Happiness Won’t Save You

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More than 40 years ago, three psychologists published a study with the eccentric, mildly seductive title, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Even if you don’t think you know what it says, there’s a decent chance you do. It has seeped into TED talks, life-hack segments on morning shows, even the occasional whiff of movie dialogue. The paper is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of happiness studies, a staple in any curriculum that looks at the psychology of human flourishing.

The study is straightforward. As the title suggests, the authors surveyed lottery winners and accident victims, plus a control group, hoping to compare their levels of happiness. But what the authors found violated common intuition. The victims, while less happy than the controls, still rated themselves above average in happiness, even though their accidents had recently rendered them all either paraplegic or quadriplegic. And the lottery winners were no happier than the controls, at least in any statistically meaningful sense. If anything, the warp and weft of their everyday lives was a little more threadbare. Talking to friends, hearing jokes, having breakfast — all of these simple pleasures now left them less satisfied than before.

There were flaws in the study — its design, alas, was as crude as an ax — but you can see why it became famous. It had an irresistible takeaway: Money! It doesn’t buy you happiness! Perhaps even more fundamentally, it had a sexy, almost absurd, premise. What kind of mind would think to pair lottery winners and accident victims in a research paper? Who in academic psychology had such a cockeyed imagination? It was social science by way of Samuel Beckett.

The answer to that question is a fellow by the name of Philip Brickman, a 34-year-old rising star at Northwestern University. He was warm, irrepressible, spellbinding to talk to; his mind was a chirping hatchery of ideas. Unlike so many of his peers, his preoccupations had little to do with cognitive processes. Rather, they had to do with matters of the heart: how we cope with adversity; how we care for others; how we form commitments, subdue inner conflicts, wrench meaning and happiness from this brief life.

“He wanted the world to be a more humane place,” his closest friend, Jeffery Paige, told me.

So for Brickman to come up with a study like this one made perfect sense. It was idiosyncratic, humanistic and, above all, relevant: Does money fulfill us? Does irremediable damage to the body cause irremediable damage to the spirit? Can we simply adapt to anything?

What, ultimately, do we need to carry us through?

Not long after publishing that study, Brickman left Northwestern for the University of Michigan, where he’d become the director of the oldest and most storied arm of the Institute for Social Research. It was a prestige gig, an honor often reserved for academics at the pinnacle of their careers. Paige, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Michigan, told me he thought Brickman was destined for the National Academy of Sciences one day.

We’ll never know. On May 13, 1982, at the age of 38, Philip Brickman made his way onto the roof of Tower Plaza, the tallest building in Ann Arbor, and jumped. It was a 26-story fall. The man who’d done one of psychology’s foundational studies about happiness couldn’t make his own pain go away.

According to those who knew him, Brickman was not a man who struggled with ongoing, intractable suicidal impulses. Depression and feelings of deep inadequacy, yes. But suicide? Not that they knew of, not until the final weeks of his life.

“To imagine what could have driven him to do that — I almost had to imagine a different person,” Vita Carulli Rabinowitz, one of his former graduate students, told me. “So it made me wonder: Was there an underlying disorder that we just didn’t see?”

Most suicides are cruel mysteries, the suffering of the deceased “private and inexpressible,” as Kay Redfield Jamison put it in her 1999 masterpiece, “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide.” But Brickman wrote over 50 book chapters and academic papers in his short life, plus a book, published posthumously. So if Brickman was suffering from an underlying disorder, as Rabinowitz suggests, there was also an awful lot that was hiding in plain view. It is tempting, in hindsight, to wonder if his scholarship wasn’t a trail of bread crumbs — one long, unconscious attempt to unknot the riddle of his vexed self.

It seems safe to say that much of it was. But it also seems safe to say that his scholarship wasn’t enough.

Was there something he missed? If so, would it have made a difference if his insights had been complete? There will always be a gulf — bridgeable for most, but unbridgeable for a tragic few — between understanding what ails us and having the means or desire to bring those difficult feelings to heel.

It may even be worth asking whether understanding is quite beside the point — more of a requirement for the living than for the dead.

What are we to learn from this man?

As a professor, Brickman was an affecting combination of exuberant and awkward, exacting and underconfident. He was an awful lecturer. But he was an intoxicating conversationalist, the type who’d burst into your office whenever a new thought occurred to him, eager to discuss it, even more eager to collaborate. The first time he met Camille Wortman, now an emeritus professor of psychology at Stony Brook University, his opening conversational gambit was to ask whether she thought serial killers deserved compassion. He had just picked her up from the airport for a job interview.

“For me,” she told me, “it was intellectual love at first sight.” During their talks, she’d often have to stifle the urge to run back to her office and jot down notes.

Yet Brickman was bedeviled by insecurities, both physical and intellectual. He was homely, his face perforated with acne scars, his lip crowned with an extravagant walrus mustache. He was affectionate but quick to take offense, supportive but high-maintenance — tender in every sense.

“If he got a negative review on a publication he submitted,” said Wortman, “he would go insane. Nobody likes to get a bad review, but it had a profoundly negative effect on Phil. He would rant for days.”

“You really didn’t want to have a meeting with Phil on your calendar,” said Rabinowitz, the recently retired executive vice chancellor and provost of CUNY. He was needy. It was odd. 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. He’d give people grief if they stapled a paper in the wrong place.

The irony is that, better than almost anyone, 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. Our gratification from the new is fleeting; we adapt in spite of ourselves. “Fulfillment’s desolate attic,” as the poet Philip Larkin once put it. You may as well chase your afternoon shadow. Happiness always looms ahead.

In 1971, Brickman and the psychologist Donald T. Campbell went so far as to coin a term for the pointless quest for more, more, more: “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.”

Which is all very well. But what on earth do you live for, if not happiness?

Your commitments, according to Brickman. They were the true road to salvation, he decided, the solution to an otherwise absurd existence. He recognized that they didn’t always give pleasure; they may even “oppose and conflict with freedom or happiness,” as he wrote in his book “Commitment, Conflict, and Caring,” published five years after his death. But in many ways, that was the point: The more we sacrifice for something, the more value we assign to it.

“Happiness,” he wrote, “involves the enthusiastic and unambivalent acceptance of activities or relationships that are not the best that might possibly be obtained.”

“What Phil led me to realize is that a lot of psychology operates on this rational notion that, Well, I do the thing that works best for me,” said Dan Coates, a former student of Brickman’s and the second author on the lottery study. “But I think ultimately Phil would have said happiness is not what maintains us. What really maintains us is unhappiness.”

Which is a liberating — even electrifying — idea, particularly if you find happiness elusive, as Brickman did. “I think he was feeling that there was something a little bit wrong with him,” Wortman told me, “because he had achieved so much personal and professional success, yet it wasn’t as satisfying as he had hoped.”

There was only one problem with Brickman’s theory. Commitments, too, can be fragile and transient. 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.

Jeffery Paige used to say that he envied Brickman’s family life. And on the surface, there was certainly a lot to envy: Three adorable girls, a lovely wife, an idyllic farm outside Ann Arbor. But that portrait of domestic serenity was hard won. Brickman didn’t exactly come from a family where commitment came naturally. His father was a tomcat, forever destabilizing the household with his extramarital affairs, his sister, Julie, told me, and Brickman was an anxious, insecure little boy.