CHAPTER 1 Bye-Bye, Eden, ForeverRead more at location 108
What’s the Big Idea? We compete to survive and feel better about ourselves.Read more at location 110
“The food is terrible, inedible—and the portions are so small!”Read more at location 114
Now, I am not a compulsive fiend who needs to work seven days a week. Nonetheless, I wanted my weekend imposed upon.Read more at location 119
I’m afraid, though, that it has become fashionable to look down on such things, to sneer at job seekers and job doers as unthinking rodents trapped in a rat race.Read more at location 125
A trunk load of books will tell you that happiness is found away from the job and away from any stress.Read more at location 127
Henry David Thoreau set the example by stomping his way into the woods at Walden Pond.Read more at location 128
No doubt, the quest for bliss has launched a big industry.Read more at location 129
Charismatic crazies lead perfectly normal people to die in sweat lodges. Popular yoga and meditation classes introduce physical contortion and deep breathing.Read more at location 132
Thoreau famously wrote that most of us lead lives of “quiet desperation.” In fact, I think Thoreau was wrong. Most people can find enough happiness to avoid drugs and avoid wasting their days in a vicarious world, watching washed-up “stars” on reality television. But it is not easy.Read more at location 134
In this book I will argue that much of the common happiness advice is feckless, and sometimes dangerous. It starts with harmless prescriptions like meditation for adults and timeouts for children.Read more at location 137
The Buddha (who does share much good advice) did in fact abandon his wife and child in order to go on a quest to find himself. That’s hardly a heroic example. Buddhist male-only monasteries may reflect a high pursuit of spirituality, but unless you are ready to trade in your car for an orange-colored monk’s robe, you will have to grapple with the complex world we actually happen to live in, packed with stress, hatred, love, affection, traffic, caffeine, and cotton candy.Read more at location 140
Just as original sin expels human beings from Eden, capitalism becomes the new sin that prevents us from returning to Eden. If we could just expunge the drive to compete, and the desire to acquire, we could finally claw our way back to that noble, leafy, and peaceful place we left behind in Genesis, where we never wanted anything, let alone tried to get it. I will call such believers Edenists.Read more at location 146
Not only should you take a timeout, but the entire economy should be given a timeout, or the economic equivalent of Ambien.Read more at location 150
Shut down capitalism and replace it with a kibbutz for three hundred million people.Read more at location 151
Why? To prevent envy and to drain our competitive juices.Read more at location 151
The happiness gurus believe that competition is cancerous, eating away at our souls and our chances for happiness. If we could just stomp out competition, we could achieve self-realization and bliss.Read more at location 152
In fact, if you would like to visit an ancient economy stuck in Stone Age splendor, plan a trip to Bhutan. This little nation, with a per capita GDP about equal to the summer take-home pay of a kid’s lemonade stand in Des Moines ($1,400), is tucked in the Himalayas and has swallowed almost all the happiness potions.Read more at location 155
There is a national uniform for professionals, most buildings look the same, and “tourists are taken to all the same places and served the same food,”Read more at location 158
Bhutan also mandates Buddhism as a state religion, so no one can be envious of anyone else’s creed.Read more at location 160
But “Kumbayah” does not work. Sitting around a metaphoric campfire, holding hands and singing communal songs does not make human beings happy. Sweaty, yes. Sooty, perhaps. But not happy.Read more at location 172
More tourists have trampled on Thoreau’s Walden Pond snapping photos than have seriously considered giving up their cell phonesRead more at location 173
Are we just selfish hypocrites who have fallen too deeply in love with a synthetic commercial world, with all its gadgets and traffic?Read more at location 177
In this book, I will take on a seemingly preposterous task, employing the latest research in neuroscience and behavioral economics to argue the opposite: It is the race itself—sloppy, risky, and tense—that can bring us happiness. It is the very pursuit of love, new knowledge, wealth, and status that literally delivers the rush, lights up our brains, releases dopamine, and ignites our passion.Read more at location 181
Furthermore, I’m going to argue that the cause and effect between competition and happiness is hardwired into every one of us. Some of the results will surprise you. Competition makes people more fair, and it also makes them taller.Read more at location 184
Neuroscientists report that when a person begins to take a risk, whether it’s gambling or ginning up the nerve to ask a pretty girl to the prom, his left prefrontal cortex lights up, signaling a natural high. Alpha waves and oxygenated blood surge to the brain.Read more at location 186
Likewise, our competitive juices cannot be separated from our desire to learn more. Ironically, those who deride competition are often the first to exalt education.Read more at location 188
foolish to pretend that desires do not press us forward to learn more, to gain more knowledge, and therefore to get smarter.Read more at location 190
We shall see that despite Jungian memories of Eden perhaps embedded in our psyches, our evolutionary ancestors did not bestow on us the gift of glee. Glee does not come easily or naturally.Read more at location 192
Competition begat cooperation. Competition is the root of our success, not an anchor dragging us into misery.Read more at location 200
Buddhists may tell us to stop struggling, but that is only a good choice if you’ve got servants to tuck you in a blanket and feed you.Read more at location 204
Biology endows us with a nepotistic streak and sometimes an altruistic streak for a reason. Remember the last timeRead more at location 208
You will come no closer to a blithe spirit by apologizing for your complex and contradictory human drives. Life is not an AA meeting where we must confront and confess. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. True, I suppose. But the overexamined life is not worth living, either.Read more at location 214
Neuroscience shows that we make a dreadful mistake when we try to deny our emotional drives in the pursuit of a more pure, objective rationality.Read more at location 216
I will reveal studies demonstrating that we need our emotional selves, even our selfish and scheming selves, in order to function.Read more at location 217
Nothing makes a happiness guru sadder than seeing someone pull into Walmart in a big SUV and buy a big flat-screen television.Read more at location 228
What should they do, according to the happiness teachers? Smash the TV, ditch the SUV, and stop buying from big conglomerates. They should pursue a more “natural” life, unspoiled by modern fancies and factories.Read more at location 233
A British economist actually titled an article “The Hippies Were Right All Along About Happiness.”Read more at location 235
Intellectuals since Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1700s have been harping on the inner goodness that we allow society to spoil. Whereas more than a century earlier Thomas Hobbes had proclaimed that before society, life was “nasty, poor, brutish and short,” Rousseau countered that “man is born free, but everywhere we see him in chains.”Read more at location 237
Contrast Tarzan with the ultra-civilized, urban socialite Dorian Gray, who in Oscar Wilde’s haunting 1890 story sells his soul just to maintain his superficial youth.Read more at location 242
Kevin Costner’s overly long 1990 movie, Dances with Wolves, conveys the same spirit.Read more at location 243
Is it possible that we have embedded in our genes and brain function a kind of ancient memory or tropism toward the tropics?Read more at location 254
there is danger in introducing Jung’s fanciful memories, dreams, and reflections into science before they can be tested. Here is the danger: Flowery conjecture can easily be twisted into an ideology that blocks real scientific inquiry. As Pinker sets forth compellingly, a good part of the twentieth century was dominated by sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists grafting their biases about noble savages onto their data and survey reports.Read more at location 259
The book was Derek Freeman’s Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth. Mead, a protégé of the leading anthropologist Franz Boas, had traveled to Samoa in the 1920s to investigate a simpler people, to see whether they avoided the manias and pathologies of modern life.Read more at location 264
Mead believed that human beings were essentially “plastic,”Read more at location 266
Montagu, another Boas protégé, argued that “Man is man because he has no instincts,Read more at location 268
As a young man, he had changed his legal name to “Montague Francis Ashley Montagu,” which sounds as if he had been nursed by Queen Victoria herself.Read more at location 273
Turns out he started life as Israel Ehrenberg, a real East Ender. Now, it would be wrong to suggest that Montagu’s name change invalidates his work. No, it’s his work that invalidates his work, including his claim that chimpanzees were pacifist vegans.Read more at location 274
A psychologist named Zing-Yang Kuo asserted that the human desire to have sex is merely manufactured by social images.Read more at location 278
Unlike Americans and Europeans, Samoans look after each other and do not exhibit jealousy. Unlike in our crass culture, they do not covet each other’s beads or clay pots.Read more at location 281
unlike our randy, relentlessly anxious teenagers, Samoan teens have casual sex, without guilt, without jealousy, and without catfights or gang rumbles at the gym.Read more at location 282
although Shakespeare resonates in London, Tokyo, and Berlin, somehow the Samoans would not understand the point of Romeo and Juliet, even if translated into everyday Samoan.Read more at location 283
Mead’s turned out to be shoddy research. Aside from her inability to speak the language,Read more at location 285
Would a Play-Doh species survive the battle of evolution? More likely it would become slaves or dinner for another.Read more at location 287
Second, the “plasticized” view of mankind inspired megalomaniacs. That wasn’t the underlying intention, and many of Mead’s followers devoted their lives to trying to help people, even identifying themselves as “peace activists.” Nonetheless, just as Wagner unwittingly gave Hitler the melody of the Holocaust, the Boas school gave Stalin a justification for trying to rewire the faulty neural circuiting of the Soviet people.Read more at location 292
Third, Mead’s convictions reinforced the idea that all of human history was just a big mistake and that what we know as progress was actually retrogress.Read more at location 300
The noble savage tradition argues that nobility comes from nature and is quickly corroded by modern society.Read more at location 303
It sounds rather sexist to me, but the point is that the impulse for materialism did not start when Macy’s opened the world’s largest department store in New York.Read more at location 317
R. H. Tawney wrote about the “Acquisitive Society.” Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith published screeds on conspicuous consumption that became standard texts in economics courses.Read more at location 321
Warwick professor Andrew Oswald further argues that the hippies, “the road protesters, the down-shifters, the slow-food movement—all are having their quiet revenge . . . being confirmed by new statistical work by psychologists and economists.”Read more at location 323
some prominent economists and psychologists argue for squeezing people with high taxes and strangling businesses deemed too successful. Daniel Gilbert summarized these findings in an academic paper, writing, “Windfalls are better than pratfalls,Read more at location 326
A well-published behavioral economist opined that he doesn’t see how “anybody could study happiness and not find himself leaning left politically.”Read more at location 328
Coined by Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell, this dangerous piece of exercise equipment conjures a striking image of consumers constantly trying to acquire material things, but never getting closer to the delight they seek.Read more at location 335
Brickman and Campbell produced the landmark 1971 study showing that lottery winners do not get a permanent high from their loot.Read more at location 338
Richard Easterlin surveyed Americans, asking how many goods and luxuries—home, car, television, swimming pool—they needed in order to live the “good life.”Read more at location 341
Edenists go on to array data seeming to show that earning more income does not make people any happier, and it is not just an American phenomenon (known as the Easterlin Paradox).Read more at location 344
Then the Edenists denounce the sin of envy. H. L. Mencken had quipped that a wealthy man was one who earned $100 more than his wife’sRead more at location 348
The Cornell economist Robert Frank devised a clever metaphor of trees in the forest. If each tree needs to be higher than the next, each tree ends up using more resources in order to peek above its neighbors.Read more at location 351
Now, it may be true that earning $70,000 instead of $50,000 does not change happiness, but it is a groundless leap to say that $50,000 is no different from $15,000. Money does matter.Read more at location 357
As Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof says, “It’s no shame to be poor—but it’s no great honor either.”Read more at location 359
We seek success because it validates our lives, and gives us a feeling that we are worth loving, and that we were worth the love and effort our parents lavished on us. Yes, money is involved, but money is simply a convenient way for society to arrange economic relations, to avoid the clumsiness of a barter system.Read more at location 367
We prefer to earn more than our colleagues at work not because we are nasty and want to be envied, but because that is a signal that we have earned our keep. If everyone were paid the same, if everyone lived in the same house, our minds would receive no signal that we are expending our energy in a prudent or productive way.Read more at location 370
The dollars, the baubles, and the bangles we gain from work spark an aboriginal sentiment that excites the vital juices that keep our hearts beating and the oxygen flowing to our brains. They signal to us that we will not be ground down to dust in the evolutionary cycle.Read more at location 372
Furthermore, success is not always defined by money. Many talented people deliberately choose careers that do not yield bulging paychecks—for example, professors, ministers, chefs, and playwrights.Read more at location 374
But what they are really trying to earn is self-respect and the respect of others. Some will spend their monetary earnings on trinkets and useless electronics. Others will count their pennies and spend frugally.Read more at location 380
Regardless, our competitive drive is not ultimately about showing off to others. It is about showing ourselves that we deserve to live and then to live on through our progeny.Read more at location 382
Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, hit the best-seller list in 2000 with a depressing book called Bowling Alone. Putnam charted the decline in bowling leagues and other civic and social activities.Read more at location 384
Nonetheless, Putnam was onto something, for men today do report fewer friends than in prior eras.Read more at location 387
I would not blame consumerism for splintering friendships and communities. I contend that certain consumer goods might actually help create more communal feelings. For example, American homes are 50 percent larger than they were in the 1970s. But this explosion in square footage does not mean that homes have 50 percent more bedrooms than they did in the 1970s. Instead, people desire larger kitchens and “great rooms.” And what do they do in these larger common rooms? They commune with their families and their neighbors.Read more at location 390
Edenists can sneer at ultra-size outdoor granite and stainless steel barbecue units, but what does the owner of this $2,000 barbecue do? He flips burgers and steaks for his family and his neighbors.Read more at location 393
Edenists can disdain sixty-five-inch flat-screen televisions. But doesn’t this increase the odds that the owner will invite his buddies over to watch Monday Night Football,Read more at location 394
Baron Richard Layard, a British economist and the author of Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, seems to think we all would be better off psychologically if we erased some zeroes from salaries or bank accounts.Read more at location 400
Although Layard’s views are wrapped in “new science,” they also reflect E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, a book that millions of undergraduates had to read in the 1970s,Read more at location 402
Schumacher, the world’s first German-born, Buddhist-British economist, and the chief economist for the British Coal Board, argued for “enoughness,” a Buddhist view that we should get by with far less. ForRead more at location 405
Here are the problems lost on these social critics: (1) Any system involving human beings that lasts longer than a few years and involves more than a few people will be competitive; (2) We cannot go back to Eden, because even if Eden existed, human beings have evolved and are no longer suited for paradise; (3) The dastardly desire to acquire is not, in fact, chiefly driven by a crass materialism invented by snarky businessmen with manipulative advertising campaigns. Human beings do not get on the treadmill to pursue stuff; they get on the treadmill because work makes them feel better about themselves, and succeeding at work validates their lives and gives them a bigger chance of perpetuating their genes; and finally, (4) Without the competitive urges, most of you reading this book now would be dead.Read more at location 413
These assertions are grounded in neuroscience, anthropology, and economics, and I will unpack and unfurl them in the chapters ahead.Read more at location 419
