spirituality (SOC Happiness)

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people in the world as a century ago: This means a twelve-fold increase in global units of happiness. We may be losing perspec- tive person-by-person, but we are making it up on volume!

The fact remains that men and women in the West have ever

more health, possessions, and freedom, but these advances do not make them joyful. Why not? And what can be done about it?

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Chapter 5

MORE OF EVERYTHING

EXCEPT HAPPINESS

1 f you sat down with a pencil and graph paper to chart the I trerids of American and European life since the end of World War II, you'd do a lot of drawing that was pointed up. Per-capita income, "real" income, longevity, home size, cars per driver, phone calls made annually, trips taken annually, highest degree earned, IQ scores, just about every objective indicator of social welfare has trended upward on a pretty much uninterrupted

basis for two generations. Many subjective graphs would also . show steady upward trends: personal freedom, women's free-

dom, reduction of bias against minority groups. But your graphs would lose their skyward direction when the

topics turned to the inner self. The trend line for happiness has been flat for fifty years. The trend line is negative for the number of people who consider themselves "very happy," that percent- age gradually declining since the 1940s. And the trend line

would cascade downward like water over a falls on the topic of avoiding depression. Adjusting for population growth, ten times

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as many people in the Western nations today suffer from "uni- polar" depression, or unremitting bad feelings without a specific

·cause, than did half a century ago. Americans and Europeans have ever more of everything except happiness.

Drawn to this paradox of progress, in recent years a number of researchers have begun to study happiness or "subjective well-being," in the ten-dollar term that researchers prefer. They join the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has been conducting polls on the topic since just after the end of World War II. So far the findings of such re- search have been published mainly in academic treatises, such as Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies by Robert Lane, a political scientist at Yale University.l Roughly 60 percent of Americans described themselves as "happy" in the year 1950, Lane found, and the figure has not changed since, except for tiny ticks. up ·and down. Through the same period, the portion of Americans who call themselves "very happy" has declined from about 7.5 percent in 1950 to about 6 percent today. The decline of the -"very happy" class continues, while the big action is the increase in the depressed class.

A_bout 25 percent of Americans and Europeans now experi- ence at least one bout of depression in their lives-clinical in the sense of sustaiJ?.ed or debilitating, not just a few days of being in a bad mood. A study by Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School recently estimated that 6.6 percent of Americans now experience at least one episqde per year of "major" depression, not just bad-feelings, but the kind of depression that makes you not want to get out of bed.2

Incidence of bipolar or "manic" depression, the condition in which a person alternates between bouts of animated glee and immobilizing gloom, has not increased during the postwar era;

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MORE'of EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 165

this illness is now thought to be mainly chemical in origin, and is treated with drugs. Unipolar depression, on the other hand, just keeps rising in incidence, with no end in sight. Unipolar de- pression is thought not to be a physical disease; something within our society, or within our own minds, causes it. And though the rising rate of Western depression may relate to some extent to better diagnosis and the loss of taboo associated with this topic-often the depressed of previous centuries were qui- etly kept in darkened rooms and not discussed-a tenfold in- crease in two generations is far too great to be an artifact of

improved diagnosis alone. From the standpoint of happiness math, it should be reiter-

ated that it is far better there be millions of free, prosperous peo- ple who have the time and leisure in which to become depressed-many undergoing their depressions in nice houses and attempting to distract themselves with nice vacations or nice dinners out-than numerous possible alternatives. Unipolar de- pression has not risen in the developing world, probably because so many people there are focused on simply staying alive that they have no time or leisure in which to experience depressed frames of mind. Many of our ancestors might also have been so engaged in constant exertion, and so dependent on each day's

. work outcome for sustenance, as to have had no time for de- pressing moods. Our ancestors might also have had few expec- tations beyond daily exertion, and thus been less prone to suffering depression in response to setbacks. The United States and European Union generate enough wealth to spoil their citi- zens with depression; huge numbers of people in these places can, in terms of money or time, afford to feel badly:

Yet unhappiness is a genuine concern. Unhappy people are not merely feeling sorry for themselves or guilty of descent into

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solipsism, although of course there are examples of both. (We all know people who trudge around acting theatrically disconso- late, to the point at which there is temptation to shove the per- son against the wall and holler, "You idiot, snap out of it!") Most men and women who suffer depression are experiencing a condition they would like to escape, one that detracts from the quality of their lives. Millions of others are not clinically de- pressed but feel the sort of unfocused unease that prevents their one chance at life from conferring the satisfaction it should. This, too, is a genuine concern. Sadness should not be the de- fault human condition.

Happiness, in turn, is a worthwhile and important goal. To be happy is not an exercise in self-indulgence, rather, one of the pri- mary objectives ·of life. Aristotle called happiness "the highest good" and said that an enlightened society would be ordered with·the·goal of helping its citizens become happy. The framers of Americ~n democracy did not laud "the pursuit of happiness" because they considered this self-indulgence. Rather, they knew that happiness both ought to be a goal of life, and makes for bet- ter citizens. Dennis Prager has devoted an entertaining, quirky boo!<, Happiness Is a Serious Ptoblem,3 to the notion that peo- ple have a duty to become happy, because happiness is the wen.:. spring of altrqism. Higher up the scale of literature, a century ago the poet Robert Browning wrote, "Make us happy and you make us. good"; twenty-three centuries before that, Aristotle said, "Living well and doing well are the same as being happy." In Aristotelian usage, "doing well" meant exercising virtue. Aristotle and Browning both anticipated current research, by so- ciologist David Myers of Hope College and others,4 showing that happy people commit fewer crimes, donate more to charity, perform more volunteer work, are more likely to aid strangers, and exhibit other traits of virtuous citizenship.

MORE OF EVERYTHING EXCEPT IIAPPINEIS I 167

It's impossible to be certain, of course, precisely what happiness is: Men and women may go back and forth on whether they feel happy; there is no hard metric, like an SAT score or a forty-yard

: dash time. Much of what is known on this subject from a data standpoint is "self-reported happiness"-what people tell re- searchers or pollsters. People talking to pollsters or psychologi- cal researchers may feel they ought to describe themselves as happy, because unhappiness implicitly suggests rejection by oth- ers, or some private failing. Many people genuinely can't make up their minds whether they are happy. They might describe themselves as happy if the phone rings with a pollster's call at 7 P.M., and unhappy if the same pollster calls with the same

questions fit 8 P.M. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, who

won the 2002 Nobel Prize for Economics, and a colleague named Amos Tversky spent the better part of two decades try- ing to devise a reliable, impartial scale of "subjective well- being," and eventually gave up. Kahneman tested various sets of questions on groups of volunteers, and never came up with any-

thing conclusive. Kahneman found, for example, that if he asked college stu-

dents whether they considered themselves happy, most said yes. But if he first asked college students how long it had been since they went on a date, and then asked whether they considered themselves happy, most said no. Other small tricks skewed re- sults, or generated information that was amusing but inconclu- sive. For instance, "There's absolutely no difference I could detect in overall happiness in California versus Kansas," Kahne- man says, "but people in both places believed that people in California should be more happy." At one time, Kahneman

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asked subjects if they presented a smiling face to the world but were privately unhappy. He stopped asking this question be- cause it caused many people to burst into tears.

Even if research data on "self-reported" happiness must come with an asterisk, it is illuminating nonetheless. Edward Diener, a psychologist at the University of Tilinois, has spent his career studying this topic. He views it as a research field of rising im- port, as societies everywhere "are starting to assume that not just the affluent, but every individual should achieve some kind of satisfaction in life," Diener says. His studies have led him to the following conclusions.

• Lacking money causes unhappiness, but having money does not cause happiness.

• As a group, the old are happier than the young; for most peo- ple the sense of well-being increases with age.

• Millionaires as a group are no more happy than people of av- erage income.

• T~e disabled and chronically ill report a slightly higher sense of well-being than the population at iarge, perhaps because they have a ~eightened appreciation of the value of their own lives.

e The psychological norm for the United States is positive, but only by a tiny bit. On a test of life satisfaction that Diener has designed, the average score is "slightly satisfied."

Since popular culture worships youth, many might profess disbelief at Diener's contention that aging increases happiness. But nearly all researchers find a higher sense of well-being

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MORE OF EVERYTHING EXCEPT HAPPINESS I 169

among the old than the young, defying the standard asspmption that youth is the. acme of life. "The minds of the young are full of all the things they want to achieve and have not, whereas most of the elderly have either achieved what they wanted or made peace with the fact that they never will," Diener explains. There is, Diener reports, also no evidence that the approach of death causes panic or dread among senior citizens. As a group, even those faci':lg the age of death "experience more satisfaction with their overall life than young adults," Diener says.

Diener's discovery that the impoverished are unhappy is hardly surprising. In a classic confirm-the-obvious exercise, Diener traveled to Calcutta, interviewed its street-dwellers, and came home with irrefutable evidence that people who are very poor experience "a low level of life satisfaction." Studies by Diener, a Dutch researcher named Ruut Veenhoven, and others show that in all nations and cultures, the poor are unhappy, and for the obvious reasons. Some philosophy and art romanticize the idea of the person who has nothing and cheerfully·lives from hand to mouth, rewarded by finding tranquility in the lack of material grasping. The Roman philosopher Seneca, for example, declared, "No one can be poor who has enough, nor rich who covets more." But a good guess is that hardly any person with- out resources has ever achieved a serene life, not even saints and bodhisattvas. Seneca, bear in mind, himself occupied a suite on the emperor's palace grounds.

As income begins to rise, Diener's research shows, the sense of well-being rises with it-but only up to a point. The ascent from poverty to a middle-class existence with a home and reasonable financial security markedly improves happiness. But once the middle-class level is reached, money decouples from happiness and the two cease having anything to do with each other. Diener

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has tested a fair proportion of the multimillionaires (now, often, the billionaires) on the Forbes 400 list of the world's richest men and women, and found they have only a tad bit more life satis- faction than people living at the median income. Money has made them rich, but there are things money cannot buy; the data on this point are now in.

Nearly all well-being research supports the basic conclusion that money and material things are only weakly associated with leading a good life. Kahneman sums up his research in the simple phrase, "Life circumstances don't seem to have much ef- fect on happiness." Veenhoven's work suggests that the magic number at which money decouples from happiness is about $10,000 per capita per annum. "In the relationship between na- tional happiness·and national income," he says, "we see a very clear pattern of diminishing returns, with the bend-off point at about $10,000 annual income·." Per-capita income in the United States in 2000 was $29,499.5 Both the United States and West- ern Europe are long past the statistical point where, on average, money· can still buy happiness.

As to why money stops buying happiness once people become mid1.le-class, there ate several theories. One is that the goalposts constantly move. Diener notes that although inflation-adjusted income has ris~n spectacularly for almost all Americans and Eu- ropeans since· World War II, "What people want in terms of ma- terial things and life experiences has increased almost exactly in lockstep with the postwar earnings curve."

A generation ago, to own a home, a car, and to take one an- nual vacation using the car was viewed as material success. Now the goalposts of the good life have moved. Huge numbers of Americans aspire to a large home, at least two cars, regular din- ing out, and jet vacations to alluring destinations. Fancy watches,

MORE OF EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 171

expensive SUVs, free-spending parties, and other extravagances can start to look like necessities, as part of the blurring of needs and wants. Abundance itself may prevent ever higher incomes from having any relationship with happiness by creating a never- ending progression of new things to want, so many new things entering the market each year that no one could keep up with it

even if money were no object. The blurring of needs and wants is important here because

needs can be satisfied. A person needs food, clothing, shelter, medical care; education, and transportation; once attained, these needs are fulfilled. Wants, by contrast, can never be satis- fied. The more you want, the more likely you are to feel dis- gruntled; the more you acquire, the more likely you are to feel controlled by your own possessions. "The victor belongs to the spoils," as David Myers has memorably phrased this quandary

of affluence. The transition from modest community to affluent suburb or

other desirable address-a graduation ceremony tha.t many mil- lions of Americans and Europeans have attended in recent decades-may only serve to instill an insidious new form of dis- satisfaction. In a small town or a modest community, a per- son might not be able to afford all that he or she wants, yet most of what is available is reasonably close in money terms-the stores are Target, the restaurants TGI Friday's, the housing three- bedroom. Land in an affluent community and you are immedi- ately confronted by all kinds of pricey stuff that even the well-off have trouble affording. Tiffany, four-star French restaurants, new BMWs, and gated McMansions with circular drives now sur- round you, making what you have attained seem insufficient.

In 2001, the writer David Brooks spent several months com- paring median-income towns such as York, Pennsylvania, with

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affluent suburbs such as Montgomery County, Maryland. Enter- ing stores and restaurants in median towns, Brooks realized that businesses had sized up their market and priced accordingly. People he interviewed in the median-income towns did not envy the better-off residents of New York City or San Francisco, and had few resentments about money "because where they lived they can afford just about everything that is for sale," Brooks wrote.6 In York, Pennsylvania, the top of the local market was Red Lobster restaurants, Laura Ashley clothes, and above- ground swimming pools-within the reach of the typical resi- dent. On the other hand, residents of Montgomery County, Brooks found, often were upset and unhappy about money, even though their average income was three times as high. Higher- income residents of the fancy suburbs constantly drove past huge homes of people much better-off than they, and exclusive stores selling items only the rich could afford. This rendered them dis- content even though, objectively, they were well-off. For them, money had utterly decoupled from happiness.

If there were some way to create a society in which everyone had a three-bedroom house and a Honda Accord, with no man- sions or Ferraris but also no housing projects or homelessness, the s~nse of happiness might be served, as people wouid not see around them extremes to covet. But there is no known way to create such a society while maintaining freedom and economic vibrancy; the primary experiment along these lines, the old So- viet Union, resulted only in housing projects.

In a· kind of nature's-revenge law, the fact that there will al- ways be something you desire but cannot possess ensures that even the rich will never be materially satisfied, since no matter how loaded you become, some estate, some company, some work of art, some prize or honor will always be denied to you.

MORE Of EVERYTHING EXCEPT HAPPINESS I 173

The richest individual in world history, Bill Gates, cannot have what others possess and will not sell, while Gates has consis- tently been frustrated in his attempts to acquire what he seems to desire most, public respect.

Sociologists have long assumed that rising income does not nec- essarily confer rising happiness owing to "reference ·anxiety,"· a fancy term for keeping up with the Joneses. As incomes rise, people stop thinking, "Does my house meet my needs?" and in- stead, "Is my house nicer than the neighbor's?" Contemporary psychology tends to view this traditional assumption as not quite right; Veenhoven, for example, believes many people have become aware of the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses pitfall. In- stead, current research suggests that it is the trends in a person's own life, not in the neighbors' lives, that induce dissatisfaction even when times are good.

Here, research suggests, the essential element is ~n expecta- tion of more. A person with a middling but rising income may be happier than a person with a high but stagnant income. A person with a small house who expects to move into a medium- sized house may be happier than a person with a large house who knows it is the largest he will ever own.

Suppose you could have either an income of $50,000 with a promise of a $5,000 raise annually, or an income of $250,000 that would never rise. The latter deal would bring you far more money over any working lifetime; studies by Diener and by oth- ers suggest that the former would be more likely to confer a sense of well-being. A moderate but rising income would make

every year better, materially, than the one before, whereas a higher but stagnant income makes each year seem like a repeat

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of the last. The sense that things are not still improving-even if you've reached a high level-brings discontent because, as David Myers likes to say, "the second helping never tastes as good as the first."

· Th..is factor would appear to shed much light on why citizens of the highly prosperous United States often seem so unexcited about their circumstances. Starting from the comparatively low point of the 1950s-an era of smaller houses, far more poverty, far less education, and far more intolerance than today- everything seemed to be headed up. Most Americans believed their nation, and their own material circumstances, were sure to get steadily better. For most people, the expected improvements did in fact come, and today the better-off condition that so many dreamed of has been attained by huge numbers of Western citi- zens. But if for no other reason than that life improved so much so fast; it's hard to imagine that the decades to come will be even better still. Children who grew up in two-bedroom houses now own four-bedroom houses; their children, in their turn, might also ·own four-bedroom houses, but the odds are that most will not own six-bedroom houses. The expectation that each new yc:ar should be notably better than the last, once deeply in- grained -in the American psyche, now fades. We are constantly eating the s~cond helping and it does not taste as good as the first.

ANTICIPATION-INDUCED ANXIETY. Thus belief about whether the future will be better may prevent us from appreciating that the present is good, an effect that might be called "anticipation- induced anxiety." Despite the cliched complaint that men and women are shallow and live for the moment, psychology shows

MORE OF EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 175

that if anything, tens of millions of Americans and Europeans live too much for the future and ignore the moment. K;hneman's work suggests that many people are obsessed with whether the years to come will be better or worse, to the point of overlook- ing that things are nice right now. Parents and schools teach the concept of delayed gratification, of always looking ahead while keeping the nose to the grindstone. Many people learn this les- son so well that they can only look ahead, growing excessively concerned about future improvement. "We are much better at preparing to live than at living," the Buddhist philosopher Thich

Nhat Hanh has written.? Carol Graham and Stefano Pettinato, two researchers at the

Brookings Institution, have found anticipation-induced anxiety at work in many nations.s "Individuals' subjective assessments

of their economic progress, as well as their expectations about the future, are as important as objective trends," Graham and Pettinato have written in the voice of social science. Their re- search shows, for example, that although average income, health, and living standards have improved steadily in most of Latin America in the last two generations, Latin Americans as a group are unhappy, because their expectations for the future are

not positive. Nations, not just regions, have differing levels of well-being.

Veenhoven has studied the relative levels of happiness among nations. His top five are the Netherlands (his home!), Iceland, Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden while his bottom five are Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Bulgaria. The United States fin- ishes number eight for national well-being on Veenhoven's scale.

Scandinavian countries have such high well-being, many have speculated, because their socialism-lite governments have gotten almost everyone to the level of middle class, creating something

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vaguely like a society in which everyone has a three-bedroom house and a Honda Accord. Also, dishonesty is severely sanc- tioned by Scandinavian culture, and an atmosphere of trust seems to promote general well-being.9 This does not necessarily mean the Scandinavian model would work elsewhere. The Scan- dinavian states have until recently accepted almost no immi- grants, have stagnant economies owing to excess regulation, and have such perilously low birthrates that the relationship of rising pension costs to falling taxes may wreck these nations' national budgets. The former Soviet states may be places of stark unhap- piness in part owing to dashed expectations-citizens thought the end of communist tyranny would rapidly improve standards of living, and instead that goal now seems a generation distant. This makes former Soviet citizens unhappier than those of the ravaged nations of central Mrica, where many people have minimal expectations.

Note how high Ireland finishes on Veenhoven's scale. This na- tion's per-capita income is less than half that ofthe United States or Switzerland, but Ireland has a "count your blessings" culture and things have gotten so much better so fast in Ireland in the P?-St decade that national optimism is rampant. In contrast, Japan finishes almost at the bottom of well-being surveys, despite one of the wor~d's highest per-capita incomes. To researchers, the Japanese describe themselves as abjectly miserable. Perhaps this is because Japan's four decades of ever better economy has now been replaced by economic contraction, causing an anticipation- induced anxiety that life is no longer trending up. Or perhaps this is because Japan is even more money-obsessed than the United States. Much of the Japanese national sense of well-being is premised on money, and money emphatically cannot make anyone happy.

MORE OF EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPJNns I 177

A fundamental reason that acquiring money does not sync with acquiring happiness might be stated in cool economic terms: Most of what people really want in life-love, friendship, re- spect, family, standing, fun-is not priced and does not pass through the market. If something isn't priced you can't buy it, so possessing money may not help much.

True, many have used money in attempts to buy respect, love, or friendship, and you can certainly use money to buy sex. But the kind of sex you get for money isn't likely to be as good as the unpriced kind-and the same obtains for the kind of respect, love, or friendship you can buy with money. There are ways to make an economic purchase of fun: vacations, amusement parks, movies, sports events. But when it comes to fun, there's little relationship between price and value, as a simple inexpen- . sive picnic might turn out to be a wonderful time while a cost- is-no-object resort stay might turn out unsatisfying. Even this intangible of life, which the market does attempt to price, doesn't relate to money in any way that reliably produces the desired re- sult. We've all spent money on things that were supposed to be

fun, and later wished we.hadn't. Surely most people would say that the most important com-

modity that lacks price· and thus cannot be bought is love. The human need for love may not just be a matter of sentiment: In their groundbreaking 2000 book A General Theory of Love,1o three academic psychologists, Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, proposed that love is actually a physical neces- sity. "Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, where each per- son meets the needs of the other because neither can provide for

his own," the authors wrote.

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In the clunky theorist's phrase "simultaneous mutual regula- tion," the authors were referring to studies showing that the lim- bic portion of the brain, from which emotions arise and where dreaming takes place, only functions properly among those with love, family ties, or close friendships in their lives. People who lade for love or close friendship often develop limbic abnormal- ities; the limbic part of the brain doesn't keep watch over regu- latory chemicals properly. The chance discovery, in the 1950s, that certain drugs intended to treat tuberculosis also palliate de- pression is considered evidence of this concept, because this demonstrates that the emotional self is at least partly biological in origin. At first glance, the fact that drugs improve mood can sound like depressing determinism-"chemicals make us happy." But if emotions are biologically seated within the brain, then they are real and central to human life, not just some weepy distraction, and they must have evolved, just as our physical forms evolved.

Enlightenment thinking revered abstract thought, which arises from the neocortex portion of the brain, over all other mental functions; Enlightenment theorists viewed emotional needs as ha~dicaps people must rise above, and many in the West have embraced this view, perhaps to their detriment. A General Theory of Lqve counters with the contention that the human yearning for- love and intimacy is part of our evolution-even that, chemically, the brain evolved a need for closeness as part of the stimuli that make it ftmction correctly. "Isolation, sorrow, bitterness, anxiety, loneliness and despair," the three psycholo- gists supposed, "are in today's United States and European Union greater concerns than supply of any material item."

There's no need -to dwell on the modern lament that trends in Western life tend to break up friendships (constant job-switching

MORE OF EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 179

and travel), scatter families (moving for schools and care~r), en- courage people to give up on relationships (in some European Union nations, such as Sweden and Belgium, two-thirds of mar- riages end in divorce), 11 and persuade people to view themselves as disconnected individuals ratl1er than as parts of communities. America has always .been a nation of "joiners," and a plethora of religious, community, sports, fraternal, academic, artistic, pro- fessional, leisure, and similar organizations continues to thrive in the United States: Given population growth, most likely more Americans today belong to more organizations than ever before. But it's hard to argue that we are not steadily less connected to

each other. Research by Lewis, Amini, and Lannon, and by others, has

shown that human beings are happiest around other people. The Harvard University researcher Edward 0. Wilson has called this the "biophilia" hypothesis-that living things yearn for proxim- ity to other living things, which in the case of Homo sapiens means people need close connections to other people)2 There are of course men and women who genuinely wish to be left alone, but, on the whole, married people are happier than sin- gles, people in large families are happier than those in small families, those who are busy and attend lots of events where they interact with other people are happier than those who hang around the house. Research finds that a person is more likely to feel happy in a friends-or-family social setting than when alone. This stands to reason; in a social setting or in the household you are interacting with others, your mind stimulated or diverted, while when sitting alone, nothing distracts you from thinking about your disappointments. One of the haunting points Lewis, Amini, and Lannon have made is that Americans and Europeans live longer and are healthier than ever, yet are also lonelier than

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100 J TilE PROGRESS PARADOX

ever. In 1957, 3 percent of Americans described themselves as "lonely." Today, 13 percent do,13 Rising loneliness may be can- celing out the other positives.

The same forces that are causing standards of living to rise and longevity to improve also promote loneliness. Steadily smaller households, made possible by prosperity, mean steadily less hu- man interaction. Telecommuting, a personal convenience made possible by technology, means less human interaction. The culture of complaint, in which Americans and Europeans are encour- aged to carp about ever smaller matters, drives us to take offense, which may cost friendships; the adulation of the family griev- ance, a prime topic of daytime television, drives us to find fault with those whom genetic chance made our relatives; the idealized images of romantic partners in entertainment and advertising can make a date, or a life, with an admirable but not-extraordinary person seem a disappointment rather than a privilege.

. . THE ·NICE-HOTEl-ROOM FACTOR. Forces of prosperity are likely to continue to render it practical for more and more people to live alone, work alone, be alone. Americans and Western Europeans ha~e ever longer lives in which to enjoy achievements and pos- sessions, while losing the sense of closeness to others that helps make it all vrorthwhile. This might be called the "nice hotel room factor.'' For increasing numbers of Americans and Euro- peans, life is like being in a really nice hotel room, but not hav- ing a good time because no one else came along on the trip.

This dynamic alone may constitute half the reason why the Western nations may be steadily better off but no happier. Or perhaps the epidemic of depression sheds a better light. People

MORE OF EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS J 101

aren't merely failing to become happier-which, after all, is only the absence of a positive. By the measure of depression, citizens of industrial nations are feeling worse by the year.

The ·tenfold increase· in unipolar depression in the industrial nations during the postwar era surely qualifies as an epidemic, if a silent one. According to the World Health Organization, there are a hundred million people alive today, most of them in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the Euro- pean Union, who are clinically depressed. Depression annually costs the United States $50 billion in treatment expense and lost wages,14 plus an incalculable amount in human heartbreak .

Not every researcher accepts the tenfold-increase estimate, in part because it is based mainly on "cross-sectional" studies, meaning research staged all at once, rather than "longitudinal" studies, in which the same group of people is tracked over sev- eral decades. Longitudinal studies are considered the gold stan- dard of social science, but are also the most expensive kind of study; the leading goldmine of U.S. psychological data, some- thing called the National Comorbidity Study,was cross-sectional. Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School has estimated that the increase in Western depression may be on the order of two- or threefold, not tenfold.15 An estimate of tenfold increase is too high, some researchers suppose, because current therapy tends to classify ever milder problems as depression, while an aging population will include a rising share of despondent older peo- ple whose multiple bouts of depression raise overall averages. (Senior citizens as a group may be happier than those of other ages, but seniors who do suffer depression often experience fre- quent episodes; generally, psychological damage is thought to accumulate over a lifetime, growing more acute among the af-

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Nevertheless many prominent researchers have embraced the estimate of a tenfold increase in unipolar depression in the West- ern nations. One who endorses this number is Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and a past pres- ident of the American Psychological Association. Seligman has developed a four-step theory on why depression is rising so much.

The first cause, Seligman thinks, is individualism. "Unipolar depression is a disorder of the thwarting of the 'I,' and we are in- creasingly taught to view all through the 'I,' " Seligman believes. Past emphasis on family, faith, patriotism, and community was sometimes suffocating, but also allowed individuals to view their private setbacks as minor elements within a larger context . Today in the United States and Western Europe, where formal adherence to .religion is declining, community loyalties are di- luted by constant moving, families are smaller and fragile, and, where only a minority now tell pollsters they consider devotion to country important, 16 the "I" is practically the only lens through which to view events. "Rampant individualism causes us to think that our setbacks are of vast importance and thus something to become depressed about," Seligman continues. If your life is centered in family; community, faith, or nation, and things aren't going well for you, surely there will be some person or some part of an i1,1stitution to whom you are connected for whom or where things are g~ing well, or, at least, where the problems seem more important than yours. If, however, your life is centered on pure individualism and some~hing goes poorly, there is no coun- terweight. You feel bad and nothing pulls on you in the other direction.

From the beginning of the Enlightenment, through the estab- lishment of Jeffersonian democracy, through the French existen- tialist movement and up to the present day, writers, thinkers,

MORE Of EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 103

artists, and huge numbers of typical men and women have fought for the idea that people should be free agents, unhindered by the demands of church, state, or social convention. Now that condition is largely achieved in the West, bringing with it un- precedented liberty. But freedom isn't free, as military theorists like to say. In the case of depression, the cost of freedom is leaving every person to the fate of pure individualism, without consola- tion or context. If all goes well in your life, pure individualism may work out fine. But the setbacks that almost everyone en- dures may, in the unanchored framework of pure individualism, accumulate into a cause of depression-about which, then, you may have no one or no institution to turn to, other than the dis-

embodied voice on the 800 number at your HMO. As his second cause of the depression epidemic, Seligman

blames the self-esteem craze. It may seem counterintuitive that focus on raising self~esteem, which is supposed to make people feel good, results in them becoming depressed. But then, many initiatives have unintended consequences. "Self-este~m empha- sis has made millions think there's something fundamentally wrong if you don't feel good, as opposed to just, 'I don't feel good right now, but I will later,' " Seligman says. If you don't feel good now but will later, that's a minor matter. If something is fundamentally wmng with your life, that's pretty depressing.

Self-esteem counselors and others in the movement maintain that people ought to feel good about themselves all the time, a notion most psychologists find hopelessly unrealistic. Everyone has setbacks, or bad days, or simply periods of time when things are boring or crummy; don't obsess because you'll have better days, is Seligman's advice. The preaching of self-esteem, now common in public schools and in the midafternoon-television and talk-radio universe, instills the idea that a person ought al-

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ways to be beaming with satisfaction, and if not, that he or she must have been wronged by someone or some institution and should be angry. Fixation on self-esteem may, in the end, only cause us to go looking for things to become upset about. People who go looking for things to become upset about rarely fail to find them.

Seligman's third cause of depression flows from the second, being the "postwar teaching of victimology and helplessness." Intellectuals, politicians, tort lawyers, and the media have in the last few decades become ever more proficient at discovering vic- tims. So many classes of victirnhood have been proclaimed that, in cumulative terms, today every person in the United States may be able to call himself or herself a victim of something or other; leaving aside the question of, if we're all victims, then who did the victimizing?

Surveys, Seligman notes, show that ever higher percentages of Americans describe themselves as victims. A steadily rising per- centage of incoming college freshmen, for example, characterize themselves as having been victimized or possessing little control over their fates. For university freshmen, such views may actu- ally_ be rewarded-those claiming victirnhood on admissions es- says probably increase their odds of being accepted to college, and the more. innovative the victimhood claim, the better. But for contemporary Americans to claim lack of control over their own fates is striking, since, objectively, personal freedom has never been greater. The We're-All-Victims worldview only serves to deter men and women from asserting control over their own psyches.

Seligman finds particulfltly counterproductive, and depression- inducing, the craze for adults asserting they were victimized by their parents. Only in extreme cases, such as sexual abuse, is

MORE OF EVERYTHING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 105

there a clear link between parenting behavior and adult person- ality, Seligman thinks the psychological data show. "You are en- titled to blame your parents for the genes they gave you but you are not entitled, by any research that I know of, to blame them for the way they treated you," Seligman says. Yet the blaming of parents has become a minor industry in the contemporary United States, inspiring talk shows and whole categories of junk-science litigation. A relevant note: Depressed patients often blame their parents for their condition, but once recovered from depression, usually stop blaming parents and describe their for-

mer claims as a crutch . Fourth of Seligman's inventory of causes of depression is run-

away consumerism. Shopping, sports cars, expensive chocolates, and the like are "shortcuts to well-being," Seligman supposes. Acquiring material things may produce a momentary feeling of gratification, but the feeling rarely lasts. Incessant purchases may be piled atop one another in the quest for the same gratifi- cation that purchases once brought-this is the basic dynamic of shopaholism-while ever higher spending activates the cycle of work-and-spend. Spending as a "shortcut" to well-being is crippling owing to debt, or by locking a person or a head of a household into the soul-draining existence of always chasing

maximized income. That runaway consumerism may be a malady in the clinical

sense is suggested by the fact that it sometimes responds to medication. Recent studies have suggested that shopaholism can be treated by the antidepressant Celexa.17 This may sound like a postmodern practical joke-if your problem is that you spend too much money, what you need is an expensive prescription drug. But it's inarguable that runaway consumerism harms some people's well-being: They spend too much, or waste too much

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time shopping, or make compulsion-driven purchases of things they don't even necessarily want. Perhaps excessive consumerism is a cause of depression, or perhaps a symptom, with people shopping .too much because they are depressed-metaphorically, endlessly seeking that which they do not find. In either case, if an antidepressant relieves the condition, this tells us consumerism and depression are linked. That is not good news for a society grounded in consumerism.

WAKING UP FROM THIS AMERICAN DREAM. To the many research- based theories of why rising Western living standards have not increased happiness, instead being accompanied by a wave of depression, there might be added one more factor: call it "wak- ing up from the American dream."

From·the beginning of the American republic, what the ma- jority of citizens sought, and oriented their lives around seeking, was . the American dream. Once, that meant you owned the farmland on which you toiled. Then it meant a decent job in in- dustry and an education. By the early postwar era, the American dre~m meant a home, a caJ; some spending money, Saturday night out. By roughly the 1970s, as home- and car-ownership became comrr:on, the American dream also meant graduating from college, having a professional career, being an individual- ist. Europeans have been seeking their version of this dream for centuries longer. In all thes~ dreams, material security and per- sonal liberty are the essence.

Until approxilnately the current generation, the majority of Americans and Europeans failed to achieve most of the Ameri- can dream. They longed for· affluence and personal freedom, failed to attain it at least in some part, urged their children to

MORE Of EVERYTIIING EXCEPT IIAPPINESS I 187

continue the quest. Implicit in the longing was the assumption that those who did achieve the dream would become happy.

Today, throughout America, the European Union, Canada, Japan, and Australia, the majority achieve the American dream. Reasonable prosperity, personal liberty, high education, and good health are the daily condition of perhaps five hundred mil- lion people in the Western nations. The creation of entire regions of the world in which most people are well-off-in which the typical person lives what all previous generations considered a dream-is without precedent in history.

But having achieved general prosperity, we must awaken from the dream and realize that an overall condition of personal freedom and material prosperity does not make us any happier . Don't misunderstand: It is magnificent that five hundred million Westerners are living the American dream. If only every citizen of every nation could! This condition, however, must now be seen in perspective as in the fullest sense a dream, for its vital as- sumption, that the good life would confer happiness, tu~ns out not to be true.

All the many previous generations denied the circumstances of the American dream reasonably supposed that if only they were better off, they would liv:e in joy. Previous generations rea- sonably taught their children to strive to be better off in the hope ot realizing joyfulness. Now most men and women of the West- ern nations have attained the condition of which previous gen- erations dreamed, and although this is excellent news, the attainment makes it possible for society to verify, beyond doubt, that personal liberty and material security do not in themselves bring contentment. That must come from elsewhere, making it time to awaken from the American dream.