A few months ago the World Health Organization released its Gallup poll survey of 146,000 people across the world to assess which countries were the happiest. The people were asked about their well being in five areas: their sense of purpose, social relationships, financial situations, community involvement and physical health. Based on their responses they were rated as either thriving, struggling, or suffering. To avoid test bias the questions were asked verbally in each person’s native language.
Interestingly the majority of the top 10 happiest countries were in South America with Panama ranking number one. The United States ranked number 26 in the world with only 30% of people rated as thriving in at least three of the categories tested. That means 70% of us are failing to thrive in three, four or all five of the tested categories. What’s going on America?
I am going to offer a possible reason why we are failing so miserably to find happiness. Obviously this is a hugely complex topic with no one answer, but I feel there is probably a general orientation in how we think as Americans that is driving our misery.
We have always been a driven country. By that I mean that we are a proactive people that are driven to get what we want. We are not a passive people that lie down and accept whatever life dishes out to us. I personally think this is a good thing in general, but I think that over the last 70 years what we want has changed in a direction that is driving our unhappiness.
After WW2 America entered a time of abundance. Life was not the struggle it had been previously and hopes ran high for most people. In general everyone felt good about the future and the only threat in the American consciousness was the creeping spread of Communism. The American goal was a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. We launched into the age of comfort. The talk was about how as prosperity progressed our major concern would revolve around how to spend our free time. Labor saving devices were freeing us up on every front. American industry was busy freeing us from having to do much of anything – cooking, cleaning, even working. The belief was that automation was going to free us from the drudgery of even having to work. Consumerism for the products that would give us the most comfort became the message we heard from every angle. Success was measured by the goal of comfort attainment and happiness was equated with comfort.
With the unfolding of the 60’s the emptiness of the pursuit of comfort turned into the pursuit of deeper meaning spiritually and socially, but by the 70’s that trend had failed for most people and the shallow pursuit for happiness as comfort again asserted itself. The relentless pressure of the advertised message of consumerism, as the key to happiness, became the mantra of the next generation. Consumer goods can offer release from effort, which is interpreted as comfort. The problem is comfort is not equal to happiness. We have been duped into thinking that the comfort provided by our purchased things will give us happiness. This is the big lie we have bought into and are now trying to
throw off…sort of. We want more than owning stuff now, but we still want our stuff.
The WHO study points directly to a more reasonable definition of happiness. Notice that financial security is only one item on the list of five markers of happiness. It is very telling that the list of happiest countries is filled with much poorer countries. From our perspective that seems impossible. Wealth is our measure of happiness because of the comfort it can buy us.
Lets look at the other factors of happiness cited by the WHO study – purpose, social relationships, community, and health. We can tick off the last one first. The US ranks 37th in the world for keeping its citizens healthy in spite of having the most expensive healthcare system in the world per person. We are a very unhealthy nation. We ranked number one back in the forties and fifties – what happened? Portugal is better than us. Colombia is better than us. Places I know nothing about like Malta and San Marino are way better than us. The message is clear. If you want to get healthy GET OUT OF THE US.
How could this happen? My simple answer is we have been trained to demand comfort foods and comfort medicine. You can’t get health from either of these. Health requires individual personal effort, not comfort. Comfort is successfully killing us.
Community has always been difficult for Americans because we are the great melting pot of cultures. Community is generally built around the communal sharing of culture. This is much easier to do if everyone shares the same culture. We compensate by banding together based on the sharing of ideas and goals. This generates a reasonable mental connection between people, but lacks the deeply satisfying heart connection of shared cultural sameness.
Social relationships – what can you say? Americans have always been very immature in this arena. This is not to say that there are not lots of other immature cultures, but there are also lots of more mature ones as well. We tend to be very narcissistic and have no value for cultural perspectives other than our own. For instance most European citizens speak several languages, while most Americans can’t even speak English properly.
This brings us to a sense of purpose. How much purpose is fulfilled by keeping up with the latest tech gadgets and spending your days on Facebook? How much meaning is there in life when the average American spends 7 hours a day watching television, or the younger generation even more on the Internet? Some of us buck this trend, but we are not the average. But the television and Internet are comfortable. It requires nothing from us.
Here I believe is the crux of the issue. We fail at happiness because we have mistakenly confused ease with comfort. Ease is that feeling in our heart when we are connected to those around us and we are engaged in meaningful work. Humans naturally seek ease. It feels good and it enables us to exist in our natural state of happiness. That’s right, happiness is a natural state of being. Happiness is not excitement. Happiness is just us connected to life and engaged in our meaningful purpose.
We have confused comfort for happiness. Comfort is that womblike feeling of having all our needs met without having to participate with life at all. Comfort is that relaxing in the easy chair watching TV with a cold beer in your hand. It couldn’t get any better unless they could drip the beer in with an IV so you wouldn’t even have to lift the can to your lips.
Where did we get this insane idea that non-participation felt good? When did becoming a baby equal happiness? America became great on the ideal of hard work and clean living. We were happier working hard and living cleanly. We have been brainwashed by the push to consume rather than work for meaningfulness.
Our drive to consume is at the core of our unhappiness from my perspective. It is the core belief we have been taught that we are in a state of lack that makes us unhappy. Feelings of lack make us great consumers as we try to fill the lack with things we can buy. But this lack feeling can never be met from the outside. Lack is filled by our participation with life as we outflow our hope, skill, and love. We are filled from the inside out.
Living from the inside out produces the feelings of ease that we so deeply want. Ease does not come from chasing comfort. Understand this and you can fill your life with ease.