by Paul Dolan
Overall, each of us can be categorized according to the preponderance of different types of feelings. The happy ones among us have more positive feelings than negative ones. Using Bentham’s language, they generally feel pleasure and not that much pain. So, the more frequent and more intense are your various feelings of pleasure, the happier you are. But are there other feelings that might matter besides categories of pleasure and pain?
The pleasure-purpose principle
Yes, there is another important category of feelings that matter to you, and these are the feelings of purpose and pointlessness you feel. I will use these adjectives as shorthand for a range of positive and negative feelings, such as fulfillment, meaning, and worthwhileness on the one hand and boredom and futility on the other. These feelings affect your happiness in ways that must be properly accounted for. You only have to think about working or studying to know that these activities can feel quite purposeful some of the time—and quite pointless at other times. These good and bad feelings matter to you every bit as much as do feelings of pleasure and pain.
Feeling it
Now, calling purpose a feeling suggests that it is an emotion that can be placed on a comparable footing with more recognized emotions like joy, anxiety, and anger. But I have a more general interpretation in mind here; namely, what I call feelings as sentiments. I do not mean sentimental in the tears-in-your-eyes sense; rather, sentimental in the sense of a rich array of feelings. In my definition, a sentiment is a feeling that covers the kinds of emotional pleasures and pains that psychologists generally have in mind but it additionally includes feelings about the degree to which an experience is purposeful. The adjectives for feelings of purpose are distinct from those used for pleasure. Purpose is a simpler construct than pleasure because it’s largely nonaroused, so either it’s good (purposeful) or bad (pointless).
Writing this book is a great example of doing something that feels purposeful. It feels purposeful while I am doing it; just as having a beer with my mates feels pleasurable. Helping a friend move house is another example. Lugging boxes and furniture up and down three flights of stairs all day isn’t particularly pleasant but it does feel purposeful at the time you are sweating on the stairs. Or perhaps watching that moving documentary, which may not be exactly fun but keeps you engrossed throughout. I’m sure you can think of plenty of your own examples.
There are also times when you feel the opposite—pointlessness, futility, or a lack of purpose. That work assignment where you are convinced nothing will ever come of it, which feels painful as well as pointless. Or that romantic comedy you watched last night, which was actually quite pleasurable but did not feel at all purposeful.12 I bet you don’t have to try too hard to think of these sorts of examples.
It is surprising to me that happiness has not really been considered in this way before. There has certainly been much discussion in the academic literature about day-to-day experiences of pleasure, but purpose is not usually considered in this experience-based way. Insofar as it has been considered, it has typically been tapped into by studies that ask us general questions about whether life overall has direction, meaning, or purpose.13
Just like life satisfaction questions, these kinds of questions capture overall evaluations of purpose when life as a whole is reflected upon and not the day-to-day experiences of purpose, which are what really matter to how you feel. As an example, new fathers report more purpose in their lives than their childless peers, and the effect is much less pronounced for new mothers.14 These results are interesting but they could simply be explained by responses being driven by what is prominent at the time of assessment. New fathers might pay more attention to the general fact that they have just had a kid as compared to new mothers, who might also be thinking about the housework (which they still do much more of). A more accurate and useful measure would consider whether new mothers and fathers also report different amounts of purpose in the daily activities of their lives.
As I sit here now, typing these words, I feel pretty good. But most of that good feeling is not an emotional reaction to what I am writing but rather that the words, and my attempt to convey their meaning to you, generate a feeling of purpose. I am sure that you feel similarly as you go about your daily life. You might spend time tending to your garden, and this might feel purposeful in addition to—and separate from—any emotional reaction you have to looking after your roses. Or you might have a job that feels rewarding; it might even be less fun than your last job but it makes you feel happier overall.
So I am much more interested in the meaning of moments than I am in constructions of the meaning of life. There is pleasure (or pain) and purpose (or pointlessness) in all that you do and feel. They are separate components that make up your overall happiness from an experience.
That our happiness includes both pleasure and purpose is also reflected in what people like you tell me. Few scholars have studied what people think about happiness in their own lives, or what data governments could use to inform decisions about how we spend money on public services, and so with the support of the Office for National Statistics in the UK, Rob Metcalfe and I designed an online survey to help fill that gap. We need to have a healthy degree of skepticism about what people tell us in surveys because the responses are heavily influenced by the wording of the questions, but, when asked about happiness in their own lives and in the context of informing public policy, about as many participants were in favor of a focus on “happiness and sadness on a day-to-day basis” as were in favor of focusing on “the degree to which you consider the things you do to be worthwhile.”15 In other words, both pleasure and purpose matter to us (although admittedly this is a rather evaluative way of describing purpose).
To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.
As well as explaining human motivation to seek out pleasure and purpose and avoid pain and pointlessness, the PPP can also help explain why some generally negative emotions can in fact sometimes be positive if they serve a purpose. Anger, for example, helps us to avoid bad situations and seek out good ones, and it can elicit a “positive” reaction by directing us toward rather than away from conflict resolution.16 In particular, anger has the propensity to discourage selfishness and to encourage cooperative behavior.17 So you don’t want to experience good sentiments all of the time. Life can be cruel, and people can be, too, so you sometimes need to get angry. But we can also get angry unnecessarily, of course; such as when we get stressed by small annoyances.
The PPP might also help us answer a hugely important question, which actually got me thinking about purpose in the first place: why would any of us ever choose to have children? I mean really choose to, rather than because of a biological imperative to reproduce? A big part of the answer to this question must be because we would expect to be happier as a result. What do the data tell us? Well mostly, that, at best, children are neutral in their impact on happiness.18
Now, it could still be the case that many of those who have kids might have been much less happy if they remained childless and also that some of those without kids would have been happier with them. To truly show the effect of kids on happiness, we would need to know what otherwise might have been the case for each individual, and this is impossible to establish. This highlights the fact that we need to be very careful about making any claims about the causal effects of life events on happiness when people, to some degree at least, self-select into the groups whose happiness we are comparing.
It should come as no great surprise that having children does not improve happiness, though. You need only to have a desire for having sex, which sometimes results in pregnancy, and then to emotionally connect to a baby that looks like you when
it is born, which means that you are then much less likely to abandon your kids. What happens to your happiness thereafter is then of little consequence.
So when I first started thinking about having kids of my own about a decade ago, the happiness-informed decision could well have been to remain childless, right? Perhaps, but the data at that time were based largely on evaluations of life satisfaction and partly on experiences of pleasure alone. I had the strong sense that some of what I would do as a parent might feel purposeful, such as helping my kids put their shoes on or learn to read. I did not expect such activities to be that pleasurable, and certainly not as much fun as a night out with my mates, but I did think that reading a story to my kids, or later listening to them read to me, would feel purposeful at the time of doing so.
Armed with the strong intuition that having children could potentially make me happier by adding more purpose to my already pleasurable life—or at least differently happy by changing the balance of pleasure and purpose in my life—I decided to take the plunge and have kids. Les and I now have a daughter, Poppy, who is six, and a son, Stanley, who is five. They bring us a bit of pleasure, a lot of misery, and a massive dose of purpose. I would say that they have definitely made me differently happy as the balance of pleasure and purpose has changed in my life. They might even have made me happier overall, as the relative shift from pleasure to purpose quite suits me as I get older. In the next chapter, I’ll discuss studies that I’ve since conducted which show that time spent with children is about average in terms of its impact on pleasure but that it is one of the more purposeful ways of using your time.
Now, I am certainly not suggesting that you rush out (or, more precisely, stay in) and have kids: much of what you do can feel purposeful without it having to involve children. All I am saying is that a happy life is one that contains lots of positive sentiments of pleasure and of purpose. Equally, a miserable life contains a preponderance of negative sentiments of pain (anger, worry, stress) and pointlessness (boredom, futility).
Creating a definition of happiness is a complex endeavor, but the PPP helps us cut through various other definitions by incorporating a rich array of sentiments into the daily experiences of life. Getting angry from time to time, working long hours, and having children may no longer be such crazy things to do. But they might be if you sacrifice a lot of pleasure for a little more purpose: that is, if your own balance between pleasure and purpose is out of kilter.
Balancing it
You are unlikely to have thought explicitly about your balance of pleasure and purpose before now. To begin considering it here, think about the kinds of programs you typically watch on TV (or books you read if you don’t watch TV). Would you say that you generally sit down in front of programs that you would describe as pleasurable, or those that you would describe as purposeful? Or perhaps you watch a balance between the two. To help you to visualize where you are located on the “swing-o-meter” of pleasure and purpose, take a look at the pendulum below.
Now that you have warmed up by thinking about TV, think about yourself in general. Are you more of a “pleasure machine,” experiencing lots more pleasure than purpose? Or are you more of a “purpose engine,” experiencing lots more purpose than pleasure? Or are you one of the “balanced folk,” with a mix? Where would you locate yourself now? Is this where you would like to be?
How and in what ways your own happiness should swing back and forth between pleasure and purpose is for you to decide, just as you should decide what you watch on TV. What floats your boat may not be what keeps mine bobbing along. Our preferences may differ. Watching The X-Files might make you happy while I prefer The X Factor. Allowing different things to affect you in different ways has been missing from a lot of the “one size fits all” books on happiness. You need to work out what works for you.
Whatever your reactions, however, it is the frequency and intensity of your feelings (sentiments) that ultimately matter. You are happiest when you have a balance between pleasure and purpose that works best for you. They will not necessarily always be in the same proportion as one another, and it will probably be different from the balance I have in my life. Moreover, each of us requires different combinations of pleasure and purpose at different times in the day and in our lives.
Having said all of this, it is possible for me to make a general claim: if you have a lot more pleasure in your life than purpose, then you should spend a bit more time doing something that is purposeful. And equally, if you have a lot more purpose than you have pleasure, then you should spend more time engaging in pleasure. This claim is based on the law of diminishing marginal returns (in our case, to happiness), a concept that is very close to any economist’s heart.
To illustrate, imagine two goods, beer and pizza, and assume you like both. The first beer goes down smoothly, and the first slice of pizza tastes really nice. The next beer is good but not quite as good as the first one, and the next slice of pizza is nice but not as nice as the first. So if you have had four beers, you would probably be willing to give up the fifth beer for a first slice of pizza. If instead you have had four slices of pizza, you would probably be willing to give up the fifth slice for a first beer.
The same logic applies to other goods and aspects of life, and also to pleasure and purpose. Without data on the precise trade-offs, consider a sample of two: my friends Mig and Lisa. Mig is my best friend and he lives in Ibiza. He works as little as is required, enjoys parties, and laughs a lot. I have had some of the best times of my life in Ibiza, thanks largely to being with Mig. He calls me Professor Happy and being with him makes me happy. Lisa has a passion for using behavioral science to improve people’s lives and she takes her work very seriously. She is a very intense person and only smiles on special occasions. Mig has lots of pleasure whereas Lisa has lots of purpose.
Mig would be happier if he found something purposeful to do (in exchange for some of his fun stuff) and Lisa would be happier if she had a little more fun (in exchange for some of her time spent feeling purposeful). Mig and Lisa have both confessed to me that they think they would be happier with a different combination of feelings of pleasure and purpose in their lives. But neither has acted upon their recognition of this. It is one thing to know and quite another to do, and I will show how you can achieve changes like this later in the book.
In order to say a little more about how people weigh up pleasure and purpose, Tali Sharot, Ivo Vlaev, and I recently conducted a small study involving twenty students who were asked to rate a series of daily activities (such as taking a friend’s dog for a walk, reading for work or school, watching TV, listening to music, and so on) according to the pleasure and purpose they would feel during these activities. They were then presented with a series of eighty choices between two activities and asked which one they would prefer to engage in when they got a couple of hours of free time one day soon. The results show that ratings for both pleasure and purpose can be used to predict people’s subsequent choices about how to spend their time, but with more weight given to the ratings of pleasure.19 One possible explanation for this is that free time is more likely to be used for fun than for fulfillment. Our follow-up study will address this issue, and we also plan to look at brain activity when people are experiencing pleasure and purpose.
The PPP over time
Day to day, moment to moment, you feel sentiments of pleasure, purpose, pain, and pointlessness. You are happier when you experience more of the positive sentiments—and when you experience them for longer. So happiness is ultimately about the pleasure-purpose principle over time.
Time is a truly scarce resource. You can beg, borrow, and steal money but a minute spent has gone for good. Each day, you have a time bank account with 1,440 minutes in it. Each day that account goes back to zero again, with no borrowing or saving. Put bluntly but accurately, you are getting ever closer to death. There are surprisingly few researchers who think about happiness in terms of yo
ur time use. But the scarcity of time means that any sensible definition and measure of happiness must consider the duration of your experiences of pleasure and purpose as well as their intensity.
Ultimately, we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Just as you cannot recover time that is lost, you cannot recover happiness that is lost. Staying in a boring job or an annoying relationship simply prolongs the misery and any future happiness is unlikely to fully compensate for this loss. Lost happiness is lost forever.
I should say at this point that more sleep is not necessarily a waste of time. A colleague of mine thought that a consequence of thinking about happiness over time was that happiness levels would go up when waking hours go up because you have more time to be happy. But you would then also have more time to be tired and miserable, too. Happiness is not only about the quantity of time (though that matters) but also about its quality. As someone who does not sleep too well, I would be happier overall during my waking hours if one more of my hours overall were spent sleeping.
So you are happier when you feel better—and for longer. In fact, strictly speaking, you are happier when you feel better for what feels like longer. It is our perceptions of duration that govern our experiences. I’m sure you’re aware that time seems to pass much more quickly for some activities than for others. As Einstein said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute—then it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity!”20 If you are in pain, time may feel as if it is passing quite slowly and the same applies to feelings of pointlessness, which seem to drag on and on.21 Calculating the happiness from different activities using real time is only an approximation of the value of the real experience.
