If we read enough self-improvement books, learn to think positively, and write down the best things that happened to us in a diary, will it be easier for us to survive life’s adversities? Can we make ourselves happy?
“Happiness is your choice.” In this wonderful, if fictional world, we have to forget that other people or external circumstances can stand in the way of our happiness – unfaithful husbands and unfair bosses, sexual or racial discrimination, cancer, poverty, loss of a job, or even stop selling our favorite discounted cookies.
And yet we are constantly told that only we ourselves can make ourselves happy. “If we can accept as a truth that life circumstances are not the key to happiness, we will have the inner strength to pursue happiness ourselves,” says positive psychologist Sonya Lubomirsky. Motivation guru Jim Rohn echoes her: “I don’t want it to be easier for you! I wish you to be better!”
Paradoxically, this guilt-tinged approach to happiness undermines rather than enhances one’s contentment with one’s life. All existing research unequivocally indicates that our sense of happiness is largely associated with social relationships and support from others. Building such a relationship requires mutual investment in each other’s happiness, not just your own.
The idea of creating happiness through personal effort undermines the sense of interdependence and shared purpose. And as long as we deny the existence of objective obstacles to happiness and blame the person himself, society does not consider itself responsible for eliminating the underlying causes of human unhappiness.
Fortunately, some new research is challenging the concept that the victims themselves are to blame. Richard Pitow, who and his colleagues published the results of their massive study in The Lancet, called the work good news for grouches.
Scientists for about 10 years have observed the lives of a million women living in the UK. And they came to the conclusion that those of them who feel unhappy or live in constant tension, the likelihood of chronic diseases and premature death is no higher than their cheerful peers.
Pitow’s team undertook this study in part because they were trying to dispel a deeply rooted belief in European culture that dissatisfaction with life leads to illness, which means that unhealthy people bring illness on themselves through their pessimism and other negative emotions.
This is good news not only for grumblers, but also for anyone who is not enthusiastic about the recent obsession with happiness that has spread. The idea that we all have an obligation to make ourselves as happy as possible, and if we failed to do this, then we ourselves are to blame, penetrates everywhere.
Since people’s belief in DIY happiness is so deeply rooted, the results of Richard Pitow’s team are unlikely to change anything. However, now there is hope that the minority will find it easier to live in their healthy … pessimism.