A clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine

Oh, dear. A couple of rather lengthy articles read in close conjunction that have sparked several thoughts that are hard to disentangle and articulate. First there is The Spirit of Independence: The Social Psychology of Freedom, July 2, 2010 by Lee Harris in The American magazine and then there is All Joy and No Fun in New York magazine, July 4, 2010 by Jennifer Senior. I found both articles interesting to a degree, each with a strong point of view with which I might agree up to a point. Harris emphasizes the importance of the "internals" in a population, those people for whom a defining aspect of their self-concept is that they are responsible for themselves, that the locus of control is within themselves. Harris has several pithy comments.

"Intellectuals routinely give undue weight to people's ideas. They tend to believe that ideas cause attitudes, though it is far more often the other way around."

"They rebel because they instinctively understand the high cost of not rebelling."

"A kinder, gentler serfdom."

Senior's piece is a little more meandering, with most of the meat in the final paragraphs, but what she is attempting to explicate is the difference between happiness and satisfaction. The nexus of her discussion is around parenthood where most studies over multiple years seem to consistently indicate that children are detrimental to adult happiness. Senior's first question is why this can be given the biological imperative to reproduce but she uses that question as a platform to dive in and begin exploring ever yet more subtle questions - what is happiness, how do we measure it, what is it that parents clearly love about being a parent that offsets the negative measures of happiness that are being captured?

Senior teases out some very interesting conclusions from what at first seems indisputable data pointing in a direction different from that where she arrives.

Seven years ago, the sociologists Kei Nomaguchi and Melissa A. Milkie did a study in which they followed couples for five to seven years, some of whom had children and some of whom did not. And what they found was that, yes, those couples who became parents did more housework and felt less in control and quarreled more (actually, only the women thought they quarreled more, but anyway). On the other hand, the married women were less depressed after they'd had kids than their childless peers. And perhaps this is because the study sought to understand not just the moment-to-moment moods of its participants, but more existential matters, like how connected they felt, and how motivated, and how much despair they were in (as opposed to how much stress they were under): Do you not feel like eating? Do you feel like you can't shake the blues? Do you feel lonely? Like you can't get going? Parents, who live in a clamorous, perpetual-forward-motion machine almost all of the time, seemed to have different answers than their childless cohorts.

The authors also found that the most depressed people were single fathers, and Milkie speculates that perhaps it's because they wanted to be involved in their children's lives but weren't. Robin Simon finds something similar: The least depressed parents are those whose underage children are in the house, and the most are those whose aren't.

This finding seems significant. Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you're spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They're robbed of something that gives purpose and reward.

Further:

But for many of us, purpose is happiness - particularly those of us who find moment-to-moment happiness a bit elusive to begin with. Martin Seligman, the positive-psychology pioneer who is, famously, not a natural optimist, has always taken the view that happiness is best defined in the ancient Greek sense: leading a productive, purposeful life. And the way we take stock of that life, in the end, isn't by how much fun we had, but what we did with it. (Seligman has seven children.)

About twenty years ago, Tom Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell, made a striking contribution to the field of psychology, showing that people are far more apt to regret things they haven't done than things they have. In one instance, he followed up on the men and women from the Terman study, the famous collection of high-IQ students from California who were singled out in 1921 for a life of greatness. Not one told him of regretting having children, but ten told him they regretted not having a family.

Where these two articles would seem to intersect are the ideas of valuing future or strategic goals at the expense of current tactical discomfort, the frequent conflicts between agency and circumstances, and the relative value Happiness - Pleasure versus Happiness - Enjoyment.

When I highlight the conflicts between agency and circumstances, I am reflecting on the conundrum of free will. Both articles touch on how individuals are caught in circumstances over which they may or may not have control and which may or may not be enjoyable but that in both cases, those individuals exercise agency - they decide how to respond to those circumstances.

In refining the simplistic concept of Happiness, Senior gets into some interesting territory. I was recently reading an article in which the author made the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure, in the context of his discussion, related to physical response to stimuli - does it feel good, does it taste good, does it sound good? Enjoyment was a conceptual response, an aesthetic response to an abstract situation. Enjoyment would be the satisfaction we derive from completing a difficult and challenging task. In Senior's article she throws into relief the simplistic studies which are measuring the tactical pleasure of parenting (and the degredation of happiness in that context), versus the much more difficult to measure concept of enjoyment - a life of purpose and fulfillment.