When Great Is Never Good Enough
By: Dr. Patricia Farrell
Tags: Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Writing, Happiness, Life

When Great Is Never Good Enough

Chasing happiness may be an endless and empty goal unless we make peace within ourselves.

Photo by Fauzan Saari

Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity. — Rollo May

Is it happiness or contentment that makes us most pleased, secure, and stable in our lives? And what do those terms mean? Are they different for each of us depending on our current or future-hoped-for station in life?

Is life the continued seeking of a goal (as Brickman would argue) or simply moments of true joy for which we remain grateful? Or is it some never-ending slog toward vague achievement that will never be realized or, if realized, will never be enough?

The psychologists who were drawn to this type of research regarding what has been termed the “hedonic treadmill” (Philip Brickman) or positive psychology (Martin E. P. Seligman) were soul-searching in my estimation. In this, I am voicing a take-away from one of my doctoral professors. “All research is me-search,” he would say, and the older I get, the more I read, the more prescient it becomes.

Brickman, for all his incredible academic and professional accomplishments, must have been a tortured soul. If he was on the treadmill of his own conception, it threw him a curve somewhere; he committed suicide at the age of 38 by jumping from the 29th floor of a prestigious university building. His wife was left to raise three children on her own.

Was his suicide an admission that he could never reach the goal he set for himself, or was it an admission that he had reached the summit and there was nothing more? Whichever it was, and there’s no knowing if it was either, it was in some way an escape. Could he have suffered from the Imposter Syndrome with all his professional successes?

“…in which an individual doubts their skills, talents or accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”

Success, Happiness and the Self

Happiness may be a fleeting moment, hour, or a day in the service of escaping what Robert Burton stated in his book, The Anatomy of Melancholy. In the public domain, the entire book may be downloaded from Project Gutenberg.

Burton believed that melancholy is natural, but we have control over how we respond to it. He wrote:

In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing forwardness in us, or a dislike.

The antidote to melancholy was provided by Burton. ‘I write,’ Burton noted in its opening pages of melancholy, ‘by being busy to avoid melancholy.’

Or was it that he was also obsessed with the idea of being great and seeking the hedonic state that Brickman proposed? Burton’s enormous medical book was 900 pages, constantly being revised and expanded.

It seemed as though the book was never complete and, like many authors, his mind was in constant revision mode. Was it a fear of any kind or merely to ward off melancholy which may have haunted him? Was it me-search? Did it provide happiness for him?

The longest-running study on happiness is The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which tracked 724 men for 75 years. The object was to gauge if there were a secret to happiness.

As the people got older, they tended to focus more on what’s important to them, and didn’t sweat the small stuff to the degree they did when they were younger, according to the project’s director, Dr. Robert Waldinger. Other research supports this mindset, and has found that older adults are better about letting go of past failures. “They tend to realize how life is short and they are more likely to pay more attention on what makes them happy now,” says Dr. Waldinger.

The research project appears to complement the work by Daniel J. Levinson, who wrote “Seasons of a Man’s Life,” detailing the discrete phases of adult male development. Each decade of life has specific goals and concerns and an understanding of how much of life has been lived and how much is left.

It is this “life left” which may have the greatest impact on goals, achievements, and where life’s priorities lie.

Photo by Jacqueline Munguía

The Simple Solution to Happiness

After all these years of studying, or attempting to find, define, and synthesize happiness, the Harvard Study came to one conclusion; happiness lay in volunteering. Was it because these men had come to the end of their careers, or had they had a lightbulb moment in later life that happiness was not where they had sought it?

We know that giving to others also benefits us and, in that, it’s a kind of reverse altruism. Should volunteering be a part of the hedonic treadmill to soften the blows, the paths taken in error, the goals not achieved? Do we need this buffer to be happy?

One study did conclude that a happy, content life necessitates more than a career or achievement focus; it requires connection.

Contrary to some other studies, this study has found potentially beneficial connections between volunteering and mental well-being during the middle stages of the life course. It has been reported previously that middle-age people who are less depressed are more likely to volunteer and thereby enjoy the benefits of being volunteers. The benefits of volunteering may also accrue from early middle age because of the social roles and family connections, which are more likely to promote volunteering at that stage of the life course. Volunteering is connection to others and that is important to we human animals.

Where will your happiness lie? How will you gauge it, and should it be gauged at all? Just as everything else is in the eye of the beholder, so too is happiness. Each of us must determine it for ourselves, but we must also be introspective as we do it.