Integrity and Happiness

A vocabulary-expanding combination

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— U.S. Constitution

So, leaving aside the exclusionary use of the word “men” above, and the refusal to use that blessed of all grammatical tools, the Oxford comma, I am still left with a big question:

How do you pursue happiness?

Whenever I imagine pursuing happiness I alternate between two images: a bunch of fangirls chasing some unfortunate celebrity into an alleyway where they have to hide behind a dumpster to get away, and a poor, bespectacled schlub heaving a deep sigh while gazing at the woman of his dreams from across a crowded room, knowing she’s way out of his league.

Personally, pursuing happiness brings to mind that gut-wrenching feeling of chasing after the only bus that will get me to work on time, desperately waving at the driver to get her attention, knowing that it probably won’t work and if it doesn’t, there goes that job (and this month’s rent and groceries, most likely).

Not to get all maudlin about it, but happiness has always felt to me like such an ephemeral state of being that building a whole nation around its pursuit is a set-up for failure. Better the honesty of the feudal systems. At least they had the decency to admit happiness for us peasants was never part of the game plan.

I’m not saying I want to go back to the divine right of kings, mind you. I’m just saying I don’t understand how you operationalize “pursuing happiness” for an entire nation consistently when our single, human lives already seem hard enough to wrangle to the chase.

But maybe there’s something I’m not getting here? Maybe the descent of winter and the ubiquity of war is clouding my understanding of the matter at hand, making me dour and cynical?

According to Brent Strawn, a professor of religion and theology at Emory University, I’m not alone, at least. There is a consistent misapprehension in the modern United States, he argues, about what the Founders meant by the “pursuit of happiness.” (Perhaps other peoples are similarly confused, or perhaps our national consumerist mania makes Americans uniquely prone to this problem. I’d be curious to hear from those of you outside the U.S.) The confusion boils down to a lack of understanding of the difference between hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being. To quote research on the two, “Hedonia relates to immediate sensory pleasure, happiness, and enjoyment, while eudaimonia relates to the consequences of self-growth and self-actualization.”

As an aside, the etymology of eudaimonia (a brand new word for me) involves the Greek words for good (eu) and demon or deity (daimon). It would be decidedly less satisfying to yell Eudaimonia! than Good, god!, though if you’re surrounded by the sorts of folks that oppose “taking the Lord’s name in vain” you could sneak under the radar with this one. Also, the romantic in me loves the notion that eudaimonic well-being involves daily sacrifices, both large and small, to the good spirits which tend to our lives in the background. Like internal house elves.

Returning to the matter at hand, Strawn insists that the Founders had a decidedly eudaimonic, or “thick” as he calls it, understanding of happiness. That heft means that we can actually catch ahold of happiness. That we’re not just grasping at clouds. He puts it this way:

[B]oth the Bible and positive psychology give us a very thick understanding of the word "happiness." It is not about breakfast being yummy. It is about human flourishing, the good life, the obtaining and experiencing of all that can be glossed with the word "happiness," but only carefully and usually with a few sentences of explanation required to flesh it all out.

A thick understanding of "happiness" means that we have to think beyond only pleasurable sensations or think about redefining "happiness" altogether if "pleasure" is the only thing it means. If that's the only thing "happiness" means anymore, then we have a case of "word pollution" and we need to reclaim or redefine the word or perhaps use a different one altogether, at least for a while.

Redefining simplistic, thin definitions of "happiness" means that we come to terms that the happy life does not mean a life devoid of real problems and real pain. Those, too, are part of life and can even contribute to human growth and flourishing, which means they can and must be incorporated into a thick notion of happiness. As one positive psychologist has said: The only people who don't feel normal negative feelings are the pathologically psychotic, and the dead. Or, according to the biblical book of Psalms, the only people who live lives of constant comfort and pleasure are the wicked!

I am historically all for clarifying definitions. A good reframe, or redefinition, can change the whole picture. But I’m still left with the emotional and practical question of how. How do we live into this thick notion of happiness? How do we grasp it and hold it close even while all the possibilities of horror and heartbreak rage around us?

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Two authors offer some ideas. The first is Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist and professor at George Washington University. In her book, Real Self-Care, published in March of this year, she argues against hedonic notions of self-care— scented candles, bubble baths, and such. Not because they are inherently bad, necessarily, but because they represent a shallow, “thin” understanding of what it means to take care of ourselves while also clearly servicing the needs of capitalism. The notion that we can buy our way into self-care, in other words, keeps our wallets open but doesn’t actually improve the condition of our lives in the long-term.

Nor is it something you can schedule. “[I]nstead of thinking of self-care as taking 15 minutes out of your day to meditate or go for a walk…we need to be thinking about self-care as something that is threaded through every single decision you make in your life— the small decisions and the big decisions,” Lakshmin explains in an interview with Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom, “So it’s not a task to check off of your list. It’s actually something to embody.”

According to Lakshmin, that embodiment focuses around four pillars: boundaries, compassion, values, and power. Practicing integrity is part of our self-care, in other words. Lakshmin also ties practicing integrity to the idea of eudaimonic well-being, as opposed to the momentary cessation of suffering found through hedonic well-being:

So hedonic well-being is the giant 600-calorie Starbucks milkshake that they’re calling a coffee, right? That’s pleasure, right? It’s a sugar rush, or it’s the absence of suffering. Whereas eudaimonic well-being is a life that is built on meaning and purpose…when you understand that your activities and your relationships and how you spend your time and energy is aligned with what is most important to you, i.e. your values. And the important piece there is that if you look up values in the dictionary, one of the definitions is that it’s a preference of what you decide to be most important in your life. It’s a preference. Everybody’s values are different.

And so real self-care is about making those choices aligned with what you actually care about. And the key there is then that’s usually hard.

Sometimes I feel like my whole adult life has been an exercise in grappling with this notion of hedonism (of which, honestly, I’m a huge fan) versus eudaimonia. And maybe that makes sense, because understanding the different outcomes that arise from immediate gratification versus delayed gratification requires a certain accumulation of experience. By which I mean, screwing up repeatedly yet not dying.

For me, anyway, it’s taken decades of trial and (a lot of) error. Not to learn to turn away from pleasure, which is one of the payoffs of living in a body, but instead to appreciate it’s role. Sensual pleasure can bring us into the present moment. It can ground us when we’re anxiously spinning. It can inspire feelings of awe and gratitude and joy. But it can’t fix the circumstances of our lives when they’re broken, or change habits or systems that undermine our flourishing.

Pleasure can give us a needed break from suffering, but it’s only a postponement. Repeated denial of that reality, which lives at the heart of most addictions in my experience, only amplifies suffering.

If pursuing happiness through the frame of eudaimonic well-being doesn’t resonate or inspire, then Jeanette Winterson might offer an approach that does. Winterson is an award-winning British author with a long history, as a working-class lesbian, of bucking convention. Living outside of the norms of society forces a certain reflection about how things work and don’t so that you can build a life and relationships that do. For all of the difficulties, it can be a position that allows for deep insight.

Here’s what Winterson had to say about happiness in a recent New Yorker interview:

As for happiness, I think the Americans were nearly right about it being a pursuit. But it’s not quite a pursuit. It’s more like an emergent property, like consciousness, and it comes out of a sense of meaning. For me, that’s very important. I have to feel—and it may be my religious background—I have to feel, above all, that this is a life of service. You build the things in your life that matter. It’s like having a 3-D printer. You build it layer by layer, and in the end you’ve got a rocket ship. It’s incremental and you can make it out of mushroom fibre, if you’d like.

So you do it layer by layer and you don’t worry so much about where it’s going to lead. With friendships, you go on putting the work in—you try to be a good friend, you try to show up, and then gradually you realize that you’re building something that is both high and deep. That is very sustaining. It’s these really quite old-fashioned core values that I think allow for a level of happiness such that even when things are difficult, as they must be in every life, even when we’re struggling either existentially or in a practical way, we still have these things that we have built ourselves and that are solid. We can find genuine comfort there, which is not escapism or a delusion.

Then she expands on the question of values, illuminating how living according to your values, whatever they may be, leads to self-respect. Self-respect doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness, but it prepares the ground for happiness to flourish again following dark seasons:

Back to this business of rules, you don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules, but you do have to play by your own. And, when you’ve worked out what they are, just stick with them. Then you have self-respect, which is not the same as being self-conscious or self-involved. And that really does matter. Self-respect gives you boundaries about what you will and won’t do. It also allows you to be generous, allows you to say yes as well as no. And it means that, even if you do something that in the short term makes you deeply unhappy or that you find deeply difficult, you know why you’ve done it—it might be getting out of a bad relationship or saying goodbye to a job that is actually destroying you.

So often people imagine that when they make the right decision they will feel better. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred they will feel worse. When we do make these big changes, often it’s really disorienting. There can be a rush of euphoria, and then it’s hard, hard, hard. I think that’s not often enough said. At that point, we can’t look for happiness. We have to go back to the core values from which happiness will emerge again, in the fullness of time.

I have woken up following a night of using pleasure to postpone suffering, only to feel devoid of self-respect. I’ve also woken after making hard choices to adhere to my values with little to shelter my feelings of vulnerability and loneliness but my self-respect. Neither experience of waking is particularly pleasant, but I’ve come to appreciate that the former never leads to happiness, while the latter reliably and eventually does. So, maybe I’ve been pursuing happiness after all. What about you?

How do you pursue happiness?

---

Hey! Are you reading this through the Substack app? After a long period of skepticism and avoidance, I’ve become a huge fan. If you haven’t yet, use the button below to check it out.