Happy

Readers of previous posts may have happened across my interest (read obsession) with the whole self-help genre. One of the most interesting (in the uniquely English sense) books I’ve come across is Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design. I think I came across the book in the British Airways inflight magazine. Reviews of the book often cite a story about someone at Penguin (the publisher) reading the book and quitting their job. There are plenty of other books out there which have influenced my appreciation of what happiness is and how it can be achieved.

All of that reading about happiness didn’t fully prepare me for a conversation I had today with a Year 10 student (US grade 9; 14 or 15 years old). As the class were working on some fieldwork planning, the kid randomly asks me: ‘what makes you happy?’. Friends often tell me that I have a somewhat annoying trait of never giving a simple response to a simple question. Arguably this was a simple question: pick a memory, recount it. Maybe it’s just my brain, but I didn’t think it was a simple question. It was however a fascinating one.

‘What do you mean?’, I asked.

‘What makes you happy? Tell me what has made you happy?’

‘Why are you asking me?’, I asked.

‘I’m just interested. I’m asking all of my teachers’, came the response.

‘Oh, what have they said?’, I’m even more interested now.

‘Well Mrs [choose random teacher name] said it was [insert landmark achievement of a child]’.

‘Interesting,’ I said (because I can’t help myself using the word in that very much English way), ‘so they chose a one-off event and it was to do with somebody else’.

‘Yeah’

‘What makes you happy?’ I enquired, quite invested in the discussion by now.

‘I don’t think I used to be very happy, but now I feel a lot happier and…’

Anyway for sake of brevity and a lack of accurate recall of dialogue, it turns out the kid has become quite the reader of Robert Greene’s Laws of Power. He said that it made him reflect on what he used to think and worry about, but now he was happier because he understood better what he could control. I found this fascinating and, having had a quick look into Greene’s book, this use of ‘control’ definitely showed it’s influence, not least on language .

I wanted to find out what he meant by this, and he was talking about becoming more focused about what he could control and how this could help him get to where he wanted to be. This got me riffing about what he was saying and I suggested it sounded like he was talking about a difference between finding your place and making your place.

What I suggested by finding your place was about self-knowledge, understanding who you are, where you’ve come from and how you fit into the world around you. This is important, but it can maybe suggest a level of passivity, perhaps even fatalism. You’re discovering yourself, but what do you do with that knowledge? I guess, by extension, you could become obsessed with finding self-knowledge by worrying about your current circumstances, or what other people think about you. At the same time though, finding your place gives you an awareness of your starting point for any potential journey of change. And taking stock of your current place can bring a contentedness which can be needed at times.

By making your place, this was very much about the journey we go through towards achieving success in life, however we may define success. It is about goals, ambition and the question of purpose. It is also working out how to make your place; about planning, developing and reflection. It is about agency and a belief that you can bring about change.

In offering the two phrases though, I wasn’t suggesting a dichotomy. I think both are important, because to focus on one and not the other is somewhat delusional. To focus solely on finding your place may lead to regret on what you might have become instead of being wrapt in too much introspection. To focus solely on making your place could leave you detached from reality. While ambition is great, realism is necessary and for all the rags-to-riches stories, or equivalents in other fields, the mobility we have is limited to some varying extent and to think we can overcome every barrier to reach whatever ambition we have may be improbable if not impossible. It is difficult to say which of these is the grander delusion – is it easier to reconcile our regret, perhaps shrouding it with some degree of tactical ignorance of what might have been, or to acknowledge our limitations and the barriers that stand in our way, trying not to succumb to the unfairness of the universe for leaving your dreams unfulfilled?

Going back to happiness, as our conversation didn’t get anywhere near as dark as that last paragraph may suggest (as I said, this isn’t a transcript), I suggested that not only are finding and making our place both important, but also that we can be happy with both dynamics which they create. If finding our place leads us to embrace the status quo while making our place motivates us to go on a journey, I believe that we can be happy with both of those conditions at the same time: we can be happy where we are while also knowing that we’d be happy (or happier) getting to where we could go.

Reflecting further about this later, I thought there were probably five possible combinations:

• We can be happy with what we have now and that is pretty much what we’ve always had – no journey done, no journey needed as we’re already happy (here I use the phrase journey to be some kind of change to fulfil an ambition, to make our place).
• We can be happy with what we have now because we feel we’ve completed our journey – destination reached, happiness achieved. (Whether we were happy before the journey is not necessary to discuss here).
• We can be unhappy with where we our now but we believe we know what will make us happy – journey needed to achieve happiness.
• We can be unhappy now and we believe that no journey can make us happy – a journey would be pointless because we feel doomed to be perpetually miserable.
• We are happy with what we’ve got now, but feel that a journey could take us to similar or greater happiness – the journey is discretionary (and isn’t choice wonderful!).

I don’t think I’d ever tried to put together a framework like this before, so I found the discussion and my follow-up reflection quite enjoyable. I think the framework offers a way of thinking about what makes us happy, what motivates us to change (or not) and also to accept how much change is possible and desirable. The real lightbulb moment for me was that acknowledgement and acceptance of a duality: it doesn’t have to be suboptimal now, working towards better later. I believe it is quite possible to be happy with what you’ve got and still be wanting to change. Making change for seemingly zero gain might seem unnecessary, but not everything has to be done out of necessity.

One of the joys of teaching is the unexpected moments, of which teaching has more than its fair share due to it fundamentally being about human interaction. You don’t start a day or a lesson planning to have a conversation like this, but when you do, it adds another piece of evidence that you can be happy doing what you do while also knowing you could be happy doing other things you might aspire to do as well.