Educating for Happiness

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Some time ago I was invited to participate in a “super seminar” in honor of Anna Ekström, former Swedish Minister of Education. The topic was the education of the future. Here’s an English version of my remarks. The event was recorded and is available here.

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When a journalist asked General de Gaulle if he was a happy man, the General is alleged to have responded: “What sort of idiot do you take me for!?” de Gaulle expressed what may be a common view: that happiness belongs to the innocently ignorant, and that education and intelligence not only won’t help you get happier – but may be an actual obstacle to happiness. A corollary is that the pursuit of happiness is somewhat selfish, since it involves remaining stupid and ignorant.

Someone who would have disagreed was John Stuart Mill. He thought education was critical for progress toward the greatest happiness for the greatest number. A well-designed curriculum, to Mill, would promote happiness in at least two ways. First, it would help the students themselves become happier, more flourishing human beings. Second, it would bring students’ goals and purposes in line with the greatest happiness principle, leaving them with a desire to do good for others as well as themselves.

When we think about this today, I propose we follow Anna’s lead and follow the science. There is a science of happiness that goes back literally 100 years. Its general contours are well known. Happiness can be reliably measured, and studied across people and over time. There are things that are consistently associated with significantly higher levels of happiness in a variety of populations: money, companionship, relationships, etc.

But one important upshot of the science of happiness is less well known. It’s the idea that each and every one of us ultimately has to figure out, for ourselves, what makes us happy. And we have to do that by means of reflection and experimentation. The psychologist Sonya Lyubomirsky, for example, encourages us to actively distrust initial reactions and gut feelings, in favor of a more reflective, empirical approach.

Why can’t we just apply, in our own lives, what the science says? Even if (say) companionship is associated with greater levels of happiness in the population, that’s just an average. We’re all different, and the effect need not hold for you. Making things worse, we’re pretty bad at predicting what makes us happy. We can sit around and imagine how happy we would be if things were different, but doing so is often pointless.

What can we do instead? The literature offers at least three suggestions.

One, instead of imagining how happy we would be if we lived a different kind of life, we can ask people who are currently leading that kind of life how happy they are. You may object “But they’re different from me!” That’s true. But the research suggests we’re so bad at imagining how happy we would be under counterfactual conditions that we’re better off using somebody else’s happiness under actual conditions as a guide.

Two, instead of just reflecting on what sort of life would make us happy, we should be ready to try them on for size. Mill called it experiments in living. We don’t just imagine what it would feel like to have a new car; we ask the dealer to let us try to real thing. The same applies in life. By trying out various modes of life we can develop an empirically informed view about how valuable that life is to us. As an added bonus, our experiments can help others. If we happen to hit on a particularly satisfying mode of life, others can imitate us – for everyone’s benefit.

Three, we need to reflect on our priorities. To assess what constitutes a successful experiment in living, we need a yardstick – a standard of evaluation. That yardstick is our values, goals, and priorities: the sort of normative commitments that drive our behavior in the first place, and by reference to which we can say that an particular experiment succeeded or not. If we don’t reflect on what priorities are genuinely our own we risk mindlessly adopting the values of whatever influencer, marketer, or tech visionary happens to grab our attention. They may be anywhere from uninterested in our well-being, to exploitative, to downright malicious.

So what this tell us about educating for the future? I think there are three relatively straightforward implications.

1. We should expose students to a wide range of modes of life, through curriculum development and through a diverse workforce.

2. We should help students to articulate and realize their own plan of life (within the bounds set by the law, student safety, and good taste).

3. We should encourage reflection about values and priorities in life. It’s a fact that we can’t always have everything that we want, and that we sometimes have to choose, and that if we don’t make an active choice that’s genuinely our own, somebody else risks making it for us.

These suggestions all formulated to help individual students (of whatever age) to reach individual happiness. That might make the pursuit of happiness seem selfish, after all. But there’s an extra bonus: the skills involved in learning to live a life of well-being are the very same skills involved in building a good society!

Exposing students to different modes of organization, helping them articulate and try to implement a vision of the good society, and encouraging them to reflect on the values by which we assess what’s a good society and what’s not is exactly what they need – not just to live lives of well-being, but to join the effort of building a better world for all of us.