Being Happy In, and With, America

The science of personal happiness offers some insights into our political dilemma.

I was listening recently to a podcast on how to improve the chances of raising happy children, and something the guest said lit a bulb with me.

Dr. Laurie Santos is a Yale professor who studies and speaks on the science of happiness. In the interview, she laid out a way to think about happiness: It comprises two parts often discussed by social scientists: happiness in your life, and happiness with your life.

These two aspects cover very different but sometimes overlapping things.

Happiness in your life refers to the everyday aspects of your life, including spending time with loved ones and experiencing joy, laughter and other positive emotions. Specifically, it’s about having a healthy ratio of those positive emotions versus negative ones.

Happiness with your life means being satisfied with the way your life is going and finding meaning and purpose in it. It can include things like satisfaction with your job and your marriage and your relationships with your children and friends, to name a few examples.

Another way to think about this distinction is how you feel in your life versus how you think about your life.

It occurred to me that our current politics can be thought of the same way. Right now, many progressives and liberals are understandably dispirited from the election. They dread the next four years, and there is ample reason to. This often translates into strong negative feelings about the future of our country. And that can lead to some detaching from politics (“I’m going to just focus on my family and my personal life from now on”) or even for some a sense of nihilism and fatalism (“We’re not going to even have any more elections soon, so why even bother?”)

We are having a hard time finding ways to be happy in this America.

But if we take these two aspects of happiness discussed by Dr. Santos, we can ask ourselves some questions and start to explore the answers.

Are we happy in the U.S. after all is a very different question than whether we are happy with America.

With a few notable exceptions that affect the most vulnerable among us, most of us can continue to be happy in this country. We go to work. We form bonds. We raise our kids and grandkids. We laugh, we exercise, we read, we engage. Life for many will go on day-to-day in much the same way as before.

It’s being happy with this country that remains a challenge. Those who uphold the values America was founded upon—democracy, the rule of law, justice, equal treatment under the law—are very unhappy with the way the nation is headed.

So let’s unpack this a bit. When we are unhappy with our lives, there are some basic things we can do to change this. For example, if we don’t like our career, we can learn a new skill, go back to school, and importantly shift our mentality to an “unstuck” one. The very act of taking affirmative steps toward a new goal is empowering. The one thing we should probably not do is believe that we are powerless to change things and just resign ourselves to staying in that job.

I believe the same principle applies when, as now, we’re unhappy with our country. Staying firm in the belief that we can help change the direction of the nation, and remaining engaged with others in that vital effort, is a powerful thing. It could help unstick us from the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness that are threatening to engulf many.

Here’s a bonus: In the process of being part of the change we desire, we can form communities, friendships and support networks that will add also to the happiness we feel in our lives. Social scientists emphasize that our social connections are the most important factor in our overall happiness, and in part I believe it’s because they impact both how we feel in our lives and how we think about our lives.

It’s certainly food for thought. We naturally want to be happy both in and with our country, and we can actually do things about each.

Have a great and restful Sunday, and I’ll be back to chat with you here tomorrow.

Jay