World Ark Magazine - November/December 2007 - (Page 12)

RUNNING TO STAND STILL One of the most intriguing fi ndings in the literature on happiness is that human beings are not designed to make themselves happy. The unconscious mind “was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life,” notes Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. “[P]art of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. [Our unconscious mind] cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious.” However, the kinds of things commonly associated with prestige—the things we think will make us happy—fi nancial success, fame, winning awards—do not actually provide a lasting sense of wellbeing, as Daniel Gilbert explains in his best-selling book, Stumbling on Happiness. No matter how much we acquire, we soon want more. Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell dubbed this the “hedonic treadmill.” Once you’re on it, you have to keep running just to stay even. Consider the past 50 years in America. Compared to our grandparents, we are amazingly wealthy. We have twice as many cars per person, our houses are twice as big, and we eat out almost three times as often. With the significant exception of Americans living in or near poverty, never before have so many people been so inundated with so much stuff and so free to pursue their whims. And yet over the same period, the divorce rate has doubled, suicide has tripled and violent crime has quadrupled. Today, a million kids drop out of high school each year, and obesity, diabetes and depression are off the charts and striking people at younger and younger ages. Perhaps most troubling, in polls, more Americans than ever before say that they don’t trust strangers and feel that the nation’s best days are behind them. THE FAILURE OF OUR SUCCESS And yet the pressures to advance along the current path continue to intensify. How many people spend their lives making and selling things they don’t believe in to acquire or achieve things that don’t fulfill them? Three out of four students entering American colleges today consider it “very important” or “essential” that they become “very well off financially”—nearly double the proportion in 1970. It so happens that the highest paying profession—law—is also the one with the highest levels of drug abuse and depression. All of this may help to explain why we are so obsessed with happiness. Is America experiencing the failure of its success? Could it be that our biggest social problems today—failing public schools, skyrocketing health costs, widening wealth inequalities, collapsing infrastructure—are related to the fact that, in the midst of plenty, so many Americans still feel they don’t have enough? Could this explain, at least partially, why, as a nation, we have disinvested from so many public goods that don’t yield shortterm returns? Happy, trusting, optimistic people almost always want others to prosper, too, and they think about the future. It is only when we get stuck in a mindset of scarcity that we cling to what we have and wall ourselves off from others, especially the have-nots. Isn’t this what we have done in America? Look at New Orleans. OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL One night in 1999, Gerald Chertavian called his father with big news. He and his partners had just sold their technology company for $83 million. Chertavian was 34. “I remember calling my dad and saying, ‘I’m really scared right now. I never thought this would happen to me,’” he recalled. “I was overwhelmed by it. My dad said, ‘Don’t make any decisions for now. Just take some time.’” Chertavian had grown up in a middle class family and attended public schools. When he was a freshman undergraduate, he www.heifer.org 12 November/December 2007 | WORLD ARK http://www.heifer.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of World Ark Magazine - November/December 2007

World Ark - November/December 2007 Contents Letters For the Record The Good Life Asked & Answered Pursuing Happiness (PRODUCT) RED: Consumer Power Fights AIDS in Africa Rwanda Reconciles End Hunger Now Protecting the Poor from Climate Change Mixed Media Heifer Bulletin Heifer Spirit Heifer Calendar Reflection

World Ark Magazine - November/December 2007

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