Accelerating Past Happiness

If I had a chance to grab a beer with Thomas Jefferson, I think we’d get along OK. I’d compliment him on his design for Monticello and thank him for founding a nation that would become the envy of the world for its freedom and prosperity. (I’d also let him down easy when I told him that the whole world knows about his affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, through DNA testing). He’d probably be too busy gawking at cars and smartphones to receive my appreciation.

But my favorite contribution from Jefferson to the world is the idea that God has created in us the inalienable right to pursue happiness. It’s such a well written and subtle phrase that outlines a profound reality: humanity does not have the right to happiness itself, but it does have the right to pursue it. Whether or not we find happiness, implies Jefferson, is unrelated to the right to search for it.

Many tend to think of the search for happiness as each individual person’s quest for whatever makes them happy. Each person would be free to pursue relationships, hobbies, charitable works, fandoms, political parties, and experiences that they found meaningful and good. But what if we discovered that humans aren’t so different, and we are all made happy by the same basic things? What if we uncovered a pattern of joys that 99% of all human beings share? It turns out, despite all our differences across race, religion, gender, and class, we all derive happiness from the same basic sources.

Here’s what the research is telling us: your happiness will dramatically increase if you invest in your family and friends, take care of your body, join a club, practice your religion, avoid anger, and be generous to others with your time and money. This short list comes from writer Arthur Brooks, who writes the happiness column for The Atlantic and teaches “the happiness course” at Harvard. Pursue these things, says Brooks, and the data says you’ll grow in happiness. This is true for people of all stripes and life situations.

We know what makes people happy, but as Jefferson wisely understood, knowing what makes us happy and owning the right to pursue it doesn’t mean we’ll actually achieve it.

If happiness is to be pursued, I wonder if we have the stamina to keep up. According to sociologist Harmut Rosa, the pace of change in the last century that we have witnessed in technology, society, and our inner personal lives has given us all a case of whiplash. My grandparents, for example, grew up without electricity in rural Virginia and slept on hay-filled sleep sacks with 9 or 10 siblings. Today, just shy of 90 years old, their smart tablet gives them access to the totality of human knowledge, most of the music that’s ever been written or recorded, and the ability to video chat with their family across three or four different states.

All this change, according to Rosa, leads to more change. Technology becomes obsolete at shorter intervals. Social cues and morays change at the drop of a time. The result is that everyone must keep up with the change or be left behind at a disadvantage. Despite technology’s promise to make life more efficient, it in fact accomplishes the opposite. It takes time to keep up with the changes in technology and remain competitive in the marketplace. It also takes more time to remain social, as our relationships are impacted by these new technologies as well. All of a sudden, we discover we cannot find rest or satisfaction, because resting and satisfaction put us behind in keeping up with the varying changes around us. Acceleration also prevents us from investing in timeless and universal sources of happiness, filling our calendars instead with “keep up” obligations.

It isn’t difficult to find examples of acceleration in everyday life. Acceleration is cheaper LED lights, which mean more affordable Christmas decorations, which means more neighbors are decorating for Christmas, which means we experience the peer pressure to decorate for Christmas ourselves. Acceleration is politically correct language, which changes quickly and shapes public discourse, and those who don’t know the language are excluded from that discourse. Acceleration is being assigned a new social media platform to manage on behalf of your company, the extra work it takes to switch classroom management systems, and the new app your company wants you to learn and download onto your smartphone to track your location as a remote worker. Acceleration is looking at your calendar and realizing that your next true day off won’t come for another month at least, and you might need to reschedule that dinner you organized a while back to finish up a last-minute work project.

However much there is to be done, the answer is always “more.”

Acceleration also highlights the unspoken fears evoked by God’s sabbath commandment to rest one day a week. To do so is to risk falling behind at work, to risk being overtaken by market competitors or ladder climbing colleagues. To rest is to fall out of favor with other families who book that time with Latin lessons, youth sports, computer programming camps, instagrammable trips, or some other parenting fad. For some, the refusal to rest is about staving off existential fears and quitting inner discontent. Others are desperate for rest, but can’t risk the serious financial or social consequences.

It’s enough to make one miss those old blue laws, which kept most non-essential services closed on Sundays so everyone could take a break and go to church. In the state I live, there is only one blue-law left — car dealerships statewide must be closed on Sundays. I’m told that some years ago, a politician made an offer to car dealership owners to lead the charge and let car sales happen seven days a week. The dealership owners urgently and quietly waved the politician on to another cause — in a cutthroat and competitive business like theirs, they were grateful to have Sunday off. The exhaustion and burnout that would come with a seven-day workweek was not worth the additional profit they would make. Sundays remain for them a state-mandated ceasefire, where one industry gets to genuinely clock out for twenty-four hours. Blessed are the peacemakers, as they say.

How can one pursue happiness if the goal posts keep moving with every step? In our constant state of acceleration, happiness becomes increasingly hard to realize, a mirage on the desert horizon. Blue laws are a nice idea, but they can’t slow down the heart that always wants more than what we have.

One wonders if, then, when Jesus offers rest to the weary and heavy laden, whether happiness isn’t intentionally part of the package. Or perhaps happiness is a byproduct of the gospel, a fruit of love repackaged as joy and gifted to an overworked and exhausted generation. Maybe the spiritual freedom from slavery that the New Testament promises is freedom from the treadmill of competition and earning. These are deep concepts with implications for just about every area of life. Thankfully, I have the opportunity to pursue them freely.