Fifty percent of your happiness is genetic. Sorry, you can't do much about that. Another 10 percent comes from your circumstances (geography, family, health). So that leaves you with 40 percent of your potential happiness that you can actually do something about. This falls into the realm of what's known as "intentional activities." Your happiness depends on the activities you choose to participate in on this planet, your experiences. How are you spending your 40 percent?
We're programmed to blow that stake on one narrow choice, material items, but researchers have found that the biggest bang for your buck is to go for the experience instead. The participant experience is one of the most potent and least known paths to happiness and a thriving life beyond the office and android state. Your brain would take the riveting power of engagement any day over inanimate objects, if it wasn't so clogged with sedentary distractions.
Researchers Leaf van Boven of the University of Colorado and Cornell's Thomas Gilovich have found that we're happier when we choose experiences over material things. Whether it's a vacation, painting a canvas, or aikiko lessons, these moments of full engagement contact a deeply personal realm that feeds core self-determination needs. We're designed to step out, not veg out.
"Experiences really satisfy desires for self-actualization," Van Boven told me for my new book on the power of engaged experience, "Don't Miss Your Life." "They help people become the type of people they would like to become."
We're all head cases these days, locked in perpetual brainlock and analysis. Direct experience gets you out of the thought factory and into the life-participant column, alive to the moment.
That's a good place to be, since most anxieties stem from the two tenses we're not in. Experiences are the nexus of Now, the choice of anyone who wants to make an immediate beeline to engaged presence. The road to life satisfaction runs straight through engagement, not status. It's not the money. It's not what's on the business card. It's not the popularity. It's the experience.
Experiences don't get on our radar because we're conditioned to go for tangible external rewards. Experience is an intrinsic affair, done for internal goals like fun and growth. But here's something that may make it easier to make the leap to a more experiential life: People actually like you better when they see you as someone with interesting experiences. Van Boven and his colleagues Margaret Campbell and Thomas Gilovich found in a 2009 study that people found the materially oriented to be less socially desirable but were keenly interested in the doings of experiential people. Experience is two mints in one: a direct route to your own happiness, and an admired path by others.
Why is this realm so potent? Experiences trump material items because they can't be compared to anyone else's experience. They're your personal event, the participation and impact determined only by you. Also, you don't habituate to experiences as you do with a new car or phone. The new car smell won't last, but the memory of screaming down a zip line will.
The interactive nature of experiences sets off multiple neuron firings in your brain that form memories that stick with you, creating the positive memories that remind you that you like your life. Think how vivid your vacation memories are, opposed to, say, last month at work. The more positive and novel the recent experiences you can recall, the higher your life satisfaction, report researchers Kennon Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky. Another reason experiences are so fulfilling is that they tend to be done with others, satisfying your core need for social connection.
The message drummed into us, though, is the opposite of the participant dynamic -- flip on a screen and watch. The drumbeat is for comfort, goodies, digital distractions. Brains were designed for novelty and challenge that you dig out and participate in yourself. Do too much watching and not enough experiencing, and you wind up looking in the window of life or the smart phone.
There's a skill-set needed to activate a participant life, tools I detail In "Don't Miss Your Life." They are things nobody ever tells you about that get you out of onlooker mode and in the middle of experiences so electric and sublime that you'll need to be checked for illegal substances. Some of the most important skills are those that open the door to direct experiences, from attention-directing to the pursuit of competence. You can't enter the experiential domain while twiddling your phone; you need full absorption, and if you don't have the desire to learn and improve at an activity, you'll never develop the competence to have it turn into a passion.
The magic of direct experience comes from its ability to root you fully in the moment of living. Anyone interested in the power of Now has to be an experience fan, since it offers immediate transport to the unfolding present. You can't be anywhere else than where you are when you're immersed in your experience. The action itself allows no room for the static of self-talk and worries about what's going to happen tomorrow or what you messed up yesterday. The ego gets benched, allowing the authentic self to step forward to enjoy, learn, or try without the judgment killjoy of the external agenda (how am I doing? what am I going to get out of it?). The experience itself is enough.
When you're in an activity where your skills meet a challenge, you're vaulted into the higher realms of optimal experience, or flow, a state of absorption so complete that your thoughts and deeds are one. This is as good as it gets on the third planet from the sun, as close to anything that can be imagined to what we know as happiness, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of flow, has put it.
I can vouch for that 100 percent when I'm slap-happy in the zone of my favorite activity, samba dancing, or immersed on the adventure trail of some exotic land or back-country ridge. All chaos and heartache vanishes in the moment of harmonic aliveness. There's a feeling of completeness that reminds me of a line by Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist. He said it's not the meaning of life we're after; it's the feeling of being fully alive.
Nirvana is now, and experience is its stage.
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Joe Robinson: The Key to Happiness: A Taboo for Adults?
I do agree that creating art is experience in its purest form, but travel could not be further from that. All travel does is prove to the rest of the world that you are rich, not that you know how to live. It's just another rich person ideal meant to screw poor people out of money.
The absolute key to Csikszentmihalyi's "flow" or finding the zone or Campbell's feeling of being alive is the authenticity of the experience. i am doing this for me and am experiencing it as me. Then a hike in the mountains, a day meditating on the sea or a trip to the grocery store becomes a living moment. There is a lot of this is the "presence" literature right now (potentially a fad of its own). But experiencing mindfully should mean, if authentically practice, that driving the kids to soccer practice, waiting at the doctor's office and pondering the starry sky are all equally experiences to be felt authentically. The ocean's blue, a vast sandstone vista, the evening sky over the Pacific may however make that authenticity more accessible.
Yes, we look back on our memories - not our stuff. How often do we have clothes in the closet with tags still on? Any toys piled to the sky? How often do the thingss in our lives diasppoint us and not give us the rush that we thought we'd get? It might have been fun to buy - but the rush does not last.
Family and friends -- laughing and doing - that's where it's at. We need to detach from all of the stuff and go out and live for what is important. We all seem to be working harder just to get more stuff, but alas, we are no happier. So that is not the path. De-stuff, declutter, don't tbuy what you don't need a year from now.
Instead, go away, have fun, and generate some great new memories.
http://www.BouncingBackNow.com
http://blogs.forbes.com/janetcarmosky/2010/11/09/peak-stuff-are-we-there-yet/
In the early 1990’s I watched areas of Guangdong Province begin the slide from lush 3-crop-per-year productive farmland into what is now toxic (perhaps irreversibly so) industrial swamp. The factories I visited were makings what the retail business calls “Trim-a-Tree,” a product category that is the very epitome of “Stuff.” You know what I mean; those holiday and licensed character-themed mantel figures, cookie jars, door decorations; those objects devoid of artistry that spend a few weeks in service, and a few centuries if not millennia decomposing in landfill. Thanks to the recession, among the things that Americans can no longer afford to order from Chinese factories is a large volume of “Stuff.”
or my personal favorite, when you are on vaca & the person you are with plans everything out to a t! my friend's dad use to always do this & it drove us absolutely NUTS.
http://graciouslivingdaybyday.com/
time spent alone transcending to the source of thought in meditation, so when you come out, you can appreciate all those things so much better...
The craving for security is understandable but paradoxically it can be a kind of death itself. When we lock ourselves in secure prisons and watch the world through our windows, so much of what makes us human is abandoned.
People have been conditioned to believe that we need so much to survive, so much to be happy, and yet the human species has managed to survive and even flourish for many millennia with almost nothing. Imagine the resources it must have taken to be able to live a full life 50,000 years ago. That's what we are wired for. How little our modern life reflects that.
BTW, for anyone who has not read Gilovich's book "How We Know What Isn't So", I highly recommend it. It is a must for anyone interested in understanding our own misconceptions about life and the world.
Fromm was always a good read, and smarter than most. His categories are of course accurate for binary classification, but.... most of us hop around to varying points along an orientation scale rather than nesting at one end or the other.
For instance, my "being orientation" promotes a passion for engaging individuals and groups on family issues... but, on occasion my "having orientation" makes me splurge on a fine West Coast Merlot. So I am, like most everyone, the net of a variety of behaviors and influences.The trick is balance, and I believe Ben Robinson (and probably Erich) would agree that if we do nothing, we are in danger of sliding that net point way down the scale.
Thanks for the good thoughts and the reference to Fromm... let me be your first fan.
Lawson Meadows