Happiness through Process, Fulfillment through Work

Over a century ago, William James wrote: "Inner happiness and serviceability do not always agree. What immediately feels most good is not always most true, when measured by the verdict of the rest of experience." As one of the original pragmatists – even a humanist before the term was coined – his words resonate more loudly in today's world than ever before.

In yesterday's New York Times, columnist David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece on how recent college graduates are entering a world for which they are vastly unprepared. College provides a structured environment and inculcates students to succeed in that structure. The real world, he contends, is unstructured and open. Graduates will thus begin searching for a role with little guidance and may spend up to a decade or more finding that niche that suits them – or rather, suiting the niche in which they find themselves.

Brooks offers that at such a young age, we likely don't know ourselves well enough to know what we want to do with our lives. Yet we must start paying back those college loans, so we get that first and second job. Eventually, a problem in one of those jobs becomes a vocation, and it becomes our mission to fix the problem. He summarizes: "[Our] cultural climate... preaches the self as the center of life. But... [we] discover that the tasks of a life are at the center." Spoken like a true apologist of the American machine, though perhaps still in line with James. But am I the only one who sees a glaring problem with the gospel of Americana running contrary to its reality? I've never been a Christian, so I can't relate to the cognitive dissonance of realizing such lies. I still believe in the Dream.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, famous for his book Authentic Happiness, has come to recant his assertion of its importance. His most recent studies demonstrate limitations to the importance of happiness and instead point to values of well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. He explains this by questions such as why billionaires continue to pursue making more money, or why do people play games that they don't even enjoy the act of playing? His response is the value of a composite phenomenon he calls flourishing, which pertains to relationships with others and sense of accomplishment in life. Better, what's important is "your sense of 'earned success' – the belief that you have created value in your life or others' lives."

If we were all simply hedonists, our great civilization built upon social contracts would hardly have taken root. Therefore, foregoing pleasure in favor of progress, as evocative of the Enlightenment as that is, must have some merit. Brooks is right so far as he speaks of American culture – a culture largely obsessed with success and finding meaning in an otherwise meaningless life. Gone are the days in which we inherited our professions from our fathers, Sartre's being-in-itself. A free world is a realm of fantasy, Sartre's being-for-itself. We can become whatever we wish, but at the peril of getting lost along the way in what we find meaningful. Maybe that's the point. Maybe happiness cannot be measured in progress, but in process. The act of doing, the proverbial labor of love, is what's at stake. I think William James would agree. I just wish America was more honest about it.