Contentment and happiness

I've been thinking a lot about the difference between contentment and happiness, lately. I think about it on and off, probably more than your average bear, as part of monitoring my own mental well-being and the way I react to the world around me, and I have a long-standing interest in what is now, cheesily enough, becoming known as "positivity studies" - essentially, the study of happiness.

The latest bout was brought on by my realization that I still feel, on a more or less daily basis, that having Obama rather than Bush in the White House is improving my quality of life and personal happiness. I'd read a report on a study, published months before the election, that argued that this was one of those human fallacies where we think something will make us happier/unhappier, but the "hedonic effect" (the impact on our happiness) is far more ephemeral than predicted.

To which I say, bullshit.

Dan Gilbert, who is a very funny author and happiness scholar, and whose work and observations I am a great fan of, in the main, perpetrates something similar when he writes about how parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children. Much as I love well-done pop psychology, I have to say that it's things like this - where the catchy "kids don't make us happy!" or "you don't care as much as you think you do about this election!" press line triumphs over close examination of the methodology - that gives the genre such a bad name.

I found (and I can't remember where) a piece that talked about the methodology of one of these studies. And it was very revealing. They'd gone to a group of women (only women, and I'm sure you can see the problem with this sample right away) and basically popped in on them at random points in their day and asked them to rate, presumably on a simple scale of some sort, how happy they felt right then. Changing the nappies (how happy are you?), reading a book (how happy are you?), on hold with the phone company (how happy are you?), doing the laundry (how happy are you?) - and then they looked at how happiness corresponded to various activities. And found that interacting with children (small children and teenagers particularly) received the lowest happiness ratings.

So kids make you miserable, right? "Happiness Plummets With Kids' Arrival," was the headline one online newspaper attached to Gilbert's work. Quick, to the IUD and the diaphragm, lest we become sad shadows of our former jolly selves!

But seriously, is it not clear what is wrong with this approach?

There is a huge (HUGE) difference between asking someone, "How happy are you right now?" and asking them "How happy are you with your life?" or "How happy are you with the direction your life choices are taking you?" or "How happy are you generally?"

Like, I love my job. It's exactly what I want to be doing, it's close to home, it has the potential to help people, I get to learn and grow and do new things, they pay me, and I'm fairly good at it. If you ask me, "do you like your job?" the answer will invariably be "yes, I love it." But if you ask me "How was your day at work?" the answer is unlikely to be as positive. And if you pop your head into my office while I'm on yet another interminable conference call with a client and ask me how happy I am at that moment, the answer (after I hit the mute button on the speaker) is likely to be unprintable.

Happiness is a tricky word with a lot of meanings. I, personally, prefer to think of it in terms of two factors - contentment and happiness. Contentment, in my schema, is how happy you are with your life. Are you going where you want to go? Are you with the people you want to be with? Do you have a sense of purpose? Do you feel safe? Are you acting sufficiently in accordance with your beliefs? Happiness is the ephemeral "hit," the hedonic high. Are you at a great party? Did your child or partner just say something sweet and loving to you? Do you have a perfect cuppa and a well-loved book, and time to read it? Are you out for a bracing hike on a perfect day in a place you love?

If you break it down like this, the results of these happiness studies (if not the way the researchers chose to conduct them)* start to make more sense. They're asking about major contentment factors in the context of happiness. It's like trying to measure thirst by asking people how hungry they are; it's just not the same. Oh, I still get a moment of happiness here and there when I hear of something awesome Obama has done. And there are more happy moments in parenting than I ever knew, though they are outnumbered (not outweighed, just outnumbered) by the moments of frustration or routine. But I didn't have a kid because I thought it was going to be all joy all day - I don't think anyone does. And I didn't vote for Obama because I thought, "Hey, that dude will make me happy if I elect him."

I made those choices because they spoke to the things in me - my values, my deeper needs, my sense of the way the world should be - that directly affect my contentment. It's how I try to make most of my choices. And I am, on the whole, a deeply contented person. Not a happy one - I am rarely really happy in a how happy are you right now? sense - but a content one, which I think I much prefer. (Though, can you be happy and not content? I think you can - I think I spent a lot of my twenties that way, and it involved large quantities of alcohol - but it's an interesting question to ponder).

Gilbert posits a lot of potential reasons for his outcomes - social conditioning, memory errors, attributing happiness value to things in order to justify investment in them, etc. But he never seems to wonder if he's asking the right question.

How about you? How happy are you right now? How happy are you with your life in general? Are they the same?



* Yes, I get that you can only get this information through self-report, and that self-report is necessarily less reliable the further back (or, I suppose, more general) the information that the subject is trying to report. I still maintain that different question wording might have elicited some very different answers.

Sadie Mae
1994ish - October 12, 2009
I don't know how to write about this.

It is humbling, and not a little heartbreaking, to be loved the way Sadie loved me. I rarely lived up to it; I'm not sure that it's possible for a person, greedy and scattered with a brainpan full of human stuff, to ever live up to that kind of devotion. But I don't think she noticed much, or cared, about all the ways in which I failed.

I don't think I will ever know if I did the right thing, in the end.

The Name of The Air

It could be like that then the beloved
old dog finding it harder and harder
to breathe and understanding but coming
to ask whether there is something that can
be done about it coming again to
ask and then standing there without asking

— W.S. Merwin

Squidbits

I am awakened each morning by the Squid, buried beneath his blankets, yelling through the door. "Excuuuuuuse me. Excuuuuuuuuuse me! Mooooommmmyyyyy! Mommy! Excuuuuuuse me!" Very polite, but it doesn't change the part where I have to wake up to go get him. Ugh. I am not a morning person.

"I'm hungry!" he says, when I try to haul him into the big bed for a few more moments of blissful, warm horizontality.

"Oh yeah? Well, I'm hungry too. I'm hungry for snuggles!" I say.

"I'm not hungry for snuggles! I'm hungry for breakfast!" he says, kicking me and squirming until I tell him to get out of the bed, then running for the kitchen. "Come on, Mommy!"


DONNIT DONNIT

He talks about bad guys and fighting a lot. It's that age. "An' then he FIGHTS the bad guy an' he WHACKS him an' they FIGHT each other!" is a typical excited recounting of a story or movie or imaginary play sequence at school. He's also interested in dying - not in any existential sense, just in a "thing people do" way, and he talks about it a lot. "I'm dead," he says, lolling in his carseat with eyes closed. "I died." I try to not make a big deal about it by telling him dryly that that's too bad, and pointing out that most people don't keep talking after they expire.


We had our backyard re-done and this is the new fountain. Essentially, we got it just so he could have a water feature to play with. He loves it.

Potty training is going remarkably well, knock on wood. We're down to an accident every other day or so. It was a rough start - a very rough start - but he caught on quickly. He gets a star for his "good job" card every time he walks to the potty on his own big boy feet without fussing, and a gummi bear every time he uses it successfully. Twenty stars gets him a model car - he saves them up until he has enough, and then "pays" the clerk with the card of stars at the store, while I slip them my credit card under the guise of paying for something else. Economics and potty training, an integrated process!

For a while, I had him on a kitchen timer, and just made him go every half-hour. That worked fine for a few weeks, until he started refusing to go (even if he had to) because "the timer didn't go off yet." I told him that the timer was just a reminder and he needed to listen to his body. "Your body is the real timer," I told him. I weaned him off the kitchen timer, then, unless we were out and about or doing something especially exciting (he ignores his body when what he's doing is more fun than potty). And it more or less works! "My real timer is telling me I have to go pee," he said last night, and ran for the potty. Hurray! Some days are still better than others, and I don't anticipate having him out of diapers at night for quite some time yet, but on the whole I am very pleased and proud.


With the tower crane he got with "good job" potty stars!

I was solo parenting for the bulk of the last month, and we did something we've just started recently for when one of us is away. Himself wrote (email) letters to the Squid that I could then read to him at night. He attached photos, too, and the Squid was fascinated. One was of a German sandbox with toys, and every night, when I read him that letter (because of course he wanted all the letters each night, not just one) he would ask, "What is that toy? Can I go to Germany and play with it in that sandbox?" There you have it - the joys of international travel from the 3-year-old perspective. Going new and exciting places and ... doing more or less what you do at home, only with new toys. Actually, I know a lot of adults who travel like that too.


The sandbox is still a big hit.

I'm trying to wean him off movies, but it's hard when I'm solo parenting. Sometimes a movie is the only way I can get a shower, make dinner, or take care of other tasks. I ended up going out to eat with him a lot and spending evenings at the library, the park, swimming lessons, anywhere that wasn't home with the potential of a movie, because he always asked to watch one, and he started this thing where he would either burst into tears when I denied him - real tears - or if I gave him a movie, burst into tears and throw himself on the ground when it ended and I refused him another.

I tried getting promises of good behavior, but he is just too young for it. He can do it the other way around, for short-term things - behave in order to get a treat - but he can't promise future good behavior for a treat now. "Movies make you fussy," I told him. "If I give you a movie, can you promise no fussing afterward, when I turn it off and it's time for bed?"

"Movies don't make me fussy any more," he said (contradicting very recent evidence). "I promise, no fussing."

Later, grimly hauling a yowling, tear-stained young man off to brush his teeth, I reminded him. "Remember how you said movies didn't make you fussy, and you promised no fuss when it ended?"

Sniffle, sniffle. "Yeah."

"So I gave you a movie, but what happened after?"

Sniffle. "I threw a fit."

Oh, well. Now I know better than to try the "If I X, will you Y" construction with him. Maybe someday.


He likes it when we draw aminals in the condensation on the shower doors. He plays artistic director. This is "A lion! With a BIIIIG SHARK eating it up!"

We've had a lot of concern about other people's behavior lately. "Katie said I'm not a big boy anymore." "Ellison's not eating his breakfast." I tell him, "I don't care what Katie says. You know you're a big boy," and "Ellison's behavior is not your problem. Eat your own breakfast and stop paying attention to him." But tattling is here, I'm afraid, for the predictable future. "I'm telling on ya!" he says to me, when I do something he doesn't like. "I'm telling Daddy!" He and the other kids at school tattle on one another to the teachers all the time. I don't think I ever want to tell him, "just ignore them and they'll go away," because I don't believe it's true. But I feel myself skirting around the edges of it, as I tell him to walk away from conflict rather than engaging or escalating, and to discount Katie's mean words.

It's a hard one, and I wrestle with it myself still. When someone behaves in a way I don't like, how do I respond? Or is it better to remove myself? How can I hold other people accountable for their actions without letting them impact me negatively? Honestly, if someone is rude to me, I gauge how much I care about their opinion and how much I need their future goodwill and either ignore, deflect, or strike back. But I don't think that's a good strategy to teach a preschooler when you're trying to tell him that it's not okay to hit someone just because they took the toy you were playing with.


I didn't do this; he totally had the idea all on his own. But as you can see, I am raising him up right.

He has asked for his first pet. A hamster? No. A puppy? No. A kitten? No.

"Can we have a cow at our house?" he said one day.

"No, cows take a lot of space. Our yard isn't big enough for a cow."

"Yes it is. It could nibble on the grass!"

And again yesterday, driving past a house on our way to preschool that keeps a horse trailer parked outside: "Their house is too small for a horse. Maybe our house is not too small?"

Dream on, kiddo.