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Understanding the Difference Between Pleasure and Happiness: How to Cultivate Inner Contentment



Understanding the differences between happiness and joy has a greater purpose than being fodder for an intellectual debate. The distinctions between happiness and joy have many real-world applications. One practical application pertains to children living in extreme poverty.


One key insight from the book: U.S. culture tends to confuse happiness and pleasure. Fortunately, Dr. Lustig enumerates seven differences between the two. Quoting him from a 2017 interview with the University of California TV, he clarifies.




Understanding the Difference Between Pleasure and True Happiness



This table sheds some light on this question. The last two columns share insights into organizational business culture based on our new understanding of the science of happiness and pleasure.


This broader, more psychological conceptualization of hedonic pleasure argues that happiness can flow from behaviors that promote mental stimulation, stress relief, feelings of social connectedness, positive mood, and more (Arnold & Reynolds, 2003).


This expanded conceptualization has resulted in the broadening of the study of hedonic pleasure to fields such as economics. For instance, hedonic conceptualizations of happiness are used to understand how shoppers make decisions between purchases, estimating how much pleasure or utility they stand to gain by choosing one product over another (Babin, Darden & Griffin, 1994).


The eudaimonic perspective of happiness presents an alternative to the hedonic view, arguing that true happiness is found when one behaves virtuously. Pursuing eudaimonia, therefore, is about doing what is worth doing.


The purpose of a diary study is to assess fluctuations in states (e.g., moods, thoughts, etc.) throughout a given day. This type of study design, sometimes called a within-person design, runs contrary to many studies in psychology, which typically compare differences between people.


Research also shows that the alignment between our values and professional pursuits plays an important role in determining our overall happiness (Chatman, 1989; Kristof-Brown, Zimmerman & Johnson, 2005).


Overall, the satisfaction of these needs represents an avenue for achieving happiness that falls under the eudaimonic conceptualization. This is because need satisfaction promotes long-term wellness rather than just temporary pleasure (Boniwell, 2008).


We need and enjoy both pleasure and happiness, and while pleasure often has to do with physical sensations, happiness is more an inner sensation that is associated with inner peace and mental and emotional calmness.


If Locke had stopped here, he would be unique among the philosophers in claiming that there is no prescription for achieving happiness, given the diversity of views about what causes happiness. For some people, reading philosophy is pleasurable whereas for others, playing football or having sex is the most pleasurable activity. Since the only standard is pleasure, there would be no way to judge that one pleasure is better than another. The only judge of what happiness is would be oneself.


There are no shortcuts to flow. On the contrary, you need to deploy your highest strengths and talents to meet the world in flow. There are effortless shortcuts to feeling positive emotion, which is another difference between engagement and positive emotion. You can masturbate, go shopping, take drugs, or watch television. Hence, the importance of identifying your highest strengths and learning to use them more often in order to go into flow.


There is yet a third element of happiness, which is meaning. I go into flow playing bridge, but after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am fidgeting until I die. The pursuit of engagement and the pursuit of pleasure are often solitary, solipsistic endeavors. Human beings, ineluctably, want meaning and purpose in life. The Meaningful Life consists in belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self, and humanity creates all the positive institutions to allow this: religion, political party, being Green, the Boy Scouts, or the family.


This difference between happiness theory and well-being theory is of real moment. Happiness theory claims that the way we make choices is to estimate how much happiness (life satisfaction) will ensue and then we take the course that maximizes future happiness: Maximizing happiness is the final common path of individual choice.


Here Locke states that our own faulty judgment is to blame for our preferring the worse to the better. This is because, on his view, the uneasiness we have for any given object is directly proportional to the judgments we make about the merit of the things to which we are attracted. So, if we are most uneasy for immediate pleasures, it is our own fault because we have judged these things to be best for us. In this way, Locke makes room in his system for praiseworthiness and blameworthiness with respect to our desires: absent illness, injury, or tragedy, we ourselves are responsible for endorsing, through judgment, our uneasinesses. He continues, stating that the major reason why we often misjudge the value of things for our true happiness is that our current state fools us into thinking that we are, in fact, truly happy. Because it is difficult for us to consider the state of true, eternal happiness, we tend to think that in those moments when we enjoy pleasure and feel no uneasiness, we are truly happy. But such thoughts are mistaken on his view. Indeed, as Locke says, the greatest reason why so few people are moved to pursue the greatest, remote good is that most people are convinced that they can be truly happy without it.


First, there is Hedonism. In all its variants, it holds that happiness is a matter of raw subjective feeling. A happy life maximizes feelings of pleasure and minimizes pain. A happy person smiles a lot, is ebullient, bright eyed and bushy tailed; her pleasures are intense and many, her pains are few and far between. This theory has its modern conceptual roots in Bentham's utilitarianism (Bentham, 1978), its contagion in Hollywood entertainment, its grossest manifestation in American consumerism, and one of its most sophisticated incarnations in the views of our fellow positive psychologist, Danny Kahneman, who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics. His theory must wrestle with an important question: Whose life is it anyway, the experiencer or the retrospective judge of pleasure?


Consider the following scenario: researchers beep people at random during the day, ask how much pleasure or pain a person is experiencing right now (the Experience Sampling Method, ESM), and extrapolate to an approximate total for the experienced happiness over the week. They also ask the same people afterwards "how happy was your week?" The retrospective summary judgment of happiness often differs greatly from the extrapolated total of experienced happiness. Remember your last vacation? "Yes, it was great!" you might say, even though if beeped during it, the mosquitoes, the traffic, the sunburn, and the overpriced food might gainsay your summary judgment. At the hands of an experimental psychologist, hedonism becomes a methodological commitment: your "objective happiness" for a given time period is computed by adding up your on-line hedonic assessments of all the individual moments that comprise that period. This computed aggregate of "experienced utility" becomes the criterion of truth about how genuinely happy your vacation (your childhood, your life) should be taken to be. On this view, the experiencer is always right. If the experiencer and the retrospective judge disagree, so much the worse for the judge.


One basic challenge facing a hedonist is that when we wish someone a happy life (or a happy childhood, or even a happy week), we are not merely wishing that they accumulate a tidy sum of pleasures, irrespective of how this sum is distributed across one's life-span or its meaning for the whole (Velleman, 1991). We can imagine two lives that contain the same exact amount of momentary pleasantness, but one life tells a story of gradual decline (ecstatic childhood, light-hearted youth, dysphonic adulthood, miserable old age) while another is a tale of gradual improvement (the above pattern in reverse). The difference between these lives is a matter of their global trajectories and these cannot be discerned from the standpoint of its individual moments. They can only be fathomed by a retrospective judge examining the life-pattern as a whole.


Desire theory can do better than Hedonism. Desire theories hold that happiness is a matter of getting what you want (Griffin, 1986), with the content of the want left up to the person who does the wanting. Desire theory subsumes hedonism when what we want is lots of pleasure and little pain. Like hedonism, desire theory can explain why an ice-cream cone is preferable to a poke in the eye. However, hedonism and desire theory often part company. Hedonism holds that the preponderance of pleasure over pain is the recipe for happiness even if this is not what one desires most. Desire theory holds that that fulfillment of a desire contributes to one's happiness regardless of the amount of pleasure (or displeasure). One obvious advantage of Desire theory is that it can make sense of Wittgenstein. He wanted truth and illumination and struggle and purity, and he did not much desire pleasure. His life was "wonderful" according to Desire theory because he achieved more of truth and illumination than most mortals, even though as a "negative affective," he experienced less pleasure and more pain than most people.


Nozick's (1974) experience machine (your lifetime is in a tank with your brain wired up to yield any experiences you want) is turned down because we desire to earn their pleasures and achievements. We want them to come about as a result of right action and good character, not as an illusion of brain chemistry. So the Desire criterion for happiness moves from Hedonism's amount of pleasure felt to the somewhat less subjective state of how well one's desires are satisfied. 2ff7e9595c


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