a knee-jerk rejection to the procedure. It bears some similarity to drug-induced euphoria, but unlike illicit drugs, this electrical procedure seems to have no harmful side effects, according to the published study. Of course, with a small sample size and a relatively short-term trial, addiction and other harmful aspects of the procedure may be yet undiscovered. If, as this initial study suggests, the procedure is risk-free, should it be ethically accepted? Or is there cause for hesitation beyond what is overtly harmful?

The possibility of instantaneous, over-the-counter happiness has been a frequent subject of science-fiction. Notable examples include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which featured a happiness-inducing drug called “soma”; and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (later adapted into the film Blade Runner), which included a mood-altering device called a “mood organ.” Both novels treat these inventions as key elements in a dystopian future. Because the emotions produced by these devices are “false”—the direct result of chemical alteration, rather than a “natural” response to external conditions—the society which revolves around them is empty and void of meaning. What is the validity of this viewpoint? Our bias towards what we perceive as “natural” may be simply a matter of maintaining the status quo–we’re more comfortable with whatever we’re used to. This is similar to the preference for foods containing “natural” over “artificial” flavoring despite nearly identical chemical compositions. While we are instinctively wary of the “artificial” emotions, there may be no substantive difference to the unbiased feeler.

Of course, emotions exist for more than just the experience of feeling. The connection between emotions and the outside world was addressed by Kelly Bijanki, one of the scientists involved in the electrically-induced happiness study, in her interview with Discover Magazine: “Our emotions exist for a very specific purpose, to help us understand our world, and they’ve evolved to help us have a cognitive shortcut for what’s good for us and what’s bad for us.” Just as pain helps us avoid dangerous hazards and our ability to taste bitterness helps us avoid poisonous things, negative emotions help drive us away from harmful situations and towards beneficial ones. However, living in a modern society to which the human body is not biologically adapted, our normally helpful sensory responses like pain and fear can sometimes backfire. Some people experience chronic pain connected to a bodily condition that cannot be immediately resolved; in these cases, the pain itself becomes the problem, rather than a useful signal. As such, we seek medical solutions to the pain itself. Chronic unhappiness, such as in cases of anxiety and depression, could be considered the same way: as a normally useful sensory feedback which has “gone wrong” and itself become a problem requiring medical treatment.

What if the use of electrically-induced happiness extended beyond temporary medical treatments? Why shouldn’t we opt to live our lives in a state of perpetual euphoria, or at least have the option to control our emotions directly? As was previously mentioned, artificial happiness may be indistinguishable from the real thing, at least as far as our bodies are concerned. Human beings already use a wide variety of chemicals and actions to “induce” happiness–that is, to make ourselves happy. If eating chocolate or exercising are “natural” paths to happiness, why would an electrical jolt be “unnatural”? Of course, the question of meaning still bears on the issue. Robert Nozick argues that humans make a qualitative distinction between the experience of doing something and actually doing it. We want our happiness to be tied to real accomplishments; the emotion alone isn’t enough. More concretely, we would probably become desensitized to happiness if it were all we experienced. In the right doses, sadness helps us value happiness more; occasional pain makes our pleasure more precious.

If happiness in the absence of meaning is truly “empty,” our ethical outlook toward happiness should reflect this view. Rather than viewing pleasure or happiness itself as the ultimate good, we might instead see happiness as a component of a well-lived life. Whether something is good would depend not on whether it brings happiness, but whether it fulfills some wider sense of meaning. Of course, exactly what constitutes this wider meaning would continue to be the subject of endless philosophical debate.

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Reckoning with the Legacy of Derek Parfit

Philosopher Derek Parfit died on January 1st. Let us hope he will go to heaven. Will he? Parfit, who was an agnostic, was not much concerned with the existence of heaven or hell. But, he did famously argue that, even if such places do exist, the person going there would not be the same person who previously died. And, thus, someone would be punished or rewarded for the deeds of another person. This is deeply unjust, as unfair as sending someone to prison because of the crimes committed by his identical twin brother.

Continue reading “Reckoning with the Legacy of Derek Parfit”

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Pleasure (and Happiness and Good Lives)

Philosophers known as hedonists, and probably some slightly more normal people as well, have held that pleasure is the only thing we desire in itself, that pleasure is the only thing good in itself, and that it is the only thing that makes a person’s life good. To evaluate these claims, we must distinguish three distinct types of pleasure: sensory, or the pleasure of a massage or caress; intentional, or taking pleasure in some object or activity, as when I take pleasure in a round of golf or in the new car that I own; and pure feeling, the warm glow we get when learning of some award or accomplishment. Philosophers these days often seek to reduce the first and third types to the second. Sensory pleasure is supposed to be simply a sensation we take pleasure in. But this will not do. We can have sensory pleasures that we take no pleasure in, if they are guilty or addictive pleasures. Then we have sensory pleasure but no intentional pleasure. And masochists take pleasure in sensory pains. Then they have intentional pleasure but sensory pains. Nor can the reduction go the other way, attempts at which used to be more common. We can take pleasure in various activities without having any particular sensations. The pure feeling type falls between the other two: it is a bodily feeling, but without specific location in the body, and it takes objects, as does the intentional kind.

Now we can ask whether any of these types fills the exalted bill of the hedonists. We sometimes do aim at sensory pleasures, as in sex, food, and music, and they are good. We might feel frustrated or impoverished without them. But unless we are Don Giovanni, Falstaff, or Mozart, they are not the cornerstones of a good life. Pure feeling pleasures or warm glows are far more rare and not aimed at directly. Intentional pleasures are more diverse and numerous. They are therefore the best candidates for sources of goodness in our lives and goals of our desires. Focusing on intentional pleasure therefore makes hedonism more plausible, while naive attacks on hedonism most often implicitly focus on sensory pleasures.

Nevertheless, even the more sophisticated versions that view intentional pleasure as our ultimate goal and/or source of value in my view does not survive close reflection. We take pleasure in many different kinds of objects and activities. But we do not aim directly at taking pleasure. Instead, we aim to engage in the activities and experience the objects, the pleasure being a byproduct of their successful pursuit. In fact we find activities most pleasurable when we are fully “in the flow,” therefore directly aware of the pleasure we take in them only in retrospect or future prospect. When we desire an object, we typically have pleasant thoughts about it, but we desire the object, not the pleasant thoughts or the pleasure we will take in fulfilling that desire. Thus, pleasure of the intentional type is not the typical aim or object of our desires.

So what’s all the fuss about pleasure, especially among philosophers? One explanation is the equation, or I would say confusion, of pleasure with happiness. But happiness is not of fundamental importance to a good life either. In my view happiness is a judgment, most often implicit, that one’s life is going well, sometimes producing a feeling of pleasure. What’s really important is that one’s life is going well, that one’s rational, by which I mean prioritized, coherent, and informed, desires are being satisfied. Desires are coherent when the satisfaction of one does not frustrate the satisfaction of more or deeper desires. They are informed when one knows what it would be like to satisfy them. The satisfaction of such desires is a measure of one’s welfare, of how good one’s life is overall or at a given time. Nonsensory pleasures are both effects and symptoms of a high degree of welfare. But they come from fulfilling desires for more important things. Fulfilling rational desires brings value to our lives, not the pleasure we take in doing so, although the pleasure is a sign or reflection of that value.

It has been my pleasure to produce this post. But the important thing is that I have produced it and that you have read it, whether or not you took pleasure in doing so (but I hope you did).