Rev. Matt Alspaugh
Sermon, Part I – Expanding Joy
Introduction – Cantril ladder exercise
Before I launch into the sermon this morning, before I color your minds with all kinds of crazy Matt thoughts, before I take you to a Joyful place or maybe suck all the Joy out of the room — you may have your own opinion on that, I’d like to invite you to do a simple little exercise.
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”[1]
Take a moment to think of that number, somewhere on that ladder, from 0 at the worst possible life for you, and 10 as the best possible life.
Write that number down on the little slip of paper, and we’ll anonymously collect and tally them during our offering time.
Joy, and other names for joy
As I all too often do, I quickly came up with the name for this service, “Happiness Index”, figuring happiness is close enough to our monthly theme topic of Joy – as in “what does it mean to be a community of Joy?” I figured I’d make it all work out when it came time to write.
I mean, happiness is joy, isn’t it?
Then, when writing time came, I wasn’t so sure.
I did a little exploring and find that many Christians would define happiness as fleeting thrill, and joy as something that is more profound and permanent. The Bible does talk a lot about joy, so it must be special, right?
One writer[2] pointed out that the Bible also talks a lot about happiness, too, often in the same verse: Such as Jeremiah (31:13): “I will turn their mourning into joy. . . and bring happiness out of grief.” or Esther (8:16) “… it was a time of happiness and joy, gladness and honor.”
So I think the point is that we can view joy and happiness as two sides of the same coin; a coin that has other sides too, qualities like wellbeing, flourishing, life satisfaction. Ok, maybe it’s not a coin, that’s a bad metaphor – but the term happiness is now seen as something much bigger than the momentary hit of a lottery ticket win or finding a new flavor of Ben & Jerry’s in the grocer’s freezer.
In fact, there a whole body of science behind being happy.
When Korey and I sat down to talk about this service, it was natural that we both wanted to explore this science, for we both have some academic background in psych, and an interest in Positive Psychology, that part of the field that focuses on mental health rather than mental illness.
Pathways to happiness
Martin Seligman is one of the founders of this Positive Psychology movement, and he has studied happiness as part of understanding mental health and human flourishing.
In his book, “Authentic Happiness”, Seligman suggests there are several pathways to authentic happiness. Let’s take a look at these as roads on a roadmap to having a more contented, fulfilled, joyful life.
The pleasant life
The first of these pathways to happiness is to seek to create what Seligman calls a pleasant life. That is, to consciously choose those activities that bring us pleasure, and seek to do more of those things. It doesn’t matter what they are, hiking, dancing, reading, calling an old friend, the idea is to consciously make more time for these pleasurable activities.
Now, we realize that sometime great joy comes as a surprise — as the poet says[3], in observing the two newspaper boys, “Happiness. It comes on unexpectedly.” We can’t really make joy happen. We can’t force it to show up in our lives. But we can send the invitation.
The Dalai Lama says,
“We create most of our suffering, so it should be logical that we also have the ability to create more joy. It simply depends on the attitudes, the perspectives, and the reactions we bring to situations and to our relationships with other people. When it comes to personal happiness there is a lot that we as individuals can do.”[4]
But the challenge with living a pleasant life is that sometimes choosing those activities that make us happy, then fitting them into our schedules, is hard. So we bail, we go for the easy thing, and flip on the TV or open Facebook. Those things are easy, convenient, habitual, maybe even addictive — and we don’t have to plan.
Yet if we do begin to plan our pleasurable activities, we’ll find that half the fun is in the planning. That’s certainly been my experience with vacations. Even a short weekend trip can give me weeks of anticipation in putting it together, followed for weeks afterward by the satisfaction and contentment in the memories.
We don’t have to limit our planning to big things like trips. After all, we schedule downright unpleasant things on our calendars — the dentist, the meeting with the boss — so why not schedule pleasant things — a meeting with friends, a walk in the park, an evening at the library? The idea is to make more time for the things we enjoy.
The good life
The second pathway to happiness is to seek what Seligman calls the a good life. In this life, we seek to identify what he calls our signature strengths, and engage those to obtain gratification. Signature strengths are those qualities, activities, virtues that you are both good at and passionate about.
The essence is: seek to do what you love. You typically know when you’re doing what you love, because you get completely immersed in it, maybe even losing track of time. You’re in the flow.
A side of my ministry here at UUYO, maybe a shadow side here — I can say this now — is that I continued to do some of the tech stuff that is part of my background from my past career. Some of that I excelled at and really enjoyed, and some of it, well let’s just say it was not a signature strength, and I was wise to leave the tech world.
As I’ve been trying to document and hand off some of these tech things I’ve done here at UUYO, internet, phones, website — I’ve been thinking about which parts I really enjoyed, where I’d get really focused, get in the flow … and those other parts. I reflect that some of my work here was using old signature strengths, and I found that quite gratifying.
I’m trying to think how I might do more of those signature strengths in the future, and less of my signature weaknesses, if you will. You might do the same — examine your life, and see if you can do more of what you love, and less of what drains you.
The meaningful life
The third pathway to happiness is to seek what Seligman calls the meaningful life. In this case, we expand on the good life, so that we apply our signature strengths in service to something much larger than ourselves.
I think that is why so many of us find our way into human and social services. It is why some of us come to church, and serve on teams and committees and boards. We are here serving a mission that is larger than ourselves. We are trying to do our bit to repair a very broken society.
For some of us, the meaningful life has a religious context.
The Dalai Lama was asked what it was like to wake up with joy, and he said,
“I think if you are an intensely religious believer, as soon as you wake up, you thank God for another day. And you try to do God’s will. For a non-theist like myself, but who is a Buddhist, as soon as I wake up, I remember Buddha’s teaching: the importance of kindness and compassion, wishing something good for others, or at least to reduce their suffering…. So then I set my intention for the day: that this day should be meaningful. Meaningful means, if possible, serve and help others. If not possible, then at least not to harm others. That’s a meaningful day.”[5]
And so, day by meaningful day, we can, like the Dalai Lama, build a meaningful life.
The full life
Now these three pathways — the pleasant, the good, the meaningful life paths — are not exclusive. We can do them together. Seligman calls this living a full life, saying:
“A full life consists in experiencing positive emotions about the past and future, savoring positive feelings from the pleasures, deriving abundant gratification from your signature strengths, and using these strengths in the service of something larger to obtain meaning.”[6]
Conclusion
I hope that we can each act to make our own lives more full of happiness and joy. My hope is that we each will seek to nurture pleasure in our lives as we find it, that we will strive to do the things we love, and that we will offer all this up to something larger than ourselves, however we see that source of meaning.
Reading – from the guardian – “Happiness is on the wane in the US, UN global report finds”
The US has slipped to 14th place in the World Happiness Report 2017, produced by the United Nations.[7]
The UN report, which is based on Gallup polls of self-reported wellbeing as well as perceptions of corruption, generosity and freedom, this year has a special focus on the “story of reduced happiness” in the US.
The US has fallen to 19th place in happiness rankings of rich countries, compared with third place just over a decade ago, the report states.
“The United States offers a vivid portrait of a country that is looking for happiness in ‘all the wrong places’,” writes Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist and author of the chapter on the US. “The country is mired in a rolling social crisis that is getting worse.”
Sermon, Part II – Happiness Index
Are you happy now?
We don’t seem to be a nation of very happy people, right now, do we.
The UN happiness survey
This is the conclusion of the United Nations World Happiness Report[8]. That report centers around a simple idea: survey a large number of people in every country and ask them about their overall happiness or well-being. That involves asking them that simple question we answered earlier:
“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top.
The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”[9]
Even though it sounds simple, this so-called “Cantril ladder” question has turned out to be remarkably accurate. For example, people don’t vary their answers based whether they are asked at the beginning of the work week or on the weekend, as happens with some other questions. Further, the simplicity of the question means that year over year trends can be reliably studied.
Survey results
What has the United Nations learned with this survey? Not surprisingly, those liberal, progressive Scandinavian countries of Norway, Denmark, and Iceland rate highest. And failed, war-torn countries like Syria, Burundi, and the Central African Republic fall at the bottom. And North Korea refused to participate.
Where is the USA in this mix? We are in the 14th place, and falling. Looking at a similar measure of rich countries alone, we once were number 3 — that was in 2007 — but we’ve fallen to 19 on this scale in 2016.
Our index on the happiness ladder is 6.8. In the lingo, we’re no longer ‘thriving’, we’re ‘struggling’.
[I ask Korey, today’s Worship Associate, for the UUYO index, he has calculated an average of 7.3 from the slips turned in. I ad-lib that it is not surprising that we’d be happier than average.]
I suspect that this news is not surprising to you, that intuitively you know that, regardless of your personal situation, people in our country are not happy, they are not ‘feeling the love’, that their sense of well-being has declined.
The question is why.
The dominant narrative
The dominant narrative, the general Republican story, the Trumpian spin is that our situation is all about the economy. Jeffrey Sachs, an economist at Columbia University, and author on the USA chapter of the UN report, says:
“The United States offers a vivid portrait of a country that is looking for happiness in ‘all the wrong places’, The country is mired in a rolling social crisis that is getting worse. Yet the dominant political discourse is all about raising the rate of economic growth…”[10]
And we see that, with Republican tax cuts, deregulation, abandoning the Paris climate accord, and so on.
Why the narrative fails
The UN report begs to differ with that narrative. The report offers a simple thought experiment. Suppose you wanted to get back to that level of happiness in 2007 — third among the wealthy countries? What would you do?
One thing you could do is put your hands on the levers of society and could change a handful of variables — things that affect happiness overall, and adjust those levers back to the 2007 values.
The researchers consider a number of such levers, things like healthy life expectancy, social support systems, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceived corruption in government and business.
So for example, consider perceived corruption. We think our country is more corrupt now. That measure rose approximately 16% between 2007 and 2016. The researchers could measure just how much the increase of corruption pushes down overall happiness. So to get happiness back up, one thing we could do is cut down the increased corruption — that seems obvious to me.
Fail: Corruption
Or, instead, one could try to adjust other levers to compensate for corruption. We could say, in effect, well, corruption is the cost of having a strong economy. That’s the Trump narrative, isn’t it? So one could boost the economy to achieve the same happiness. How much? According to the researchers, you’d have to raise the gross domestic product per capita from $53,000 to $82,000 to achieve the same effect on overall happiness. That’s a huge increase, something like 50%, and it would take years, even decades to accomplish.
Or we could just fix the corruption.
Total Fail
When the researchers put it all together, they find that if, instead of trying to fix all the underlying social issues that impact happiness, we just attempt to raise happiness through growing the economy, the GDP per capita would have to be pushed up from $53,000 to an astonishing $133,000. That’s a mind-boggling amount of growth, unrealistic for our society, and unsustainable for the planet.
And yet, Sachs reminds us,
“Almost all of the policy discourse in Washington DC centers on naïve attempts to raise the economic growth rate, as if a higher growth rate would somehow heal the deepening divisions and angst in American society. This kind of growth-only agenda is doubly wrong-headed. First, most of the pseudo-elixirs for growth— especially the Republican Party’s beloved nostrum of endless tax cuts and voodoo economics— will only exacerbate America’s social inequalities and feed the distrust that is already tearing society apart. Second, a forthright attack on the real sources of social crisis would have a much larger and more rapid beneficial effect on U.S. happiness.”[11]
The alternative choice
So, for me, this becomes a simple story for progressives. Let’s focus on raising the happiness index, overall. Let’s do the things that will allow the average American to say, “yeah, my life is better now.”
Some of these things to work on could be:
Enact a basic healthcare reform, such as a single-payer plan, that raises the life expectancy for all Americans.
Get a handle on corruption by ending Citizen’s United, fixing voter suppression, and reregulating many business sectors whose deregulation fed the last recession.
Move beyond the culture of fear that the Bush government created in response to 9/11, with its failed war on terror, government spying on private citizens, and security theater in airports and at the borders.
Solve problems with education, especially higher education, with its massive debt load.
Reduce the yawning chasm of inequality in income and wealth. This means higher taxes on the wealthy, to fund the social safety nets, and health and education programs.
Putting it together
Now these sound like a laundry list of typical Democrat party plank platform. OK some are a bit more radical than that — or a lot more radical! But here’s the thing – it’s not just a list.
The items on this list feed a larger, higher aspiration, which is a higher level of happiness for Americans in general. If we find that implementing some change doesn’t do enough for overall happiness, we draw back from that change — that’s why we need to let go of the current administration’s focus on the economy. If we find that other policy moves greatly enhance overall happiness — then bring on more of those policies.
Now in the long view, I’d love to see us attend to a mission that is larger than just the United States, and with a loftier goal than just increasing individual happiness. But in times like these, we need to focus, to fix what’s broken, to find clear, easily articulated steps to get us out of the pit of despair we are currently in.
And I think that if we do focus on our overall happiness, we’ll end up helping the rest of the world become happier too. And we’ll help the planet itself become a happy place, too.
May we find our way toward a happier, more joyful, more meaningful future. May our country once again become a leader toward a better world, a happier planet.
Notes:
1 http://www.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx
2 https://www.onfaith.co/discussion/is-there-a-biblical-difference-between-happiness-and-joy
3 “Happiness” – Raymond Carver
4 Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, “The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World”, see https://books.google.com/books?id=fN7ACwAAQBAJ&pg=PT17#v=onepage&q&f=false
5 ibid.
6 Martin Seligman, “Authentic Happiness”, p. 263
7 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/20/norway-ousts-denmark-as-worlds-happiest-country-un-report
8 World Happiness Report 2017, http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/HR17.pdf
9 http://www.gallup.com/poll/122453/understanding-gallup-uses-cantril-scale.aspx
10World Happiness Report 2017, p. 183
11 ibid. p. 180