Time Essay: The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness

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First off, analytical scrutiny of happiness should not be confused with preaching about it. Books hustling formulas and drills that are supposed to produce happiness circulate these days in numbers that are too great to count, let alone mention. These products of the booming feel-good industry invariably try to evoke happiness, but they seldom describe or analyze it. That, of course, is the fascination of the scientific challenge. The feelgood trade's blizzard of lighter-than-air tracts proves nothing whatever about happiness except that a lot of people are willing to pay for help in pursuing it.

The new happyologists are doing a bit better than that, though their young science is now approximately where navigation was before the invention of the compass. In some ways, as Humorist Russell Baker recently observed, the happyologists resemble sociologists in their dedication to proving what everybody has known all along. Baker groaned at the supposedly big discovery that an unhappy childhood does not necessarily lead to an unhappy adulthood. Who could fail to echo his groan when it is reported, as though it were news, that money, beyond some uncertain minimum, does not buy happiness? A horselaugh might even be the appropriate response when Psychoanalyst Gaylin declares: "It is... good to 'feel good.' "

The one thing common to most of the research is the conspicuous wariness of the investigators. The utterly elusive ingredients of the mood they are examining force them to turn away from the phenomenon itself. They prefer to tabulate its incidence and parameters. So, even though they maintain their scientific detachment and method in analyzing data, to collect it they have had no convenient choice but to adopt the time-tested techniques of public opinion polling. Subjects are asked merely to declare their degree of happiness, not define it. Even Pollster Louis Harris turns up as an unlikely temporary happyologist, reporting for this month's Playboy that while 49% of American men rank sexual satisfaction as "very important" to happiness, 84% give that same crucial weight to family life.

Not all the early discoveries are that breathtaking, although many of them come in similar statistical form. Findings may vary from survey to survey, but seldom astonishingly. Some results that fail to amaze can still be heartening. Most studies so far confirm that happiness does not depend on any single factor. That is, neither geographical location nor financial status nor age is a determinant of happiness. The happy are slightly more likely to be married, but unhappiness is anything but epidemic among the single. Neither the young, the middle-aged nor the old have any special claim on happiness.