Loving less, more

The other day, I got an email from a friend describing her recent retreat to a quiet, secluded cottage where she spent many days just being, calmly being. Among her insights on this trip was the realization of how little she actually needs. She took only a few outfits and not much else. Her pleasure came not from extravagance and the “stuff” that frequently adorns vacation time, but from quiet walks, conversations with citizen conservationists, cooking local food, watching birds, sleeping on the porch wrapped in the sounds of her surroundings. She came home committed to cutting back and paring down.

Her comments reminded me of a recent conversation with another friend, who had a similar experience while rafting earlier this summer, being struck by how simple the days were and how fulfilling without the collection of things that fill our daily lives. And it reminded me of two experiences of my own. One was our recent trip to Ireland, for which (as I mentioned here before) we each took one carry-on with everything we needed for a two-week trip. And we managed fine, not even unpacking several of our bulkier items. I thought at the time about what a good lesson that was: How much do we really need, after all, I asked myself, and how much is just excess—decoration, maybe waste.

The other experience that came to mind is much older. A couple of decades ago, I was on a backpacking trip in Southern Utah with three other women. The four of us had backpacked often as a group, and we lived well together in the wilderness. It was our last morning, and we had just packed up our gear to hike out of the canyon where we’d spent the past week. Standing in the shade of an overhanging cliff, I saw our four backpacks lined up, waiting to be hoisted for the climb out. I stood there for a minute, held to the spot by the view of these four compact packages, realizing that these small bundles could hold everything we needed—all the clothing, all the bedding, all the shelter, all the food, all the cooking, cleaning, and first aid equipment, all the water we needed. And we could carry it all on our backs. I had similar thoughts during and after other backpacking trips—in the mountains, in the dessert, in Alaskan tundra—but none was as profound as that moment at the bottom of Dark Canyon. That spot is still the stuff of meditation for me, partly because it is so peaceful and partly because it’s associated with such calm realization of how simple life can be.

This theme has been floating in my mind since I read my friend’s email, and it brought to mind a flock of research studies in recent years that speak to this very lesson. Happiness, it turns out, comes not from possessions, but from experiences. When people are asked what makes them happiest, it’s not the things they’ve had that make them feel happy, but the experiences—the adventures, the relationships, the moments of profound beauty and profound peace

This seems easy to believe, but not so easy to enact. The immediate gains of gathering stuff are so great: it’s fun to have new stuff, some things are hugely convenient, some enhance our status or appearance, some may even promise to improve our connections with other people. And the distinction is not as simple as it may first appear. Sometimes getting stuff is really about getting experiences. That moment in the desert, for instance, required that we have the equipment to be there, comfortably and safely. Maybe the distinction lies in the question of means and ends. If the goal is to get stuff, we’re in for some serious disappointment when it comes to the happiness scale. But if the purpose of the stuff is to create opportunities for rich and fulfilling, memorable experiences, then we’re in a different position entirely.

I think there’s an age component in this matter of amassing possessions vs. paring down. It seems like young adulthood and midlife are more about gathering stuff, at least among those who have sufficient discretionary funds to do it. Old age, in contrast, is about cutting back, simplifying, paring life down to what’s essential. Partly, that’s a matter of necessity. Finances and physical limitations can make the things of younger years superfluous or even troublesome. I don’t need a backpack any more, and a huge multi-floor home is increasingly not a good idea (not to mention I’m way over housecleaning by now). But I think there’s something else at work, too. It seems that old age brings a new perspective to things—partly because everything is recognized to be so transient now. And as we age, I think, we can see better what has mattered and what hasn’t in making our lives what they are. I can only think of a handful of things that have any particular salience in my best memories, but the experiences I recall with great joy are legion and often come to mind spontaneously.

We’ve probably all had experiences where we realized how little we truly need in the way of things to be happy. And then we come back to “reality” and resume the style of life we’d come to enjoy. Which is fine, I guess.

But somewhere, I’d like to hold the realization that much (most?) of it doesn’t matter much in the long run. If I’m busier collecting things than creating joy, then I’m seriously short-changing my life.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

To comment on this post:  

If you got this blog via email, go to the blog website by clicking on the title at the top of this particular post.

To comment on this post from the blog website, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

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.

To comment on this post, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.