Seeking Happiness: To Each Their Own

Happiness breaks down into three things. One is what Hollywood means by happiness, which is the pleasant life. The second notion into which happiness dissolves is engagement in life—the engaged life. And the third notion, which is different yet, is a meaningful life—belonging to and serving something that you think is larger than you are.

Jack Daniels.

—which perfectly describes Peter and Mary Gregory. For the last 22 years, they've operated the Retirement Home for Horses, a refuge for abused horses and other animals in Alachua, Florida.

This is a pleasurable thing. You couldn't pay anybody to give you anything better than that.

When Sunday Morning first visited the Gregorys in 1994, we were struck by how extraordinarily happy they seemed caring for 70 horses, plus assorted abandoned goats, pigs, dogs, and a refrigerator raiding deer named Thunder.

Where are your [INAUDIBLE]? Oh, there they are. Here they are.

And 12 years later, they're still happy, living the dream they had as newlyweds nearly 60 years ago. They've got 140 horses and 17 dogs.

Hi. Come on. Lucky. Scooby, come on. Coco. Come on.

You tend to be waiting on these dogs hand and foot.

Oh, quite literally. Now, watch this one.

Eats on the couch?

Yes.

They laugh at the irony of working at least 14 hours a day so their animals can retire.

We don't go out to the movies. We haven't been to a movie for 22 years. We haven't had a vacation for 22 years. This in one long vacation. That's the way I look at it.

Are you slaves to the animals?

Yes.

Well, yeah, but very happy slaves.

The founding fathers would recognize this as the pursuit of happiness. But in ancient times, the definition was very different.

Happiness is something that's dispensed by the gods.

Darrin McMahon is a professor at Florida State University, and the author of Happiness, a History. The word for happiness is cognated with luck. So "hap" is the root of "happiness"—"happenstance," "perhaps," what happens to you. So call no man happy until he is dead, because life may look good now, but a piano may fall on your head tomorrow.

Enter the Greeks— Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. They began suggesting that maybe you have a role in your own happiness.

Aristotle, he says that happiness is a life lived according to virtue, an active endeavor that one carries on over the course of a lifetime.

The early Christians, on the other hand, figured that life on earth was all about suffering and sin. Happiness came in the hereafter. But by the 18th century, when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness in the here and now was a notion whose time had come.

The phrase "the pursuit of happiness" enshrines the sense that we can make the world, that we can shape it as we would like, that we can do wonderful things in this world. And that's so much a part of the American experiment in a wonderful way.

And it seems to be working. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 84% of Americans describe themselves as pretty happy or very happy. Dreaming of winning the lottery? Psychologists say money does buy happiness, but only if you're poor to begin with. Once you're secure, more money doesn't make much difference. What is it about American culture that our expectations are constantly being ratcheted up?

What we find is a heavy burden on some people thinking they should be happier than they already are—say, somebody who is a seven on a 10 point scale of happiness who thinks, oh, I've got to be an eight or a nine. And what I want to say is maybe. But maybe a seven is fine.

Ed Diener is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois. He researches the components of happiness—among them, subjective well being, how satisfied you are with your life.

We're asking each individual to say, yes, I like my life. I appreciate my life. I'm satisfied with it.

Compared to other countries, believe it or not, the United States ranks 15th, behind Puerto Rico, Iceland, and Canada, among others. Diener is actively campaigning for well being to be reported the way the unemployment rate is or the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

If people knew what Americans' well being was—and perhaps not every day, but every month, and is it going up or down, engagement at work and so forth—we would pay more attention to it, and in particular, policymakers would pay more attention to it. So that's our argument.

In other words, a kind of pursuit of Happiness Index—in 40 something years of research, Diener has learned that there is a lot more to happiness than smiles and fun.

We find that the happiest people, every single one of them, have supportive family and friends. There are no exceptions. What leads to long term happiness is pursuing that next goal, going after the things we value and enjoying the activities that it takes to get there, rather than having the goal itself. So the pursuit of happiness might actually be true long term happiness.

It could be taking out the garbage, caring for horses, or fill in the blank. Maybe happiness is a journey, not a destination.