Science Attempts To Hunt Down, Capture and Dissect Happiness

And so remember this:
Life is no abyss.
Somewhere there’s a Bluebird of Happiness – Song, The Bluebird of Happiness

It’s not a place, yet people are always searching for it.

It’s not a thing, yet people often try to buy it.

It’s not even a state of mind, or all one would need to do is think the right thoughts to achieve it.

It’s happiness, defined by Webster in 1828 as “The agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good; that state of a being in which his desires are gratified, by the enjoyment of pleasure without pain; felicity.” Mr. Webster also defines the word as “Fortuitous elegance; unstudied grace.”

Sure, why not?  The word’s original meaning—”fortunate or lucky”—stems back from 1380, which, given one’s circumstances in 1380, one would indeed be fortunate or lucky to be happy back then.

And so in pursuit of the nature of those “agreeable sensations which spring from the enjoyment of good,” the Global Happiness Megastudy has been spawned, an intensive psychological experiment involving at least 30,000 volunteer subjects, the distillation of proposals from more than 1,000 scientists from over 70 countries, and covering everything from exercise to yoga to AI chats to behavior modification.

“Our goal is for this to be the largest, most comprehensive, most diverse experiment on happiness ever conducted,” said Prof Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “It’s like the Avengers: many of the top happiness researchers from around the world have come together to join forces.”

One thing the researchers are aiming for is a really-truly, once-and-for-all, sure-fire “intervention,” lasting no more than 25 minutes with a guaranteed product of happiness.

Are there problems with this experimental approach? Absolutely. One that researcher Dunn and her partner in the project, Dr Barnabás Szászi, acknowledged are the shortcomings of prior happiness research, which was confined to “WEIRD” people—an acronym for western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. Another is the danger of spurious claims—something that happens when scientists, without registering a specific target to shoot for, find instead something else, and claim that’s what they were looking for in the first place.

But Dunn and Szászi, who are currently working on their top priority problem—funding—have missed the boat on what should be the most pressing flaw, namely entrusting research on happiness with psychologists—purveyors of an inexact science with no solid statistics to justify its existence as something that makes people better. Psychology, unlike happiness, is not associated with lowering blood pressure, alleviating the risk of disease, and promoting better health and longevity. Hence we have the curious circumstance of an unschooled discipline attempting to dissect something it has no ken of. Something along the lines of a plumber attempting a colonoscopy.

Researchers Dunn and Szászi are shooting for what they call “a huge leap forward for the science of happiness.”  Yet they are searching for something that’s already been found, documented and proven workable again and again.

It can be found in the works of Confucius, in the sermons of Jesus, in the sayings of Buddha and most recently in The Way To Happiness, a non-religious moral code based on common sense by Scientology Founder L. Ron Hubbard.

Happiness isn’t a less-than-half-hour “intervention,” nor is it a subject requiring “top happiness researchers” to explore at the cost of millions.

The “secret” to happiness is that it is not a static state but an active verb—apologies to Mr. Webster. As outlined in The Way To Happiness, the most recent and effective word on the subject (over 140 million copies distributed in 118 languages), happiness consists of exact steps that anyone can do. It requires discipline, not intervention, and practice, not experimentation.

Before Dunn and Szászi embark on their quixotic search for something that’s already been found, they might be well-advised to pick up a copy of The Way To Happiness and read it.

No worries. No funding required. It’s free.