When Harvard University happiness researcher Arthur C. Brooks was 50, he found his bucket list from when he was 40 and had an epiphany: “I looked at that list from when I was 40, and I’d checked everything off that list. And I was less happy at 50 than I was at 40.”
This made him excited because it contained exactly the kind of clinical data he wanted to study happiness. His conclusion: happiness is an equation. Your happiness is equal to what you have divided by what you want. So, you can be happier by either having more or wanting less.
But wants and desires are two different things. Our wants are often natural desires that largely come from our instinctual limbic system. We really want a cheeseburger or that fancy new thing. This system of feelings/desires is often fleeting and short lived. It was often designed to help us survive. Our conscious pre-fontal cortex, however, is our more lasting decision making system. Deep senses of stability and happiness come from that system – but it must get voice over the impulses from the limbic system that are constantly seeking more.
“I was making the mistake of thinking that my satisfaction would come from having more. And the truth of the matter is that lasting and stable satisfaction, which doesn’t wear off in a minute, comes when you understand that your satisfaction is your haves divided by your wants…You can increase your satisfaction temporarily and inefficiently by having more, or permanently and securely by wanting less.”
His study showed that moving our natural desires that come from the instinctual limbic system to the conscious pre-frontal cortex can be done by simply examining each want and then making a choice. “When I write them down, I acknowledge that I have the desire. When I cross them out, I acknowledge that I will not be attached to this goal.” This freed him to stay grounded in the long lasting things and yet acknowledge the natural desires so they don’t control us.
A person with a faith background knows this to be true. No amount of possessions or wealth will bring us true, lasting happiness. If it did, the richest people in the world would always be the happiest and the poor would always be the saddest. What scientists found is that over a certain amount, money isn’t even a good tracker with happiness. If you travel, you’ll find people in countries earning fractions of what folks in developed nations earn – yet are just or even more happy. People making tons in big cities are sometimes more unhappy than simple, poorer rural people.
For believers in Christ, we know that all the wonderful things in this world are just a foreshadowing of the eternal happiness we will find fulfilled when we live forever with God. Our hearts are shaped for relationship. Our hearts have a hole in it that will only ever be fully filled when we finally come home to our heavenly homeland. We cause ourselves pain when we try to replace that relationship with things and pursuits here on earth that ALWAYS fade. Instead, we need to see the world as a means to learn and develop that relationship with God and learn how to love one another despite the brokenness we encounter.
Not bucket lists
I found this statement about bucket lists to be true as well. I was in a college course when a professor introduced me to this idea. He said to imagine you had 3 first class, all expense paid tickets and you could put whatever destination in the world you wanted. He was making the point that people with college degrees will often have the opportunity to do something like that 3 times in their life, but people without the educational and networks we were making might only ever get 1 dream trip in their life. But growing up in a rural background, the idea I would soon be able to actually fly or go anywhere I wanted in the world with the opportunities I was getting was a new idea for me.
So I did that. I made a bucket list of places I wanted to go – and every few years as I ticked things off the list. I, like many millenials, started valuing experiences over possessions. As I ticked items off the list, I would re-visit and add more. I won’t say that the travel and things I experienced weren’t amazing. My life has been profoundly changed for the better by those experiences.
Did those experiences in themselves make me happier long term? No. Instead, what it taught me was the difference between external, worldly happiness and real internal happiness. Real happiness didn’t come from all the experiences and places. It often came from the relationships and friends I made.
It also made me realize there were amazing people everywhere in the world – even right in front of me at home. I didn’t need to travel around the world to find complete fulfillment or love others – opportunities were around me in everything I did. I could choose here and now, with those around me, to love and be loved. When almost all our desires could be fulfilled with a daily relationship with God and others around me – I could barely care about possessions beyond what I needed day to day.
Where does your true joy live?
