Experts look for happiness in a buy-and-sell world

(KRT) - For the past half-century, author Gregg Easterbrook says, Americans and Western Europeans have unwittingly engaged in a grand social engineering experiment, one seeking to answer this question: Does prosperity bring happiness?

"And the answer, unequivocally," he says, "is no."

"The men and women at middle-class standards or above in the United States and the European Union now live better than 99.4 percent of the human beings who have ever existed," Easterbrook writes in "Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse." So why, he asks, "don't Americans behave as though they believe this? Why do so many walk around scowling rather than smiling at their good fortune?"

And scowl we do. We live in McMansions, drive SUVs, snap up the latest plasma television sets, travel anywhere relatively cheaply, think and do pretty much what we choose. And yet research indicates that more of us felt happier in the 1940s, when a third of the population used outhouses, says David Myers, a sociologist at Hope College in Michigan.

The reason, says Myers, is obvious: "By the end of the 1990s, we were excelling at making a living but too often failing to make a life."

It turns out that we should have listened to those who said money (or a $60,000 Hummer) couldn't buy happiness. Yes, it is significantly more difficult to be happy when you don't have enough to eat or a roof over your head. But once a person reaches the lower middle class, studies show, money and happiness have very little to do with each other. Happiness, it turns out, is all in your head, or in your heart, as the case may be.

"You would think that people who have 20 times the income might have 20 times the happiness, and they don't have anything close to it," says Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. "The paradox exists because everyone knows that getting rich makes you happy. In the short term that is true. What people are not aware of is that it's a transient phenomenon."

The problem, says anti-consumerism activist Kalle Lasn, is that we've been conditioned not to believe in its transience. Amid the nonstop advertising blitz that is our society, yesterday's luxuries become the necessities of today. Into the average North American brain flows 3,000 marketing messages a day, says Lasn, author of "Culture Jam: How To Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge and Why We Must."

"And every one of those 3,000 messages, except for the odd `anti' ad, says the same thing," says Lasn, who also edits Adbusters Magazine. "It says you can be happy by buying something.

"This has really distorted our personalities, our sense of what happiness is," Lasn continues. "Many agree that this daily onslaught, this aggressive clutter, has something to do with the fact that we're losing our minds."

So we become more isolated, more disconnected from family, friends, the PTA and other social activities. At the end of the day, we collapse in front of our TVs, communing with TiVo, exhausted and lonely on top of everything else. And at the end of life, to paraphrase Thoreau, many of us are discovering that we have not lived.

The Cleveland-based organization's name is the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, which would be easy to dismiss as another set of New Age crystal gazers. Even the institute's president, Stephen Post, agrees that the "unlimited love" part sounds rather corny.

But there's a scientific edge to the Unlimited Love Institute, which has awarded grants totaling $1.7 million for 21 research projects at places like Stanford University and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In one way or another, those projects and scores of others headed by psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, economists and physicians around the world increasingly seek to answer the existential question heretofore the province of clerics and philosophers: If money and material abundance doesn't make us happy, what does?

"We're trying to take it off of the touchy-feely paradigm," says Post, a medical ethicist at Case Western University in Cleveland. "What we're trying to do is create a whole new field of significantly hard research on this topic."

In other words, to prove empirically what the sages and prophets have been saying all along.

"The bottom line is that people who live these warm, generous, palpably kind lives and engage in helping behaviors are happier and live longer," Post says. "Just to get that out [scientifically] that something has merit with regard to health and longevity, maybe people will take it more seriously."

Social scientists say research is more and more conclusive that people with many close friends and those in committed relationships are much more likely to be happy. Membership in a faith community greatly improves your chances. Slowing down doesn't hurt, either.

Three decades ago, Ronald Inglehart, the Michigan political scientist, coined the term "post-materialism," which rather optimistically describes an age in which transcendent meaning and altruism might be as fashionable as Armani.

Inglehart says there are modestly hopeful signs pointing in that direction. In 2001, 58 percent of Americans surveyed said that they thought "often" about the meaning and purpose of life, an increase of 9 percent over 20 years. In a recent study conducted for General Motors, Inglehart says he found that Americans are spending smaller percentages of their discretionary income on automobiles and more on things like travel, education and psychotherapy.

Yet, as far as awaiting the arrival of Inglehart's post-materialist age, few researchers are holding their breath. For one thing, surveys of incoming college freshman show that the vast majority still list "being well-off financially" as their highest ambition. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for, some say, is that our hunger for the next best thing is somewhat mitigated by deeper yearnings.

Contemporary philosopher Sam Keen suggests that people slow down enough to at least ask themselves a few important questions: What ought I to do? For what may I hope? Is there life beyond death? Whom do I love? Who loves me? To what cause, ideal or faith may I surrender without destroying the integrity of myself? What does it mean to experience the sacred?

Easterbrook, meanwhile, says that perhaps we will learn that we can have it both ways, at least to a point.

"Everybody needs a certain amount of money, but if money is the priority in your life, woe to you as a person and as a soul," Easterbrook said in a recent interview. "As more people become aware of that, and they're reasonably comfortable in their own lives, they'll have time to contemplate these issues."

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