Meaning Archives - Farther to Go!

You Give Truth a Bad Name

January 10, 2025 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Not necessarily you, personally. But maybe you. If so, you should stop doing that.

When I came across a promising article posted on a writers’ website titled “The World Needs Writers Now More than Ever” I could do nothing but nod in agreement, although my perspective runs more along the lines of when hasn’t the world needed writers?

I started reading with great expectations—which were immediately dashed when the author referred to writers as “truth tellers.” She says:

Most of us write to discover what we think and believe about the world, and, in the process, we arrive at a certain kind of truth. We share that truth with the world through our words.

That’s a nice idea, but she’s giving writers too much credit for high-mindedness. Far too many of them are active truth dissemblers.

But…fair enough. It’s the case for some writers I know and it’s frequently the case for me to use writing to explore rather than to explain. It’s a practice available to anyone that I wish more people would take advantage of. But a majority of people in this world, including writers, are far more interested in what they know than in what they don’t know. And they write from a position of absoluteness, as if what they have to say is the final word on how it is, what to do about it, and who is right and who is wrong. “A certain kind of truth” needs more definition.

I was further dismayed by a subheading midway through the piece claiming that all of us “have to tell our truth.” Things that are true are factual. There is evidence for them. Something happened or it didn’t happen. It either is or it isn’t. Or maybe we don’t know. Our lack of knowledge has no effect on the truth. There is no truth that is exclusively yours or mine. What this writer appears to be talking about is personal experience which is exclusively yours or mine, even when aspects of it seems to be shared.

However, I expect more from a writer, especially one writing about the craft of writing on a writing website. Personal experience and “truth” are not one and the same. As a writer, that’s a distinction she ought to assist people in making. Conflating experience and truth is what gives truth a bad name. Personalizing truth makes it wonky, unstable, vague.

If we can’t agree on what truth is, then it is hopeless to expect that we can ever recognize truth and respond to or deal effectively with it. It was snowing 10 minutes ago—a kind of blink-and-you-miss-it bit of flurries, but snowing nonetheless. The fact that someone indoors didn’t notice it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It just means it wasn’t part of that person’s experience.

Personally, I don’t really like snow, but that doesn’t mean snow is bad even though my experience of it is often unpleasant.

Every child in a multiple-child family has a different experience of their parents. They tell different stories with different details and different meanings and different outcomes. None of them are true because there’s no such thing as a true story. We are all personalizing. Well, to be more accurate, our brain is personalizing.

It is processing sensory data through our personal mental model which contains our personal beliefs and making personal interpretations that give rise to our personal experience. Your experience is your experience and mine is mine. Just because it feels “real” doesn’t mean it’s an accurate reflection of reality. If someone doesn’t experience their own experiences as real, they are likely in a dissociative state, which is not healthy. But claiming that one’s experience is or represents the truth is essentially lying.

We are being sold the idea that our experience is our truth as a way of encouraging us to not deny our experience, to give it voice. This is all well and good, but not if in the process we actually disempower ourselves by failing to take into account that we play a role in how our brain creates our experiences. Besides, if our experience represents the truth, then it is not changeable. We have no power or agency in the matter. The world happens to us and we can’t do anything about it. That is not a desirable state of affairs. And it’s not true.

Storytelling

There are types of experiences that humans tend to have—that we are wired to have, so to speak. Some of them may be given less validity by the society or culture in which we live. Sharing such experiences can validate them, which can bring them out into the open, assist individuals in recognizing others have similar experiences, and broaden the understanding of who we all are (as humans).

Stories pack an emotional punch, or they can, that non-fiction does far less easily. So telling a story of your own experience or of someone else’s can have a profound effect. You could say it represents “a certain kind of truth,” but that truth is abstract, not to be confused or conflated with “the truth.” It is a true experience. You or I or someone lived through it. It is what you or I or someone felt. It is how we perceived it.

Some may even consider abstract truth to be more important and certainly more profound than mere facts. Reading stories about other people’s experiences—especially in the form of literary fiction—has been repeatedly shown to help develop social acuity, emotional intelligence, compassion, understanding, and critical thinking, among other things. In short, it can make us better people.

But it’s vital that we know how to separate fact from fiction and experience from reality and that we all have a basic agreement as to what we’re talking about when we talk about truth. Our experience is real, but it is not the truth.

Chronic Happiness
Is Not Good for You

July 22, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

I recently came across a video of a mental health professional disparaging the brain’s default mode network (DMN). The loudest contingent of the DMN-bashing bandwagon tends to be the mindfulness folks, but it’s not an exclusive club.

This particular person cited a study I’m familiar with and have mentioned previously. Researchers contacted study participants at random times to ask them (1) what they were doing right then and (2) how happy they were.

The results supposedly revealed that people were happier when their attention was focused on what they were doing (accessing the brain’s attention network) than they were when their minds were wandering (accessing the brain’s default mode network).

My first question now would be who were these people? Specifically, I would want to know something about their personalities, given that we are all so dissimilar from each other. That is just one of many reasons why you cannot simply lump a group of people together, average their responses to some questions, and come to a sound conclusion about…anything.

Happiness was, in fact, the subject of the research, so I can’t fault the researchers for asking people to evaluate their level of happiness. But I question the ability of people in general to gauge their degree of happiness or of any other emotion. And I definitely can fault the assumption that happiness is a worthy topic of research.

The study in question was really focused on transient happiness—or acute happiness, if you will—which most people experience to a greater or lesser extent, anyway. By that, I mean we don’t all experience an equal amount or intensity of happiness. And who knows if what I label happy is the same emotion you label happy.

An inability to experience any happiness is definitely an indicator of a problem; the inability to be happy all the time—not so much.

The Pursuit of Happiness

A recent Facebook post advertising a Buddhist-oriented program asserted that anger is a “delusion” and it’s bad because it makes us unhappy. This is both simple-minded and wrong. The relentless pursuit of happiness is far more delusional and destructive than the experience of anger.

I have a handout with a list of 136 positive emotions (along with a similar list of negative emotions). Happy is but one of them. Yet somehow people have gotten the idea that it is the best or most important emotion. And somehow people have concluded that a steady state of happiness is both desirable and achievable. (This seems to be a peculiarly American take.)

One of the other emotions on the list is excited, which is far more appealing to me than happy but far less acceptable to pursue. For one thing, people who pursue excitement are often advised that it is just a poor substitute for happiness. Pursuing excitement is also associated with novelty-seeking and risk-taking.

In the Five Factor Model of Personality, it’s related to extraversion and openness to experience. (Full disclosure: those are the two factors I always score highest in, in that order.) Introverts and ambiverts tend to view extraverts with some degree of suspicion if not outright aversion, so the negative association to excitement is not surprising.

The short-term side-effects of excitement (acute excitement), however, include anticipation, alertness, increased energy, and motivation. Good stuff! But the side-effects of attempting to maintain a constant state of excitement—chronic excitement—are altogether different: impaired concentration, sleeplessness, restlessness, elevated blood pressure, increased adrenaline and noradrenaline, racing heart. The body would react to a constant state of excitement essentially the same as it would to chronic stress.

Furthermore, one would have to continually up the ante, so to speak (seek more novelty, take greater risks), to maintain the same level of excitement. Someone who was chronically excited would likely become a source of annoyance to friends, family, and coworkers.

Chronic happiness is no better for us than chronic excitement. Here’s why:

Sometimes things are not going well, there is a real threat, and vigilance is required.

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think it’s something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert

Pursuing happiness is likely to keep you stuck on the hedonic treadmill, where you’ll need to keep moving to acquire more and more of the things or experiences you think will bring you pleasure—to each of which you will adapt surprisingly quickly.
.
Happiness won’t increase your lifespan. In the final analysis, death comes in equal proportion to the happy and the sad. The result of research conducted by Oxford University with nearly 720,000 women is that “happiness and related measures of wellbeing do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality.”
.
If you’re simply here for the party, you should be aware your body processes “empty positive emotions” the same way it processes chronic adversity, which is by activating the pro-inflammatory response to prepare for bacterial threats. (Inflammation is associated with many major and minor diseases, including heart disease, various cancers, rheumatoid arthritis, etc.) A diet of too many empty positive emotions seems to be a lot like a diet of too many empty (sugar-, salt-, alcohol-, or fat-laden) calories.
.
Happiness may make you feel good in the moment, but pursuing it by avoiding negative thoughts and feelings and difficult or painful situations can stunt your personal development. That can lead to decreased resilience, greater susceptibility to stress, and reduced creativity and problem-solving abilities.

You’re less likely to become depressed if you regularly experience a range of emotions instead of aiming exclusively for the positive ones.

Research indicates that if you pursue happiness, you may get it (just not all the time), but you’re not likely to feel satisfied. On the other hand, if you focus on meaning, instead, you’re extremely likely to feel satisfied and you may also get happiness as a bonus.

The Other Problem with
Affective Forecasting

July 27, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The year it was published, I purchased a copy of the Best American Non-Required Reading 2004, which included an article written by Jon Gertner for the New York Times titled The Futile Pursuit of Happiness. The article reviewed the work of several psychologists whose work I eventually became familiar with—including Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and Daniel Kahneman—in the relatively new field of affective forecasting. I was intrigued enough to copy the article, reread it, and highlight a good portion. From the vantage point of now, I see it was one of the small handful of bread crumbs along the trail to creating Farther to Go!

But I filed the article away, and in the interim between then and 2012, seem to have forgotten about it. Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness was already a best seller before I came across a copy of it, and I don’t recall connecting the dots between it and the article I’d been so interested in. I’ve recommended the book to numerous people and refer to it in some of my courses in spite of it’s focus on happiness, not because of it.

Don’t Worry; Be Happy

That’s the other problem with affective forecasting (read my previous post, Miswanting). The emphasis is on happiness rather than on satisfaction and meaning. Happiness is an ephemeral emotional state. We’re simply not always going to be happy—and trying to be isn’t even a worthwhile goal.

We are living in an era in which the Happiness Industry invades and permeates society and every unpleasant aspect of life is frowned upon, and dismissed as an unnecessary social ill. Rather than learning to cope with or contemplate certain aspects of life—fear, sadness, loneliness and boredom—we avoid them, gradually removing our ability to tolerate even the most mundane of the difficult aspects of life. —Siobhan Lyons, Philosophy Now

The things that make us happy are not necessarily the things we find satisfying or meaningful. That’s partly because happiness is a function of the unconscious part of the brain (System 1), which is focused on immediate gratification, while satisfaction and meaning are functions of the conscious part (System 2), which is focused on long-term goals and plans. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs.

Furthermore, because happiness is an ephemeral and transient emotional state, what makes us happy at one point in time isn’t necessarily going to make us happy at another. But because of the way we’re wired, it’s very difficult to recognize and account for that in the moment.

We’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person. —George Loewenstein, Educator and Economist

And maybe a certain amount of something makes us happy, but too much of it makes us sick—literally or figuratively. Too much craft beer, sex, alone time, hanging out with a best friend, tiramisu, dancing, cooking, listening to music, laughing—whatever it is that makes us happy has at least the potential to also make us very unhappy.

To be fair to Daniel Gilbert, he isn’t advocating the relentless pursuit of happiness, either:

If someone offers you a pill that makes you happy 100 percent of the time, you should run fast in the other direction. It’s not good to feel happy in a dark alley at night. Happiness is a noun, so we think its something we can own. But happiness is a place to visit, not a place to live. It’s like the child’s idea that if you drive far and fast enough you can get to the horizon. No, the horizon’s not a place you get to. —Daniel Gilbert, quoted in The Science of Happiness, Harvard Magazine

However, there is a considerable amount of discussion and debate about how we should approach the subject of happiness. This may be the most useful perspective:

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us. —Ashley Montagu, Anthropoligist

Satisfying and Meaningful vs. Happy

One way to bypass the errors we make in affective forecasting is to focus on creating satisfying and meaningful lives rather than happy ones by identifying what we really want. Higher order wants or, as I call them, Big Picture Wants, are abstract but they are neither transient nor ephemeral.

Research indicates that if you aim for satisfying and meaningful, you may get happiness as a byproduct. But if you aim for happiness, you will not get satisfaction and meaning as byproducts. And the people who pursue satisfaction and meaning, even when the going gets tough, report higher overall levels of satisfaction with their lives. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life.

When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are, and bigger than our immediate wants and needs, we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference to ourselves and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may reflect a sense that our lives lack meaning, but pursuing happiness is not the solution. George Loewenstein recommends we invest our resources in the things that will make us happy. I think we’ll be much better off if instead we invest our resources in what makes our lives satisfying and meaningful. That path may be risky and not always easy or pleasurable, but…

If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. –Clint Eastwood

Are You Living the Good Life?

August 28, 2015 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Does living “the good life” mean living a happy life? Or does it mean living a meaningful life? Although happiness and meaning correlate positively, as the researchers put it—or at least overlap to some extent—they are not the same thing and in some cases they represent two entirely different paths.

The concept of “the good life” is often credited to Aristotle, although there was considerable debate among the Greeks as to exactly what constituted a good life.

Aristotle thought the good life included virtue and excellence of character, along with health, wealth, and beauty. His view fits somewhere in between the Stoics, who believed virtue was sufficient, and Epicurus, who believed the good life was strictly one of pleasure.

The Greeks had a word for happiness, which they considered to be an important element of the good life. Eudaemonia has several possible translations, including “human flourishing” or “good spirit.” But what does that mean?

For most people today, the concept of the good life has come to represent the life one wants to, or would prefer to, live. For some, that’s a life of pleasure, but not for all. Whatever its components, the good life is something to strive for, wish for, or hope to achieve. Interestingly, however, no matter how we define it, or how well off we are, the good life is persistently difficult to attain.

When people are dissatisfied with their lives, their dissatisfaction seems to be the starting point for identifying what a good life would look like and then going after it. But how you go about pursuing the good life depends on what you think the solution to your dissatisfaction might be: happiness or meaningfulness.

The Pursuit of Happiness vs. the Pursuit of Meaningfulness

Quite a bit of research has been conducted to determine how people who pursue happiness actually feel and how people who pursue meaningfulness actually feel. The results of the research are pretty clear, but there are a few problems with the concept.

One problem is with the way the issue tends to be phrased. The pursuit of happiness vs. the pursuit of meaning doesn’t accurately describe what we’re talking about. Meaningfulness doesn’t reside “out there,” so it isn’t something we can go after. We determine the meaning of things. Things (or people or situations or activities) mean something to us because we have assigned meaning to them. And the meaning we assign to them is very specific and very personal. A thing can mean one thing to one person and something else to another person. In addition, the meaning we assign to things, people, situations, or activities can change. If meaning resided within the thing, the meaning of the thing wouldn’t change.

As David DiSalvo says, we are meaning-makers. We can focus our lives on what we determine is meaningful to us, but we can’t go looking for meaning out there and expect to find anything.

Another problem is that happiness vs. meaningfulness represents an apples and oranges kind of comparison. Happiness is a feeling, and therefore transient. It’s the nature of feelings to come and go. Happiness bubbles up in us, often unexpectedly, and the unexpectedness is part of its charm or desirability. If we were happy all the time—which is impossible, anyway—we would miss out on that aspect of it. And since happiness is a feeling—an experience—it is subjective. It’s not easy to describe our personal experience of happiness to someone else.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” —Humpty Dumpty

A third problem results from this ephemeral nature of happiness: how do you define it? Some people have decided that happiness means what they choose it to mean:

In her 2007 book The How of Happiness, positive psychology researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky [describes] happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile.” —Greater Good Science Center website

The Greater Good Science Center is well-meaning, but the notion that you can’t experience happiness unless you also believe your life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile—whatever that means—is absurd. Ask a toddler.

Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) said, “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’” So he and Lyubomirsky appear to be on the same page. But it isn’t true that happiness can’t be pursued. It’s pursued all the time by quite a large number of people—not only pursued, but attained—at least temporarily. It’s also not true that money can’t buy happiness. It doesn’t always, but it definitely can. At least for a while.

Attempting to maintain a steady-state of happiness requires the ongoing pursuit of bigger and better things or experiences. We have an unfortunate tendency to become complacent with what we already have. We then require more things and more experiences to feed our happiness addiction—or our pleasure addiction, if we’re on board with Epicurus and consider the good life to be a life of hedonism. Yet another piece of bad news is the overwhelming evidence that most of us don’t really know what will make us happy, which can make the pursuit of happiness extremely frustrating and possibly even futile.

Happy as a Clam*

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with feeling happy or wanting to feel happy. Happiness is great stuff, but there’s a reason why pursuing it or trying to be happy all the time is not a good idea.

A good mood is a signal [to the brain] that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.

Good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors. —Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

*The full expression is happy as a clam at high tide. Clams are happy at high tide because they can only be dug up at low tide. At high tide they’re safe and secure, which is what System 1 wants us to be.

The Good Life: Gratified or Satisfied?

So what’s the solution to the problem of dissatisfaction? Pursuing happiness and pursuing what is meaningful use different parts of our brain. The pursuit of happiness keeps us fixated on ourselves and on gratifying our immediate wants and needs. Our unconscious (System 1) is focused on the short-term rewards that make us feel good in the moment (because that indicates we’re safe) but which can actually add up to an increase in dissatisfaction. The pursuit of happiness doesn’t appear to be the solution to our existential dissatisfaction.

We have the ability to determine what is meaningful to us. Because what is meaningful is less transitory, we have a much better chance of achieving and sustaining a meaningful life—and therefore a satisfying one—than we have of achieving and maintaining a happy life. When we’re oriented to something bigger than we are—and bigger than our immediate wants and needs—we’re less susceptible to the pull of immediate gratification. When we give our big brain (consciousness, System 2) something worthwhile to focus on, we can achieve goals or create things that actually make a difference, to us and to others.

Our obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, to a sense that our lives lack meaning. Although we recognize our dissatisfaction, we don’t realize the source of it. As a result, we’re stuck on the hamster wheel of System 1 looking for the solution in all the wrong places, unable to look up long enough to even identify what’s most important to us, let alone figure out how to attain it.

Inside Week 6 of What Do You Want?

June 12, 2014 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

This is the sixth and final–but hopefully not forever–guest post by Jean S., who has been sharing her experience of participating the 6-week What Do You Want? course. She previously wrote about week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, and week 5.

This week we continued exploring and, in some cases, expanding the list of what our heart is connected to, in terms of Big Picture Wants. Having our own personal list of Big Picture Wants (which are fairly intangible), helps us assess whether—and how—the things we are doing now or the goals we are going after fit into this firmament of our own “cosmic values” (my term, not Joycelyn’s).

We can better assess whether we are spending time in activities that don’t get us to any of our Big-Picture Wants. Life is too short for that! So if I suspect this is the case, I want to look deeper to see if there isn’t some Big-Picture type reward, perhaps one I haven’t yet identified, that I am getting from this activity. If something I’m doing seems like a drag or I do it without enthusiasm, it would help me see it and do it differently if I saw it as part of the bigger picture—as getting me one of my BPW’s. But if there is no connection and I do it “just because,” then maybe I could ditch that activity. My suspicion is that many of these kinds of activities actually are connected to the BPW’s, but we don’t usually look at them through that lens.

In order to have my heart in the process of going after my goals, there has to be a relationship between those goals—the things I want to accomplish—and my Big-Picture Wants.

One of the assignments of this final week was to take inventory of our relationship to goals, basically our history with them. We were to list three goals we have achieved, and describe how we did it. Next we were to list three goals we attempted but did not achieve and describe what happened. Finally, we were to identify three goals we are currently working toward or want to work toward and the progress we’ve made. (Curiously, some of us in the group did not complete the section on goals attempted but not achieved, and those who did complete it reported that it was very difficult to do.)

Before my closing story, I want to thank Joycelyn for the opportunity to make these weekly reports. If they sounded like gobbledygook, that means I either didn’t do a good job or perhaps you need this course. It was a real eye-opener and learning experience for me and, I’m pretty sure, for my cohorts in this class. Writing the reports has helped me get more out of the class, and helped me get my feet wet in writing for someone other than myself or my loved ones (although, of course, it’s always for myself!)

A Cow of One’s Own

So now, here is one of my goals that I have achieved. I offer it as much for my entertainment as for yours, and with the encouragement of my classmates:

When I was a young woman, I wanted very much to have a Jersey cow, to be close to her and to take care of her.

How I did it: I kept the goal in front of me, particularly in images such as repeating images of a Brahman cow (which I believe, while still around, are thought to be ancestors of the Jersey) on a bedspread on our bed, for several years. When it was time (for our family) to move on in our life, one of two major requirements in deciding where to move to was to have a small farm so we could have at least one Jersey cow. The other major requirement was being near the sea. I reviewed with one of my farmer cousins the needs and requirements of a milk cow, and eventually we settled in to our small farm by the sea. And when we were ready, the cow appeared.

I haven’t thought, yet, about what Big-Picture Want the cow had to do with, but I assure you there is one! And, by the way, she really was a teacher.