The Myths of Happiness
By Charles Rush
January 27, 2013
I Corinthians 12 &, 13 and Lk. 4: 14-21 [selected]
[ Audio
(mp3, 5.5Mb) ]
en I was a senior in High School, one of my teachers asked us the question, ‘What is your life goal?' A lot of my friends had rather concrete answers. “I want to be a doctor”, “I want to act on Broadway”. I really had no idea of what I wanted to do as a vocation, I just knew that I wanted to compete with the best, so I said “I want to be the stupidest guy in the room.”
Our professor
seized on that comment, “Mr. Rush, a more interesting goal and one you are
quite likely to achieve.” I smile when I remember that day… It is a line that
I've been privileged to repeat a few times in my life in gratitude
for the people that I've known and the life that I've lived.
I remember
thinking that taking Latin class that PhD students from every department had to
take together.
I remember
thinking that at a lunch I had on Wall Street with a bunch of people from
Christ Church, shortly after we moved to Summit.
No, it has been
extraordinarily fulfilling, but probably not for the reasons I originally
envisioned when I was a kid. I know when we first moved to Westport,
Connecticut I was pretty overwhelmed with the wealth and the fame that New York
had to offer. I'm pretty sure that when I was a kid, I just thought about
growing up to become one of these beautiful people one day and my life would
just be fabulous.
It is a lot more
complicated than that in fact and finding genuine fulfillment in this life and
sustaining real fulfillment is a lot more elusive. But most of us start of
thinking that way, in pursuit of a goal. And when we are young, we think if I
could just get to that place- if I can just get my film reviewed in the New
York Times, if I can just get interviewed by Jim Cramer on ‘Mad Money', if I
can just get elected to Congress, then I'm going to take out a Yorkshire
Peppermint patty, sit back on my front porch, hopefully in East Hampton and it
is just all going to work out like peaches. Then I'll be happy. No more
spilling coffee running for the train I just missed, no more watching the
Knicks on TV when I want to be two rows back behind Spike Lee and the boys, no
more renting my vacation house with my brother and sister because that is all
we can afford. No, I'm going to have a real reputation and a real car and
Marsha Butler who would never date me in high school is going to eat her heart
out at the twentieth reunion. It's gonna be great.
And us Dad's encourage these dreams. They help create
independence. We know that having these big goals in the distance “imparts
structure and meaning to our daily lives”… They create “obligations, deadlines,
time-tables as well as opportunities to master new skills, network with other
people. They give us “a sense of purpose in our lives”, mastery over our time
and a sense that we are controlling our destiny. This is what it means to be
successful.[i]
And it is probably
true that managers probably over-hype this the value
of “goal pursuit”, since they need their freshly minted MBA types to grind out
75 hour work weeks for a few years on end in pursuit of the big payoff in the
future. So these values of delayed gratification in disciplined work towards
this big goal that we will get to ‘one day' overly drive our young people in
their twenties and early thirties, particularly through those times of the year
when you go to work in the dark, come home in the dark, and your social life is
fraying around the edges. That dream of ‘one day'
guides you more and more as you head to the gym before the start of the work day,
needing something to keep your attitude in motivation mode.
The only problem
with this way of living is that when we actually asked the psychology
department to test and see if we were really happy when we got to that magical
place that we dreamed about for so many years, it turns out that the boost we
get is… not so great. When we actually interviewed people on what it is like to
win Wimbledon, what was it like to become the President of Georgetown
University, what was it like to become a Nobel Prize winner? The answer was “I
felt really special for a couple days” and then it was back to normal.
More than that,
when we asked them about all the perq's that come with making the big money and
having the really great toys, the actual answer is ‘It
makes a modest difference'. [ii]
When it comes to
money, the rule of thumb is that it materially helps make a difference in your
life if you are on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder. People that
are actually working in jobs just above the poverty line, people who are really
struggling and have to make basic choices between two needs, not simply a
choice between something I want and something I need, but having to choose
between child care and health insurance, a financial boost in your standard of
living so that you can pay all of your bills gives us the biggest bang for the
buck. We really feel better about ourselves, we are more optimistic, we have a
greater sense of control in our lives, we start to
plan for a fuller existence.
But, once you
cross over the 50% threshold, the returns in fulfillment reduce substantially. Once
you are in the top half of earners in our country (and that is almost all of us
in our area), you get a little boost in fulfillment but it doesn't last all
that long. If you get to buy a new car instead of a new car, if you get a
bigger, cuter old house that is so mad nice, it is thrilling for a short while.
But humans are
wired in such a way that we pretty quickly just start
taking that new car for granted and we go on with our lives… Soon enough we can
start grousing about the same disappointments in our lives, we can whine about
the same things that are annoying.
Psychologist have a wonderful term for this. They call it
“hedonic adaptation”. Hedonic adaptation is what happens when you start dating
this wonderful girl, the most beautiful girl at the prom, and you, lucky you,
she actually wants to date you too. And you are infatuated beyond the telling
of it and all you can think about is giving her a kiss the next time you see her…
And sometime
about 18 months later, you find yourself concentrating more on a Super Bowl
replay than a problem that she is trying to tell you about in her life. She is
just going to be there and so will this silly little problem, but Ray Lewis
just made an incredible tackle to force a fumble. What happened? She is still
Ms. Wonderful. But over time, as the novelty wears off, we just start to take
Ms. Wonderful and Mr. Right for granted. They are just there in the back
ground. And usually, of course, with time we discover that there is some
maintenance involved with this person as well. It is not all cookies and cream
as we presumed. Peel back the flush of romance and genuine intimacy takes some
work, maybe more work than we originally wanted to do.
This is where
there are some remarkable parallels between what Jesus was trying to tell us
about and the broadest insights on living a fulfilling life from the psychology
department today.
In our text
today, Jesus reads, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has preached
good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives, to set at liberty
those that are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of God.” And he
closed the book and said “Today the scripture is fulfilled in your midst.”
The people are
horrified and they try to kill him because they assume he has self-appointed
himself as a Prophet or a Messiah, a problem that will plague Jesus to the end
of his life. It is what does him in eventually.
But there is
another meaning to those words which gets trampled in the outrage. Our
fulfillment is not out there in the future, our
fulfillment is now as well. Actually, it is more importantly now, and only
secondarily in the future.
Or, as our
psychologists have observed when we actually started studying people that are
living fulfilling lives, we find that they live intrinsically, from the inside
out. They are not primarily driven by external rewards like wealth, fame, or
power.
They are driven
internally and sometimes- quite a lot of the time- wealth, fame, and power
attract themselves to these people because of the quality of what they have
cultivated within.
The great
sculptor of the Renaissance, Michelangelo, is reported to have said of his
magnificent sculpture of David, “I saw an Angel in the block of marble and I
just chiseled till I set him free.”
When we finally
started to study people that had found fulfilling lives, it turns out that they
were exactly driven by some ‘goal pursuit' that they worked manically to
achieve. Those goals, nothing wrong with them, were tempered by the fact that
they had found their inner mission, their inner talent, their
inner gift.
It turns out
that they had that inner gift nurtured by mentors, spouses and friends so that
they felt confident to practice that gift over and over and over again.[iii]
As it turns out, being able to find your signature strength is critical to
developing personal meaning and purpose in your life. And if you have a spouse
and friends that really appreciate you because you do what you do, that is one
of the most fulfilling things we can experience day in and day out.
So if you can
discover what it is that you do well and you can figure out how to make that
central in your life, either as your vocation or as a deeply important hobby,
and you can express that in a community of people that value it, you are well
on your way to unlocking the key to intrinsic living. You, too, can set the
Angel free from the block of marble. Just keep chiseling.
You probably
know that the Pope commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine chapel at the
Vatican. It was probably the biggest commission in history and it made
Michelangelo famous for thousands of years. But Michelangelo was resentful
about the project. It took him away from sculpting. It was one of those
commissions that he just couldn't refuse, the Pope was very demanding and
wouldn't take ‘no' for an answer. So Michelangelo finished the project after
many years, a grand project in it's own right. But if
you look at the ceiling in the corner, where he signed his name, he wrote,
“Michelangelo Buonaroti, Sculptor”.
Like most of us,
he had more than one signature strength, but he knew
where he had to return to find that deeper spiritual center that he would live
out of more fully. This turns out to be more deeply important than we earlier
realized.
What we started
to realize is that probably a fair number of people in history that we think of
as successful or famous or important might not have set out to become
successful or famous or important. But they became that because they realized
the potential that was within them at a particularly propitious juncture in
time and it's social importance won great accolades
and riches too.
A couple years
ago, I saw one of the winners of the Nobel prize
interviewed just after they had given their acceptance speech at Oslo and some
reporter was asking them how the prize had changed their lives. The scientist
looked a little quizzical, so the reporter said something like ‘what are you
doing tomorrow, are you going to Disneyland?' How are you going to celebrate
your great fortune and treat yourself. “Actually”, he
said, “I think I'm going to the lab”. Sure, a little vacation is wonderful. But actual greatness comes from
realizing your potential day in and day out, developing the wonderful gift that
God put uniquely inside of you.
The other
finding that is interesting is that it isn't very helpful to our well being and
our deeper spiritual fulfillment to compare ourselves to other people. And how the popular culture of celebrity loves to tempt us out
there on this one.
When we've done
studies on this, and encouraged people to compare themselves to their neighbors
in terms of how much money they make, how many perq's they have, or how much
recognition they get, the results are pretty dismal. It is almost a guaranteed
way to make yourself miserable, to feel like you don't measure up, like you
aren't getting what you deserve, like you aren't fulfilled and won't be
fulfilled.
What we found is
that we are much more genuinely fulfilled by looking inside of ourselves,
staying in touch with our needs. And you know what? Most of us are doing a
pretty good job of getting those real needs met. Absent introducing these other
“wants” by comparing ourselves to our peers, we are more fulfilled than we know
and many of these so called “wants” aren't really as desirable as other people
suggest they are.
The 10
Commandments put it negatively, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbors stuff or
thy neighbors life”. Or as Jesus might have put it,
“you are asked to live your life. All these other lives are taken.” Live out of
your center. Become yourself. Celebrate the beauty of you. You are a child of
God. ‘In you', God says, ‘I am well pleased.'
Cheryl Crowe is
right, fulfillment in this life is ‘not getting what you want… it's wanting
what you got'. The answer to that craving in your soul is not ‘more' and it is
not ‘better', though there is nothing intrinsically wrong with either.
But even with
more and better, we all have ‘hedonic adaptation', we get used to it and don't
notice so much in due season. And the spiritual antidote is cultivating
appreciation in your life, especially in the middle of it, turning again and
giving a quiet thanks in gratitude for who you have become and the blessings
around you that you've got.
I was struck
this week at the Inauguration by a moment like that caught the President in
gratitude. Just after he finished his speech after being sworn in, the whole
entourage was encouraging him to get on to the next thing. As he was leaving
and heading back into the tunnel to the Capitol, he turned and looked back. He
said out loud, “I want to take this in. I'll never see this again.” And for just a moment, he savored his life as
a blessing.
It is so
important because soon enough the daily grind will devolve into a contest of
vain ego, deceit and competition- and that is before we have to deal with real
enemies.
Appreciate your
life. Appreciate those that you love. Do something that is thoughtful, do
something that is surprising and demonstrate to them just how important they
are to you. Show them that you care for them.
As Saint Paul
says, there are a variety of gifts that we all have, so let's use them to
promote each other toward a common good and serve God through cultivating a
love that brings us together.
Rejoice in what
makes your spouse and your friend interesting, colorful and who they
wonderfully are. Find a way to bless them and unleash the spiritual resonance
that comes from living out of your center in community with others.
May you be able
to say to those around you, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has
anointed me to preach good news to the poor. She has
sent me to proclaim release to the captives, to set at liberty those that are
oppressed, to proclaim that you are acceptable to God… And behold this hope of
scripture is fulfilled in your midst.” Amen.
