how to achieve well-being

November 6, 2022

Love, Fate and the Role of Acceptance in Achieving Well-being

Things happen — sometimes planned, sometimes unplanned. According to several philosophers, making the best of jubilation and tragedy is essential to a life of equanimity, given the inevitability of both.

Nietzsche put it this way in The Gay Science:

I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful.

Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

Of course, Nietzche didn’t live every day as he tried to, but he offers a helpful description of a much-needed way of achieving a well-balanced life. This man understood all kinds of joys and sorrows would be unexpected, haphazard, and absurd.

The German philosopher suggests we come to terms with whatever happens to us — the fluctuating experience of our human life no matter what. Positives and negatives come close to being guaranteed in any long lifetime.

Dean Martin’s rendition of That’s Amore (Italian for romantic love) reminds us that chance meetings often drive affairs of the heart. Amor (Latin) also means love but applies to many things, including fate, as in the expression Amor Fati or love of fate.

That is what Nietzche expresses: accepting the nature of life as a first signpost to the emotional overcoming and acceptance of disappointment, failure, and unfairness.

The Stoic philosophers additionally referred to the limits of what we can change and must concede. They believed our brief lifespan gives us a silent push to make the best use of our finite opportunities and a reason for adherence to the highest values.

Professor Luke Timothy Johnson said the following about the difference between the worldview of a man like Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic “philosopher/king” of second-century Rome, and our way of thinking about “the good life:”

Marcus Aurelius was obsessed by the transitory character of all existent things. We (by contrast) take our institutions for granted. We think that life is long. We assume that we should be healthy.

Marcus Aurelius spurned pleasure and sought duty. We are driven by the notions of feeling good, and the pursuit of happiness is often identified with the pursuit of pleasure. Marcus Aurelius identified freedom as a call to virtue and duty, whereas in present day America, we often think of freedom as the most radical form of individualism and doing what we like.

The writing of the Englishman Wordsworth, too, reminds us to make the best use of our abilities in worthwhile actions:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers …

Camus, the French writer, Existentialist, and political activist, goes beyond the conventional notion of acceptance in The Myth of Sisyphus. His title character, a figure from Greek mythology, was a man in extreme distress who achieved equanimity, triumph, and nobility despite it. 

The gods condemned Sisyphus to spend the rest of his life pushing a large rock up a tall hill. Of course, the boulder rolled down each time, requiring him to walk down and repeat the meaningless act.* 

In the view of Camus, this man does not rage against the gods for his misfortune nor forever despair at his sentence to such a life. “His fate belongs to him” to the extent he can look at it for what it is. This target of the gods has to realize “there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

In taking on the job required of him as his own, “Sisyphus knows himself to be the master of his days.” The creative sufferer buys into what is inescapable. 

The last line of the writer’s essay reads, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Captives in war, like Vice Admiral James Stockdale, relied on the teaching of the ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus when imprisoned and tortured during the Vietnam conflict. The brave officer thereby found a way to endure seven years of captivity. 

The following is from Wikipedia:

James C. Collins related a conversation he had with Stockdale regarding his coping strategy during his period in the Vietnamese prison. When Collins asked which prisoners didn’t make it out of Vietnam, Stockdale replied:
Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go.

And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again.And they died of a broken heart.

This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

Collins called this the Stockdale Paradox.

The idea of finding solace in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” so-called by the U.S. prisoners who inhabited and mocked it, also seems absurd. Yet the message is affirmative: the experience could be endured, the awfulness would cease, and life would go on. 

Think of chronic pain, another matter of endurance, as comprised of two parts. 

The first is the physical affliction itself, the signals your body sends to you from the site of the injury. The second part, however, is where your agency — your control — can be found, depending on what you do with the “idea” of suffering. 

Suppose you focus forever on your distress, worry it will intensify, think how unfair it is, rage at what caused it, and despair at what you have lost. In that event, your psychological state and unhappiness will grow. 

Instead, imagine you learn to meditate and calm your mind, concentrate on your breathing, engage in mind-capturing tasks, or distract yourself with T.V., computer games, and other pastimes. 

In that case, the possibility exists of overcoming a significant aspect of your misfortune.

One more thing. In your attempt to understand Stoicism, realize they did not dismiss the need for grieving. Rather, they added something to it.

—

I am not suggesting you or I share the fortitude of either the mythic Greek or the heroic Congressional Medal of Honor winner Stockdale. At times pain triumphed even for the Stoics.

I have tried to offer an awareness of an uncommon way to approach the act of living and consider whether it may include something both true and worthy. If you think it might, perhaps it will change your life. 

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*Please do not confuse the legendary Sisyphus and his punishment with the origin of “Rock and Roll.” I hope you get the pun. Imagine Sisyphus laughing from the hilltop.

The three images below the youtube video are all of the same Amor Fati Coin, available from the Stoic Store U.K. and easily found online. I have no financial or other involvement with this product or those who manufacture and sell it.

Presumably, it is used by some of those attached to Stoic philosophy as a reminder to seek the love of fate.

November 29, 2020

Reaching for Happiness

Phil Brickman could be a funny guy, but he was not a happy one. Let’s start with the first words he said when I defended my Master’s thesis. Phil was one of the examiners, a member of the small panel passing judgment on whether I met the degree’s requirements.

All the committee members had signed off on my research proposal. Once finished and written up, they’d read the account I gave them of my efforts.

The group of three talked for a few minutes before asking me to enter the room. The 23-year-old version of GS inhabited a state of controlled anxiety typical of graduate students in such situations.

The questioning began. Phil spoke first:

There is a very serious problem with this thesis.

Those were not the words I’d wished for. Fortunately, I carried no sharp objects with me. I waited as my brain began to dissolve. While my imagined dead-end future passed before me, the same gentleman said more.

Philip is spelled with one (lower case) L.

Philip was calling attention to how his name appeared in the Acknowledgments section of my long paper.

It read, “Phillip.“

Oops.

I don’t recall what happened next. My guess would be laughs, my apology, and relief. Or maybe my leaping across the desk (I can see it now) and throttling the man. No, I’ve never been one for rashness or battery.

Young Assistant Professor Phil wasn’t a popular guy, as you might have guessed. He didn’t fit well with people, including those of us who called him a teammate on our Northwestern Psychology Department softball team.

Everyone recognized Phil’s intellect, however. Indeed, Doctor B become famous in his field, and his research continues to be cited and discussed.

One of Brickman’s major contributions to our profession is an idea called “the hedonic treadmill.” Simply put, the notion consists of this: we adapt to events in our lives, and our elation or dismay tends to fade. As time passes, we return to where we started in terms of mood.

Here is an example of the idea (co-created with Donald Campbell in 1971).

Imagine you get a happiness boost by achieving some goal you’ve long been shooting for. You feel great, but the pleasurable dose of enhancement diminishes with time. The set-point — your usual level of high spirits or unhappiness — returns.

Don’t despair; welcome news is coming. Your set-point doesn’t control everything about your emotional state. One can still reach a condition of well-being: a satisfying life with an often positive and seldom negative mood.

In 2005, long after Philip died, other social scientists took his idea further. A study involving over 2000 twins, Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade estimated that 50% of your life satisfaction derives from inborn temperament — your genetic inheritance. Another 10% comes from life circumstances, with 40% determined by personal outlook and life-altering thoughts and actions.

The encouraging development is that various empirically validated forms of psychotherapy emerged since Phil’s work ended, concentrating on the 40% of our well-being we can enhance and the 10% of life conditions we can sometimes change. Although our genes can’t be altered, we can find ways to move through life at a higher altitude.

Therefore, the patient and therapist’s job aims to boost the things over which we possess some influence.

The irony of Phil Brickman’s life, one he took at age 38, was that his research led to improvements in many other lives, though he never achieved this for himself.

A story by Jennifer Senior from The New York Times (NYT) of November 24, 2020,  focuses on the tragedy, but I prefer to remember this man in a brighter light.

Think of someone who throws a stone into the ocean and then walks away. The ripples continue long after his departure. Many others, years after the missile touched the water, watch the surge catch the sunlight. The beauty of the reflection benefits all of them and those around them.

The cause of the tiny waves is a mystery to many whose lives thereby were enriched. Even you, dear reader, might be one who Dr. B’s distant hand helped to lift.

Now you’ll remember his name and the proper spelling of it, too:

Philip Brickman.

One L.

The top image is Pedra do Baú — Compos do Jordáo. The author is Izabel Tartari. The second photo shows Anna Stoehr, AUS, competing in the Boulder Worldcup 2012. It is the work of Henning Schlottmann. After the University of Michigan picture of Dr. Brickman, comes a 3D Graph That Shows a Rippling Pattern, the creation of Mr. Noble.xyz. All but the photo of Phil come from Wikimedia Commons.