Pursuit of Happiness V

"Happiness Won’t Save You" - Philip Brickman

• He was cherished, even if he taxed your patience. And so obviously brilliant. Yet he didn’t seem to have half the admiration for himself that others had for him. “I don’t think he felt appreciated enough,” she told me. “I don’t think he achieved the recognition that he thought he deserved.”
• Whatever he did achieve, he never considered it good enough. He wore his perfectionism like a hair shirt, and he expected it of others.
• Brickman understood that the pursuit of stature, material bounty — and ultimately happiness itself — was a fool’s errand. Early in his career, he grasped that the more we achieve, the more we require to sustain our new levels of satisfaction.
• You may as well chase your afternoon shadow. Happiness always looms ahead. “The hedonic treadmill.” The term stuck. “There may be no way to permanently increase the total of one’s pleasure,” they concluded, “except by getting off the hedonic treadmill entirely.”
• The more we sacrifice for something, the more value we assign to it.
• Happiness involves the enthusiastic and unambivalent acceptance of activities or relationships that are not the best that might possibly be obtained.
• Commitments maybe less fragile and transient than the dopamine high of getting a paper published or falling in love. But fragile and transient nonetheless. Relationships end; jobs don’t work out. It’s a very painful discovery to make. The bonds we often think of as ropes are really gossamer threads.
• “If you are really hostile and contemptuous toward the field as you sometimes seem, you must either want me to change my line of work or wish you had another life partner for whose work you could have more respect.”
• The move to the Michigan farm and the strains of his new, high-profile job had undone him — dissolving his sense of humor, coiling him with anxiety, rendering him more demanding, more intense.
• Just before he died, he applied for a large research grant; he didn’t get it. His new post required lots of administrative and organizational prowess; he didn’t have it. His colleagues were forever giving him an earful. “He got consistent feedback that they were disappointed in him,” Wortman told me.
• Toward the end of April, maybe three weeks before Brickman died, Jeffery Paige got a call from him, saying he was in trouble and needed to talk.
• Brickman was as despondent as Paige had ever seen him. “Everything went down this avenue to: Everybody else is happy and I’m not,” Paige told me.
• As strange as it sounds, it was exceptionally rare in 1982 for psychology professors to receive training in suicide prevention.  
• It’s this last category that turns your blood to ice. It basically describes people who think they’ve made a mess of everything but are inherently powerless to fix it, and therefore must permanently surrender their fate to a higher power.
• “It was a way to say to people, You let me down, and here I’m going to make you pay.” He chose to die in a place that everybody would see on a daily basis. Tower Plaza is catty-corner to the Institute for Social Research, probably visible from half its windows. 
• “opponent-process theory,” which noted that much of human experience was marked by a positive feeling followed by a negative one or vice versa — a drug addict experiencing a high followed by a low, a crime victim experiencing terror followed by relief.
• Maybe the playwright Richard Greenberg was right. Money doesn’t buy you happiness. But it does upgrade despair.
• All three groups were asked how they thought they’d feel in a couple of years. The accident victims. The lottery winners. The controls. And of those three groups, it was the accident victims who envisioned the happiest tomorrow. They carried the most optimism in their hearts.
• Pain helps, because it lowers your baseline, so that you’re willing to accept alternatives you wouldn’t have accepted before. And then you can start to build new relationships and new purposes and new meanings.” To remarry, for instance. Or find a new job. “So that’s the part that puzzles me,” said Coates. “Why didn’t Phil realize that eventually you get through this pain?”
• Pain Demands Attention,” which is pretty straightforward: People who are in extreme pain are focused on the present, because their pain is so distracting they can think of little else.
• Of her dad begging her to ask her mother whether she still loved him, for instance, because he still loved her — would she tell her mom that? But she is mainly protective of her father, more angry with her mother for not allowing the children to properly grieve. 
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