By David Bornstein
Americans have been obsessed with the pursuit of happiness ever since Thomas Jefferson inserted the phrase into the nation’s founding document. But happiness seems to be on people’s minds today more than ever before. In recent years, a small industry devoted to the exploration (and marketing) of happiness has emerged, with the publication of scores of books on the subject; the development of a new psychological discipline; and the creation of new college courses, including one—Positive Psychology—that has become the most popular offering among undergrads at Harvard.
Americans enjoy an “inalienable right” to pursue happiness. But, according to studies, over the past half century, despite our affluence and technological advances, we have grown no happier and may even have become less so.
Perhaps we can learn from “social entrepreneurs” who depart from the conventional pathways of success in order to devote themselves to solving social problems. What happens when a person pursues a path of action that aligns with his or her interests, talents and values—and also contributes to the well-being of others?
Consider the example of Earl Martin Phalen. Phalen was a first-year student at Harvard Law School in 1991 when he visited a community center in a low-income area of Boston and met 15-year-old youths reading at first-grade levels. Deeply pained, Phalen signed on as a tutor. The following year, he and a classmate raised $12,500 to start a tutoring program they called Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL). Their initial goal was to help 20 underprivileged children make it to college.
After graduating, Phalen’s partner moved on to a law career, but Phalen decided to devote himself full-time to BELL, foregoing lucrative job opportunities. At one point, Phalen had to mortgage his house to cover BELL’s expenses. But today the organization has many supporters. This past year, BELL served more than 10,000 scholars in Baltimore, Boston and New York, boasting impressive, independently-evaluated, reading and math gains. Every one of the first 20 children that BELL worked with has graduated from or is in college.
Does Phalen have any regrets when he hangs out with old classmates who have luxury cars and beach houses? “There is nothing more rewarding than helping our scholars understand who they are and support them in realizing their amazing potential,” he explained. “I feel really fortunate to be probably one of a very small percentage of individuals that actually gets to pursue work they believe they’re put on earth to do.”
Running to Stand Still
One of the most intriguing findings in the literature on happiness is that human beings are not designed to make themselves happy. The unconscious mind “was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life,” notes Jonathan Haidt, in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis. “[P]art of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. [Our unconscious mind] cares about prestige, not happiness, and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious.”
However, the kinds of things commonly associated with prestige—the things we think will make us happy—financial success, fame, winning awards—do not actually provide a lasting sense of well-being, as Daniel Gilbert explains in his best-selling book, Stumbling on Happiness. No matter how much we acquire, we soon want more. Psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell dubbed this the “hedonic treadmill.” Once you’re on it, you have to keep running just to stay even.
Consider the past 50 years in America. Compared to our grandparents, we are amazingly wealthy. We have twice as many cars per person, our houses are twice as big, and we eat out almost three times as often. With the significant exception of Americans living in or near poverty, never before have so many people been so inundated with so much stuff and so free to pursue their whims. And yet over the same period, the divorce rate has doubled, suicide has tripled and violent crime has quadrupled.
Today, a million kids drop out of high school each year, and obesity, diabetes and depression are off the charts and striking people at younger and younger ages. Perhaps most troubling, in polls, more Americans than ever before say that they don’t trust strangers and feel that the nation’s best days are behind them.
The Failure of Our Success
And yet the pressures to advance along the current path continue to intensify. How many people spend their lives making and selling things they don’t believe in to acquire or achieve things that don’t fulfill them? Three out of four students entering American colleges today consider it “very important” or “essential” that they become “very well off financially”—nearly double the proportion in 1970. It so happens that the highest paying profession—law—is also the one with the highest levels of drug abuse and depression. All of this may help to explain why we are so obsessed with happiness. Is America experiencing the failure of its success?
Could it be that our biggest social problems today—failing public schools, skyrocketing health costs, widening wealth inequalities, collapsing infrastructure—are related to the fact that, in the midst of plenty, so many Americans still feel they don’t have enough? Could this explain, at least partially, why, as a nation, we have disinvested from so many public goods that don’t yield short-term returns? Happy, trusting, optimistic people almost always want others to prosper, too, and they think about the future. It is only when we get stuck in a mindset of scarcity that we cling to what we have and wall ourselves off from others, especially the have-nots. Isn’t this what we have done in America? Look at New Orleans.
Opportunity for All
One night in 1999, Gerald Chertavian called his father with big news. He and his partners had just sold their technology company for $83 million. Chertavian was 34. “I remember calling my dad and saying, ‘I’m really scared right now. I never thought this would happen to me,’” he recalled. “I was overwhelmed by it. My dad said, ‘Don’t make any decisions for now. Just take some time.’”
Chertavian had grown up in a middle class family and attended public schools. When he was a freshman undergraduate, he had signed up as a Big Brother and mentored a child named Levi. “I loved it,” he recalled. “I was good at it. I got great satisfaction watching this young boy grow and learn.”
After graduating, Chertavian worked on Wall Street and mentored a Dominican boy named David, spending every Saturday for three years with him and his family and friends. “Here were some of the most talented, capable young men and women I had ever met in my life.” Chertavian said. “Yet they didn’t have the means to get into the mainstream of this country.”
With Chertavian’s help, David became the first person in his family to graduate from college. He has gone on to live his dream, working in the field of animation for companies like Walt Disney. “David taught me that the opportunity divide in this country can be closed,” Chertavian said.
After listening to his father’s advice, Chertavian spent months thinking about his life. “I was very wealthy,” he told me. “But a lot of people were saying, ‘You can go and do it again. You can make ten times as much money…’” He asked himself, “What do you want for your future? What do you want for your children?” He had always loved mentoring. Nothing came more naturally or honestly to him. So Chertavian decided to create an organization to prepare urban young adults from underprivileged communities for careers in technology and finance.
Today, that organization, Year Up, works in Boston, New York, Providence, R.I., and Washington, D.C. Since its inception it has graduated more than 800 students who, 90 percent of the time, move on to higher education and challenging careers in major firms like Merrill Lynch and JPMorgan Chase.
When Chertavian made the decision
to commit to Year Up, he actually felt freer than he had ever felt before. “It was the first time in my life that I did not care what people thought,” he explained. “Whether they approved or disapproved, I felt content and at peace with my decision to embark on this journey. That is not to say it is easy—it certainly is not. Rather, it is meaningful in a way that brings me true engagement and fulfillment.”
There are more than 4 million young people like David in the United States, Chertavian said. Year Up intends to reach as many of them as possible.
A Path of Discovery
Many of today’s books on happiness are filled with advice that anyone would do well to follow: simplify your life, count your
blessings, take care of your body, express gratitude, don’t forget to reflect on your feelings, find meaningful work and cultivate relationships. But one question that is missing is: Can happiness be successfully pursued in a self-interested fashion? The Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang-tse did not think so. He described happiness as “the absence of the striving for happiness.” And John Stuart Mill observed: “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”
Consider Michael Lerner’s story. One day in 1972, Lerner, a 28-year-old Ph.D in political science, met a little girl in a school in Berkeley, Calif. Lerner, who had also studied child psychology, was told that the girl had been diagnosed as mentally retarded, but after a psychotherapist took the girl off gluten and dairy products her behavior improved dramatically. “It turned out she was not retarded,” Lerner said. She only had a learning disability.
Lerner is a soft-spoken man with a calm but vivid presence. “This was a profound turning point in my life,” he recalled. “In all my years of studying child development, no one had ever suggested that nutrition played a role in consciousness.” At the time Lerner was on sabbatical from Yale University, where he was one of two candidates being considered for a tenured position. He was expected to return to Yale to teach. But he was so taken by this little girl that he decided to remain in California and start a school to explore the role of nutrition in learning behavior disorders.
“Having a shot at tenure at Yale is a big deal,” he recalled. “The idea of leaving Yale to start an experimental school for delinquent kids was, from my parents’ point of view, professional suicide.”
But the experience set Lerner on a path of discovery that he couldn’t have imagined. Over the past 35 years, he has collaborated in building Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute, the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, a nationally recognized support program, and the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, an international partnership of scientists, clinicians, patient advocates and others, which focuses on understanding the impact of the environment on health.
Lerner’s journey has not been without struggles and doubts, but it has enriched his life. “There is this enormous, coherent, indefinable mystery in the world that we can all connect to and all participate in, if we so choose,” he explained. “As T.S. Eliot says, you have to sacrifice nothing less than everything to do it. But it brings great joy if you’re willing to make that sacrifice. So I’ve been working on that for 30 years.”
The Worst Thing in Life
I have spent the past 15 years writing about social entrepreneurs like Phalen, Chertavian and Lerner. Many have walked away from careers that could have brought them great wealth and prestige in order to attack problems that lead to unhappiness for others. Along the way, they have encountered resistance and often experienced loneliness. Yet by connecting their needs, values and abilities with the needs of others they seem to have found deep sources of strength and joy. Just having the opportunity to write their stories has, in turn, made me feel more alive.
For generations, Americans have been animated by the ideal of the “American Dream”—the notion that (within the law and unconstrained by circumstances of birth) anyone should be able to pursue his vision of the good life. Too often, however, this dream has been reduced to the dream of getting rich.
William James has written that, to feel most vitally alive, people need to seek out and follow the “inner voice,” which says, “This is the real me.” Unfortunately, from grade school onward, many of us are encouraged to develop our marketability instead. As we get older, we focus increasingly on security. But when we consider the risks in life, we think in terms of money, health and safety—forgetting about potentially the biggest risks of all: dying with much of our lives unlived, dying with gifts still inside us that have never been given.
Dr. Rachel Remen co-created the Commonweal Cancer Help Program with Michael Lerner. In her wonderful book, My Grandfather’s Blessings, she observed that after working with cancer patients for 20 years, she has “come to realize how much stress is caused by the sad fact that many of us believe in one way and live in quite another.
“The worst thing in life isn’t death,” she explained. “The worst thing in life might be to miss it.”
Not long ago, I met a man who had recently attended his 25th class reunion of Yale Law School. He told me that half the people he spoke with—mostly successful lawyers—were unhappy or bored with their work. Now these are not underprivileged youths; these are people who have options. Why choose boredom? Perhaps Bertrand Russell had it right when he observed, “It is preoccupation with possessions more than anything else that prevents us from living freely and nobly.” Or perhaps Kierkegaard came closer to the deeper truth: “There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming.”
Recently, I asked some social entrepreneurs about the things that made them feel most happy and unhappy. Not one spoke of money, position or status.
Love and Respect—In Action
Mark Hanis, the 25-year-old co-founder of the Genocide Intervention Network, which seeks to stop the killing in Darfur and prevent future genocides, referred to the special high he gets when his organization makes headway on its goals—gets legislation passed or sees indications of increased public support, such as “getting a binder full of letters from students about how shocked they are about a contemporary genocide and how they pledge to stop it.” It gave him particular pleasure to see his young staffers take on greater responsibility.
Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder of the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture firm that finances businesses, which provide access to water, health services and housing to underserved markets, commented on the thrill of “creating something of beauty where nothing before existed” and “feeling part in some way of human beings’ overcoming challenges and thriving.”
Javed Abidi, the founder of an organization in India that fights for the employment rights of disabled people, said the greatest joy for him is when justice is obtained for a disabled person. He mentioned the examples of a young man with dyslexia getting admission to Delhi University and a woman becoming India’s first deaf civil servant.
Others spoke of the pleasures of spending time with family, collaborating with colleagues to solve problems, witnessing ideas come to life, having experiences that affirm a sense of oneness with the world, and attending to the marvelous details of life—“listening to the rain drumming on one’s hat,” “dancing in the first big rainstorm of the season in Ghana,” “sitting with women on floors talking about their lives.” Perhaps the strongest theme was “actualizing and witnessing the growth of others’ potential”—using your life to enable the life in others to flourish.
Conversely, the greatest sadness, other than losing loved ones, came when human beings failed to listen respectfully to one another and degraded or betrayed one another, when teams fought internally and, in general, when the feeling of trust and unity with others, and the world, was injured in some way.
The unifying force behind so many of these elements, noted Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, the leading global fellowship of social entrepreneurs, was “love and respect—in action.” Happiness was not consciously pursued, but it clearly emerged naturally, as an unintended by-product.
Michael Lerner captured the essence of this way of being: “I think the real task in life is to put everything—our highs and our lows—in the service of the great light that we each have in our hearts, let our every movement of body and heart serve life,” he explained. “We cannot know whether we are closer to the light when we feel most alive or in our darkest moments. Our task is just to persevere in service, to put one foot in front of the next on the path.”
David Bornstein is the author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and The Power of New Ideas, which was recently published in an updated paperback version by Oxford University Press. Visit |www.howtochangetheworld.org to learn more.
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