Happiness Is an Empty Promise | Steven Hayes | Big Think

Happiness Is an Empty Promise

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Too many people are striving for a quick and dirty way to feel hedonistic bliss without accepting the negative feelings they have, says Steven Hayes.

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STEVEN HAYES:

Steven C. Hayes is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. His chief research areas include human language and cognition and its application to various psychological difficulties. His bestselling book "Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life" rose to #20 on the Amazon.com list of all books in early 2006 and became the #1 self-help book in the US for a month. He was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the American Psychological Society (now known as the Association for Psychological Science), which he helped form. His other books include "The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living," co-written with Russ Harris and published in 2008.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What is happiness?

Steven Hayes: You know, there's many different definitions of it. I think one dangerous definition of it is to think of happiness as kind of a warm, joyful, **** feeling in your heart that you have to pursue and grab and hold onto for fear that it'll go away. I mean, it's fun when you have those feelings, but we know, and the evidence shows, them more intent you are on having those feelings and chasing those feelings, that's a butterfly that flies away the more you chase it. A better way to think about happiness that actually is something that I think you can reach towards is, it's living in accord with your values and in a way that is more open and accepting of your history as it echoes into the present, that's more self-affirming, self-validating and values-based. The Greeks had a word for it; they called it eudaimonia, and it's not a bad definition. And I think that definition of happiness is something that will empower human lives.

The definition that we have that gets very hedonistic and emotion-oriented -- the problem is that there's too many quick and dirty ways to chase that in ways that end up being unhelpful to people. If you avoid the feelings of betrayal and the sense of insecurity that comes in relationships that aren't working by running into detuned relationships, by sexuality that isn't connected to intimacy, et cetera. Yeah, you might feel good, but it doesn't live well. If you just have another martini or even more severe forms of substance use, yeah, it might feel good, but it doesn't live well. And if you escape into kind of a materialism -- the right car, the right woman, the right house, the right trip, the right place, the right job, the right praise -- you know, these things -- all of the folks who are wise in our culture, over the history of our culture, have written about the dangers of trying to define a meaningful life that way. But commercial culture and our media is constantly encouraging us to think that if we feel good we live well. And then we're only too happy, thank you very much, to sell you goods and services from the dancing oivoids and the pill you can take, or the trips or the cars or the clothes or the women that you can get with -- whatever that is that will give you the quick route to that.

And it's an empty promise. I think young people know it's empty, but they're not quite sure what to do. And I kind of look at what's on the T-shirts and I see another solution, which also worries me. I see "Just do it." "No fear." -- this kind of suppressive response to the treacle that the culture tries to define for us as a meaningful life also blows up on you. "No fear" is not something that you should put on your shirt. How about "I can hold my fear and still connect with you"? Put that on your shirt. "It’s okay to be me, with all of my history." Put that on your shirt. So there's a middle path. There was a guy who sat under a tree a long time ago...

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