Finding Happiness the New Old Fashioned Way

When your own mother stops reading your blog, something needs to change.

I don't know why I expected my mom to keep checking my blog daily when I only posted once every couple weeks. I also don't know why I suddenly turned into one of those people that expects other people to use their time to read her blog, when those other people have their own lives to live and reading about your life is not their most important task. But I found myself floored that my mom hadn't read the post I'd put up the night before. Then she gave me a really good suggestion. She said that if I want people to actually read this blog, I need to post in it with some kind of regularity, and the more consistency the better. She's right. And I've been wanting to be better about posting conversation topics anyway, so in an effort of consistency I'm going to start Conversation Topic Tuesdays. Hopefully this way we'll all have something interesting to say by the time our weekend dinner parties roll around.

This week, as I was trying to figure out what to write on, an enormous gold brick of conversation fodder landed in my lap--or actually my mailbox--in the form of David Brooks' article "Social Animal" in this week's edition of The New Yorker. Brooks, of New York Times op-ed fame, has long been fascinated with social science research. And lucky for us, he has combined some of his favorite findings into an article on what geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, and the like have learned about what makes us tick.

The main thrust of his argument is something most of us have known or at least wanted to believe for a long time: that standard measures of achievement (intelligence, impressive grades, prestige) don't align very well with either fulfillment or great accomplishments. Rather, our happiness and even our seemingly logical decisions are far more steeped in emotion than we generally acknowledge. Happiness and even mental ability come from relationships, and it starts when we're babies.

Turns out our brains are wired by love. Perhaps most critical is the love from our mom. Science says so: the more a baby rat is licked and groomed by it's mama rat, the more synaptic connections are made in its rat brain. Children are listening to their mothers before they're even born. Babies that develop inside a French-speaking mother cry differently than those that develop inside a woman speaking German. Once born, a baby watches its mother, mimics her, and most importantly learns to feel confident in the world by learning to trust that when he or she sends out a signal, someone will respond. That confidence is key for a child, who will need it to go out into the world with a sense of security and the confidence to feel they are worthwhile and capable of making good choices. Brooks mentions a study at the University of Minnesota where researchers, looking at the attachment patterns of 42-month-old children could predict with 77 percent accuracy who would go on to graduate from high school. He goes on to say, "People who were securely attached as infants tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less need to puff themselves up in others' eyes."

And it doesn't stop with infancy. As we get older, people learn from people they love, Brooks contends. And that's probably for the best, considering that if we love something about someone, that means they've taken a principle we think is valuable and internalized and developed it. That is far more reliable a source for wisdom than your standard expert in any field, since people generally grossly overestimate how right we are on a given topic. Brooks references a study done by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo, who questioned more than two thousand executives about their industries. Advertising managers gave answers that they reported they were 90 percent confident were right, and yet their answers were wrong 61 percent of the time. Computer industry executives gave answers they reported to be 95 percent confident of being correct, and 80 percent of the time they were wrong. Ninety-nine percent of those questioned overestimated their accuracy.

Research over the past thirty years has just reinforced what I think most of us have suspected all along (and yet what society continually fails to recognize the importance of): that what the inner mind wants most is connection. A person who joins a group that meets once a month will experience the same increase in happiness as would have been produced if they had doubled their income. And researchers Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others have found that the activities most closely associated with happiness are social, extending a person out to connect with peers, rather than focusing laterally to move upward in a career.

So go on, get happy.