Time Essay: The Scientific Pursuit of Happiness

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People who like their jobs (and up to 82% claim to) tend to be happier in general. An attitude of optimism (held by some 70%) often coincides with happiness, but quite a few of the 6% who are convinced pessimists are also happy. Good health is a big factor in happiness to some, yet poor health does not turn out to be incompatible with happiness. Not even "satisfaction" is indispensable to happiness. Says University of Michigan Psychologist Stephen Withey in Subjective Elements of Well-Being, a collection of papers presented in 1972: "Young people tend to report more happiness than satisfaction, while older people tend to say that they are more satisfied than they are happy."

The incongruous and even adverse situations that seem to support happiness may only confirm the insight ventured by turn-of-the-century Psychologist William James. "Life and its negation," wrote James, "are beaten up inextricably together. The two are equally essential facts of existence and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction." One broad contradiction that emerges from the happiness surveys is that, in spite of all the reports of the emptiness of modern life, relatively few people consider themselves very unhappy. On the contrary, an overwhelming majority of Americans (60% in one survey, 70% in another, 86% in a third) consider themselves reasonably happy. Only the heartless could be harsh toward the science that bears such tidings.

Still, happyology has defaulted so far on the really big question: Why are people happy or why not? And more fundamental, what is happiness? The young science is far from the practical goal of providing guidance on how to attain happiness. "Alas," says Freedman, "the overwhelming finding of all the research is that there is no easy solution, no foolproof strategy for finding it."

Lionel Tiger's forthcoming book offers some slightly more definite advice—or at least postulation. Although he is not studying happiness as such, the anthropologist argues that humankind does not have to go looking far for its basic source of wellbeing: it is built right into the human body. Says he: "Our benign sense of the future could have been bred into us and other complex animals out of the need to survive." Tiger speculates that man pushes ever onward, inextinguishably optimistic in the face of adversity, because of his biochemistry. The key to mankind's optimism, he argues, lies in those lately discovered substances called endorphins. These are the morphine-like chemical agents that the body itself produces, sending them into special sites of the brain and spinal cord to reduce pain. In this, says Tiger, "we may be on the way to finding a specific source for notions of personal wellbeing. Endorphins may not serve principally to reduce pain. Their major function may be to anesthetize the organism against responding too directly and forcefully to negative cognitive stimuli in the environment. They permit the animal to obscure the understanding that its situation is dire."