"Our relation to happiness often betrays an unconscious desire for disillusionment. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. And this is what makes wishing so interesting, because wishing is always too knowing. When we wish we are too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want. The belief that we can arrange our happiness, as though happiness were akin to justice, which we can work towards, may be to misrecognise the very thing that concerns us."
Adam Phillips on The Happiness Myth from The Guardian, via Bobulate.
I spent a lot of time thinking about happiness a few months ago. I thought maybe I could compose a few drawings, write a few thoughts, bind it all into a volume, and, possibly get closer to somewhere I wanted to be by crafting something of value. That way I could use what I'd learned and apply it to my work. Happy customers, buy more product.
But in frustration, I realized it was in folly. To try to define or explain or even sometimes pursue happiness feels to be a quagmire. Happiness is not a new problem and there wasn't much I could add to the conversation that hadn't already been said. There is no need for redundancy.
And then, I found Maira Kalman's blog And The Pursuit of Happiness, you need to scroll about 2/3rds of the page down. I think it's the best rumination on happiness I've witnessed recently. No where is there a mention of "this is how you achieve it." The perspective is always "this is what I saw", "this is what I enjoyed." This seems preferable, this seems healthier and wiser.
Maira Kalman's, The Pursuit of Happiness can be bought here. I know it's on my reading list.
It reminds me of what it is like to sharpen a knife on a whetstone. It's a laborious affair, pushing a blade against the slab, consistent in pressure and varying in angle and velocity. It's a process ripe with friction and frustration.
Excellence comes through an evenness achieved by variety. When through, one is left with a sharp knife and its remnants, sloughed off particles of the shorn blade in a slurry on the surface on the stone. Could happiness be that slurry, a residue of the process of sharpening ourselves through variety, frustration, and friction?
Maybe. But, I'll probably never know. Because happiness is not crafted, happiness emerges. And Brands need to understand this. Don't just tell me how good your product is, show me, and help me experience it myself.
Or has Louis C K got a far better handle on it. :-)
And how long is a happy? I think you can probably deduce a lot about a person and customer, from their answer. A moment? A day? A life? Right now? On the whole, I think it's very short little moments all strung together like pearls on a necklace. Maybe you don't get big happys until you're older, or maybe it's because you grow more contented. Demanding less of everything around you.
I don't know how you can really measure happiness. Ask any planner to comprehensively measure happiness in a focus group. It seems a silly question to ask "How happy are you?" On a scale of what to what? "Oh, you know, on a scale between Found A Penny and Three-Day Weekend". "Well, I'd say I'm about an Ice Cream Cone of happy."
Certain things die when you count them. People don't want metrics on their joy. But they do understand the appeal of the idea, as lots of us seem to think that if you force data through logic, you get control. But, it doesn't always work that way because people are emotional and not always logical. Pancakes for dinner tonight made me happy. Pancakes for dinner tomorrow night will make me sad. And the logic machine overheats and smokes away furiously.
I used to play hide and seek with my niece. It was fun and infuriating. She's not very good at hiding, so I'd have to pretend that I didn't see her. "Where is she? Where could she be?" I'd stumble around the house. Eventually, she'd get so impatient she'd yell hints. "I'm not over there!" or "Come upstairs!" or "You're on the wrong side of the room!" After more of my poor seeking, she'd get frustrated, pop out and say "I'm over here!"
It was more fun that way, than if I had seriously looked for her. And maybe happiness is a bit paradoxical like that. If you stop pursuing it, there are fewer places for it to hide.
In today's era of infinite consumer choice, paradoxically, there's a danger that to much choice only leads to greater dissatisfaction. And brands may well benefit from quality of communication over quantity of communication.
The more you just have to be listening when it says "I'm over here!"
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