How good does it get?

What should we expect?

Positive thinking seems to be back in style. Positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, solution-focused change, and positive deviance are some popular positive change approaches. These approaches tend to focus on resources and virtues that enable individuals and organizations to flourish. Positive change approaches hold a great promise. Maybe they can help us to improve our lives, our organizations and hopefully even our world. But just how positive can we expect life to become?
This may be an important question. If our expectations are too low, they can make us passive and thus prevent us from improving our circumstances. In these cases our expectations have become self-fulfilling. High expectations may be self-fulfilling too, up to a point. If they are unrealistically high, they can turn into a recipe for disillusion and frustration. Expectations play an important and sometimes paradoxical role. An example is a party. Sometimes you go a party with low expectations and you are pleasantly surprised by how much fun it turns out to be. At other times your expectations are high -this is going to be so much fun! - and it turns out rather disappointing. In these cases the contrast between what we expect and what we find seems to impact our feelings and behaviors dramatically. So, what is wise to expect about life? How good can life actually get? Is a problem-free life within our reach? Can we ever approach a total peace of mind, free of worries and fears? Can we always be feeling good about ourselves and our accomplishments and live in peace with our fellow human beings? Or is it wise to lower our expectations drastically and expect life to be one damn thing after another? Or is there a middle way? When is life good enough?

Problem induction

It is important to have valid expectations of life. Some authors have claimed that popular psychology has planted some wrong expectations into people's minds. Canadian psychologist Tana Dineen has written a book called Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People. In this book she accuses mainstream psychology of creating a generation of victims by encouraging people to dwell on their "inner stresses". Dineen claims psychologists do this on purpose to make people feel they need therapy and thus enlarge their market. I personally don't believe at all that the majority of psychologists deliberately would do such a wicked thing. But I think to some extent they may do such an ineffective thing while having the best intentions in mind. I do believe that often psychologists and coaches encourage people to analyze and focus on their inner stresses, insecurities and so forth. Dineen is right that this defect focus often does more harm than good. It is a case of what solution-focused practitioners call "problem induction". You did not worry much until someone gave you the idea that your situation actually is worrisome.

How important is self-esteem?

Another psychologist, Robyn Dawes, in his book House of Cards, has a more or less related criticism. He criticizes the so-called self-esteem movement. He says that many professional psychologists have promoted a simplistic philosophy of life. This philosophy maintains that the purpose of life is to maximize one's mental health, which is dependent wholly on self-esteem. The self-esteem movement argues that in order to function well you have to feel good about yourself first. Dawes debugs this claim. He explains that planting this idea into people's minds will often do more harm than good. Here is a long quote from a very interesting article by Albert Mohler making the same point:

"Since the 1969 publication of The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which Nathaniel Branden opined that self-esteem was the single most important facet of a person, the belief that one must do whatever he can to achieve positive self-esteem has become a movement with broad societal effects. Anything potentially damaging to kids' self-esteem was axed. Competitions were frowned upon. Soccer coaches stopped counting goals and handed out trophies to everyone. Teachers threw out their red pencils. Criticism was replaced with ubiquitous, even undeserved, praise. In 2003 the Association for Psychological Science asked Dr. Roy Baumeister, then a leading proponent of self-esteem, to review this literature. His team concluded that self-esteem was polluted with flawed science. Only 200 of those 15,000 studies met their rigorous standards. After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn't improve grades or career achievement. It didn't even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of them selves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were "the biggest disappointment of my career". Now he's on Dweck's side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents' pride in their children's achievements: It's so strong that "when they praise their kids, it's not that far from praising themselves."

The basic idea of the self-esteem movement sounded plausible but was incorrect. Trying to improve a child's functioning by first trying to make them feel good about themselves ... does not work. But is there no relationship at all between functioning and self esteem? Yes there is, but as Martin Seligman has written, the causal relationship is more likely to be the other way around. By functioning well, people are more likely to start feeling well about themselves. So, first there is functioning well, then there is self esteem, not the other way around. It may be wiser to focus on functioning well and doing good first because this will increase the probability of you feeling you deserve to feel good about yourself. It is inescapable that you will not always feel good about yourself and your circumstances. It is inherent to life that this will be the case frequently. I think it is normal and not necessarily a sign that something is fundamentally wrong. Inner conflicts and inner stresses are normal, I think, and they will keep on happening as long as you live. This reminds of a quote by American philosopher William James illustrating the inescapability on inner stresses and even their functionality:

"Nature implants contrary impulses to act on many classes of things, and leaves it to slight alterations in the conditions of the individual case to decide which impulse shall carry the day. Thus, the greediness and suspicion, curiosity and timidity, coyness and desire, bashfulness and vanity, sociability and pugnacity, seem to shoot over into each other as quickly, and to remain in as unstable equilibrium, in the higher birds and mammals as in man..."

The inevitability and usefulness of tensions
If William James was right, contrary impulses within people are inevitable and useful. From the outside these ‘inner stresses’ are usually hard to perceive. This may explain why people may (falsely) think that other people –unlike themselves- don’t have these inner stresses. And it may explain why we are susceptible for professionals who try to convinces us that experiencing difficulties must mean we need (their) professional help. From a distance, other people may look very calm and controlled. The reality, however, is probably that they too, more or less constantly, have to deal with pressures and tensions. The same may apply to all complex systems.

Let's look at a few examples. From a distance, a famous organization may appear to function very smoothly. They serve their customers, they make a good profit and they innovate. However, if we would get a chance to look from the inside, we might see all the messy processes and inner tensions and conflicts that occur within the organization. A great pop star or movie star may appear to lead a glamorous and problem-free life. However, when their biographies come out we may find out about the struggles and problems of their lives too. The same is the case with historical figures like Caesar, Alexander the Great, Beethoven and Darwin. We tend to remember the glorious ‘summaries’; of their lives. Close inspection, however, teaches us that they were more like us than we thought. They had to deal with problems and struggles constantly, like we do. From the outside, complex systems often seem stable and steady, from the inside there is equilibrium of many contrary forces. Beautiful examples in nature are the stars in the sky. From a distance we may think of a star as a glorious solid shining body in the sky. But, from up close, a star is more like a collection of very dynamic processes than a solid body. The star is the result of the balance between two opposing forces: an outward force caused by a process of nuclear fusion by which hydrogen is steadily converted into helium and an inward gravitational force. These two opposing forces create a state of equilibrium. At some point, the outward force will decline because the star will be running out of hydrogen. This is the beginning of the end of the life cycle of the star. This is an interesting perspective: the inner stresses are the essence of the ‘life’ of the star.

Back to human beings and organizations. A realistic perspective seems to be that the problem-free life, the life of constant comfort, will never exist. We should probably not let professionals of any kind convince us that experiencing problems or doubts necessarily means we need a therapist, coach or consultant. Instead, we may be wise to embrace our stresses and dissatisfactions and consciously use them to make progress.

Fluctuation and progress
Life cannot do without tension and problems and Utopian circumstances will never exist. However, this ubiquity of tensions and problems does not mean that life is doomed to be miserable and tragic. Chris Peterson, author of A Primer in Positive Psychology would say this to people who claim life is doomed to be miserable: "Even if everything sucks, some things suck more than others, an irrefutable fact given how people actually behave if not what they say. We prefer some outcomes rather than others, pursue some goals rather than others, and desire some emotional states rather than others. Whether we label these preferred circumstances "positive" or "less sucky" then becomes a matter of semantics."

What Peterson points at is that many phenomena in complex systems constantly fluctuate. Sometimes things will be worse, sometimes they will be better. The interesting thing, though, is that we can add an element of gradual progress to these fluctuations. The fluctuation of share prices is a good analogy. If you look at share price fluctuation over a relatively brief period of time, you will often perceive what seems to be a rather random fluctuation. The price goes up and down and there may seem to be no overall growth. When using a wider view by looking at a longer time period, you notice that share prices of and index on average usually steadily grow over time. This element of progress seems to be crucial for finding meaning and gratification in life.

Is happiness relevant and attainable at all?

Total peace of mind will never exist for anybody and tensions and problems are inevitable. Progress is crucial for finding a certain degree of happiness in life. Before exploring this further, there this question needs to be answered: given that problems and tensions will always be there, is happiness a real and relevant concept at all? Robert H. Frank, professor of Economics at Cornell University addresses this question in his new book Falling Behind, How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. He explains that, while many economists have remained skeptical about happiness research, happiness is indeed a real and relevant concept. It exists and it is important to people. Most of the criticisms about happiness research are aimed at one of the primary lines of happiness research: surveys. In these surveys, people are asked to classify themselves into one of three categories: very happy, fairly happy, not happy. According to Frank, some arguments for taking these measures seriously are:

1. People differ in there responses to these questions,
2. People are remarkably consistent in their answers to these questions,
3. The answers to these questions correspond closely with responses to other types of questions assumed to be associated with happiness,
4. The happiness survey responses also correspond consistently with specific distinguishable brain wave patterns,
5. They also correspond with certain social behaviors assumed to be associated with happiness (like initiating contacts with friends, helping people, etc),
6. They also correspond with signs of physical and mental health.

Happiness exists. People differ in the extent to which they have it. People value it. It would be worthwhile to figure out a way to build it. What can we do individually? What can we do collectively?

The unexpected role of adaptation
If you think that buying a luxurious car or having more money will structurally increase your happiness, please reconsider. Economist Dick Easterlin has shown that this will probably not happen. His research has shown that 1) after some time people will not say that they have become happier (you get used to your possession and it no longer brings you extra satisfaction), 2) often, however, they will keep on thinking that the next desired object (a boat?) will succeed in making them happy. But it won't, because the same thing will happen: they will get used to that, too. Will a higher income lead to more happiness? Not necessarily. One reason for this, as research by Easterlin has shown, is that the positive effect of having more money is 'deflated' by the fact that peoples perceived needs have increased correspondingly. The reverse thing can happen too. People can adapt to many tragic life events too and gradually get back to their earlier level of happiness. (This adaptation is not always complete, by the way).

Robert H. Frank has also written much about adaptation and well-being. Frank explains that the main reason we buy luxury goods is to demonstrate to others that we can afford to, thereby trying to distinguish ourselves from them. In doing so, we try to achieve happiness by improving our relative status. The irony is, however, this doesn't work. The satisfaction we get from luxury spending, which Frank calls conspicuous spending, depends largely on context. The satisfaction we get from luxury spending lasts only briefly. Two examples: 1) If we buy an expensive car, this distinguishes us from our neighbor and we feel happy. If, however, next month our neighbor buys an even fancier one, our satisfaction will be largely gone. You can see how this leads to an escalation, an arms race, with no winners. 2) The satisfaction we get from luxury goods tends to decline steeply over time. We tend to get used quickly to what we have and the favorable features of the luxury good tend to fade into the background rapidly: we no longer notice the fancy features of our expensive car and our satisfaction diminishes. Bottom line: this increasing conspicuous spending does more harm than good.

Is the growth mindset applicable to happiness?
Most psychologists assume that the extent to which happiness is developable is limited. They think there is a so-called set point. This is a biologically determined range within which your happiness would move. Many laypeople also seem reluctant in the achievability or developability of happiness. Brad Pitt, the movie star once remarked in response to the question whether he was happy: “I don't believe in happiness.” Now, the thinking about happiness seems to shift among experts. Ed Diener, a well-known happiness expert says: “Set-point is not destiny. In fact, happiness probably is really about work and striving. Happiness is the process, not the place. So many of us think that when we get everything just right, and obtain certain goals and circumstances, everything will be in place and we will be happy…. But once we get everything in place, we still need new goals and activities. The Princess could not just stop when she got the Prince.”

Carol Dweck's concept of the growth mindset might be useful here. Then, the question was whether intelligence is malleable. Dweck shows that people who see intelligence as unchangeable develop a tendency to focus on proving that they have that characteristic instead of focusing on the process of learning. This disregard of the learning process hinders them in the development of their learning and in their performance. This means that the wrong convictions about intelligence can make smart people dumb! But there is hope: when people view intelligence as a potential that can be developed this leads to the tendency to put effort into learning and performing and into developing strategies that enhance learning and long term accomplishments. An implication is that it pays off to help children and students invest in a view of intelligence as something that can be developed.

Is the growth mindset also applicable to happiness? It seems worth a try.

Some suggestions
Here are some hints about what you could do:

1. Think about how you would like your life to become
2. Be realistic: life will never be perfect but it can become good enough
3. Always focus on achieving small goals in the near future
4. Focus on progress
5. Be aware of fluctuations
6. Focus on what works for you