Aging toward bucketless happiness

Sometime between the decline of pre-industrial drudgery and the rise of contemporary leisure, mainstream America (i.e., middle-class, white, educated, especially city-dwelling folks) came to expect happiness as an automatic benefit of being alive. We tweaked the language of the Constitution's promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to insist on the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the possession of happiness. Preferably all the time. This expectation was probably helped along by the “do your thing” and “self-fulfillment” movements of the late 20^th century, but whatever its source, it is now a fixture of our cultural psyche: We are convinced that we deserve to be happy, and we expect life to make good on the promise. Of course, even at its best, happiness is intermittent. I don’t know anyone who feels especially happy during a bout of the flu or a traffic stop or a fight with a loved one. But in general, in the broad picture, the drive to be happy is pretty compelling.

To live by this narrative, we need to set about doing things that will make us happy, so we spend a lot of energy trying to figure out what that might be. Some folks look for it in relationships, some in mind-altering substances; some hope to find it in wealth and possessions, some in service to others, some in power, some in religious practice; some turn to self-help books, some create bucket lists. Some keep looking for a recipe, a Google map to Happiness.

Now as it turns out, psychologists and assorted other social scientists have been exploring the question of happiness—what it is and how people find it—for some time now. In fact, volumes have been written about it. Probably the most interesting thing I’ve learned from the research on the topic is this: happiness comes not from having stuff but from having experiences.

You're probably wondering just what kind of experiences bring happiness. Well, it happens that I came across this article the other day that asks just that question. The answer this article offers reframed my thinking about happiness and how we experience it—especially as we age. It helped to clarify why the notion of a “bucket list” just doesn’t work for me (a topic I discussed here before).

Here are the questions these authors posed:

What types of experiences should individuals pursue to extract the greatest enjoyment from life:

The extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime experiences that people tell others about and often commemorate in photographs on their (actual or virtual) walls?

Or the simple, ordinary experiences that make up the fabric of people's daily lives?

And here's what they found:

It turns out that “extraordinary experiences”—the “collectible” experiences, the stuff of photo spreads and favorite stories—are associated with happiness only for younger people, who perceive their futures as open and unbounded. It seems that these experiences help to forge people’s sense of who they are in the world. Accumulating extraordinary experiences is part of defining yourself, creating an experiential (vs. an occupational) résumé. Of course, what counts as “extraordinary” depends on the individual. It could be traveling around the world in a hot air balloon or winning the local bowling tournament, bearing a child or completing a pilgrimage to a holy shrine. What makes it extraordinary isn’t so much its magnitude or singularity as its role as a core theme for stories about yourself, its role in defining who you are as a person. For younger people, happiness might look like this: “I'm loving this process of creating my life. The future looks wide open and I want to experience it all.”

As people grow older, though, as their sense of who they are becomes clearer and more grounded, they are likely to gain their greatest happiness not through these extraordinary experiences but through deep satisfaction with the everyday events of their lives. Instead of collectible experiences, older people find happiness in the flow of every day. It's these daily experiences that are self-defining now, experiences that express the life we've forged over the years. And it's these experiences that bring happiness. For older people, happiness might look like this: "My life has been rich with experiences, and I'm happy with where they've brought me. I love the life I've created.” 

At this point , I expect some folks are thinking something like this: “Wait a minute! We don’t have to stop creating our lives. We don’t even have to stop defining ourselves (at least in part) by extraordinary experiences. We can keep having those, too.” I agree. But it makes sense to me that the balance between these two equally happiness-inducing types of experience shifts with age. The reality—like it or not—is that as we age, the time available for forging a dramatically new and adventurous life declines, along with the physical ability and money to sustain such efforts. But the important point is that this does not mean the demise of happiness. On the contrary, although we may well have found happiness in extraordinary experiences during the course of our lives, the very good news is that happiness does not decline even in the absence of those "collectible" experiences. On the contrary, a whole new realm of happy experience opens, one that we would not have had the wherewithal to craft or the perspective to appreciate in our younger years.

So I have begun to consider this (another) gift of age: the ability to take great pleasure in the lives we have created without feeling driven to collect extraordinary experiences.

Of course, that ability is in itself extraordinary.

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