It has been in favor for a few years for us in positive psychology to “reinvent” happiness. Just a few days ago, I got a solicitation for an online course from Sonja Lyubomirsky (a researcher of happiness from the University of California, Riverside), literally titled Reinventing Happiness. Familiar with Lyubomirsky’s work, I know she and others define a happy person as someone who is generally satisfied with his or her life and experiences frequent positive moods (e.g., fun, joy, interest, pride, etc.). Lyubomirsky and her colleagues’ working definition of happiness (in 2005, might have evolved since then), included three elements:
- Frequent positive experiences;
- High life satisfaction;
- And, infrequent negative experiences. *
* (They say affect instead of experiences, but we all know what they mean.)
Through the work of positive psychologists, there is even an emerging model to highlight why some of us are happier than others. The research suggests that we can increase our well-being and happiness, when we—you guessed it—engage in fun and positive activities.
So having a bias toward fun is highly likely a crucial element of happiness, but why then does deliberately pursuing happiness often backfire? One reason is a focus on subjective happiness insidiously makes us compare where we sit in the world against our peer group’s happiness set point. Another reason is the pursuit of happiness often puts our focus on the destination of “being happy.” When we focus on happiness too much, it creates self-awareness of a perceived gap between where we are (current state) and where we’d like to be (future state). Becoming aware of this gap between where we sit now and some imagined future state often subconsciously makes us self-identify as unhappy. “Well, I’d like to be as happy as Joe, but I am not, so I guess I’m unhappy.”
Mauss and her co-researchers also concluded that the pursuit of happiness, especially here in the West, often involves striving for individualist gains. A byproduct of focusing too much on ourselves is that we become less concerned with others. In other words, a personal pursuit of happiness damages our connection with others, making us feel lonely, and generally paradoxically contributes to us being less happy.
To this end, Lyubomirsky and colleagues (2005, p.111) posed a provocative question in their research:
“Is the pursuit of happiness merely a bourgeois concern, a symptom of Western comfort and self-centeredness, a factor that has no real impact on psychological adjustment and adaptation?”
In our pursuit of happiness, it is also common for us to overindulge in spiritual materialism. Gratitude interventions are becoming notorious for their overuse and potential for harm. For instance, when overprescribed (e.g., the “magic” number of things to be grateful for in a day is five), people may struggle to find a predetermined number of things they have been told to be grateful for. Emerging evidence suggests that this practice leaves many of us feeling empty because we are not meeting the pseudo-required amount of blessings (per day) we have been instructed will make us happy. Or, if we practice gratitude for external validation (#blessed), gratitude can lose its positive charge. In one experiment, students who counted their blessings once a week showed significant improvement in their well-being, while those who counted their blessings three times a week experienced a decrease in their well-being.
“Those who are preoccupied with being happy and who seek happiness too often and too directly—may find themselves counterintuitively thwarting their own happiness.” (Fritz & Lyubomirsky, 2018, pp.106-107).
Why the Impermanence of Fun Makes it so Special
It’s clear from both research, as well as simple observation, that many of us are putting too much focus on the destination of happiness and neglecting the joy of the journey—diminishing the power of our fun moments. In contrast with happiness, which has a bias toward an endpoint, when we are deliberate about creating fun moments and actively engage with the activity at hand, we are living in the present. A bias toward fun is about balancing your day-to-day life (hours, minutes, seconds) with moments of enjoyment, amusement, entertainment.
Research backs me up on the notion that if we prioritize fun in our daily lives, it likely won’t backfire the same way chasing happiness does. In fact, having a bias toward fun can often inadvertently lead to happiness. Professor Barbara Fredrickson, another prominent researcher of happiness, is a proponent of an approach that encourages the creation of positive emotions not only because of their temporary pleasantness but also because of the long-term effect they can have on our well-being and growth. She developed these concepts into the “broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions.”
“Positive emotions appear to broaden peoples’ momentary thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources” (Fredrickson, 2004, p. 1369).
In other words, when we experience positive emotions (e.g., fun, joy, interest, love), we are also developing the raw goods for living well. For example, if we have fun with another person, we are building lasting bonds and expanding our social network. We’ve created something that we might draw upon later, like a fun memory to relish and/or a friend to call upon during a not-so-fun moment. Fredrickson points out that resources accrued during states of positive emotions are enduring. They are durable beyond the fleeting point of enjoying yourself and having fun.
The Science and Art of Fun’s Impermanence
Ultimately, nothing is permanent, including happiness. The awareness of every moment’s impermanence can make a person poignant, or with the right mindset, it can be liberating and refreshing. We cannot circumvent the truth that our moments of joy are fleeting. However, we should celebrate this because impermanence also applies to most moments of our pain and sorrow, too. In fact, the acceptance of impermanence might be another crucial component of our well-being. For instance, Brian Don and Sara Algoe of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined that people who are more accepting of impermanence are less affected by daily dips in intimate relationship satisfaction. However, with a maladaptive attitude, the experience of impermanence manifests as anxiety, increasing our uncertainty, which then creates a vicious feedback loop.
I have found that a bias toward fun is the best way to break this cycle. By celebrating fun’s inherently variety and variability we make impermanence our friend. A life full of fun helps us get comfortable with the idea that there is more to all our moments than waiting to arrive at an imaginary destination.
Sure, “this too shall pass” applies to fun as well as strife. But, by accepting that our fun moments never last, we grow to appreciate them more in real-time; more importantly, we get better at prioritizing them, so they outweigh our bad moments. Having a fun bias while embracing the impermanence of fun by fully engaging in the present is a sustainable approach to happiness, helping us build lasting resilience and connections. This isn’t just my take; it’s an assertion backed by a lot of scientific evidence (some of which you’ll find below).
If you have any questions or comments, please do leave drop ’em in the comment section. I’d love to hear from you.
Sources & further reading:
Barash, D. P. (2014). Over time, Buddhism and Science Agree. Nautilus. Available at: http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/over-time-buddhism-and-science-agree
Don, B., & Algoe, S.B. (2020). Impermanence in relationships: Trait mindfulness attenuates the negative personal consequences of everyday dips in relationship satisfaction. Journal of social and personal relationships. 37(8-9): 2419-2437.https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407520921463
Ford, B. Q., Mauss, I. B., & Gruber, J. (2015). Valuing happiness is associated with bipolar disorder. Emotion, 15, 211–222. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000048
Fredrickson, B.L. (2004). The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 359(1449), 1367-1377. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2004.1512
Fritz, M. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2018). Whither happiness? When, how, and why might positive activities undermine well-being. In J. P. Forgas & R. F. Baumeister (Eds.), The social psychology of living well (pp. 101-115). New York: Psychology Press.
Gordon K. (2003). The Impermanence Of Being: Toward A Psychology Of Uncertainty. Journal of Humanistic Psychology.43(2):96-117. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167802250731
Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2019). Revisiting the Sustainable Happiness Model and pie chart: Can happiness be successfully pursued? The Journal of Positive Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2019.1689421
Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111–131. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.9.2.111
Mauss, I. B., Savino, N. S., Anderson, C. L., Weisbuch, M., Tamir, M., & Laudenslager, M. L. (2012). The pursuit of happiness can be lonely. Emotion, 12, 908–912. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0025299
Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., & Savino, N. S. (2011). Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, 11, 807–815. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0022010