I Like Trees

Someone you’ve never met can change your life. Scratch that- will change your life. Already has. And I don’t mean in the instant flash of light, the lightning bolt of transformation that we’re all secretly hoping for.

Yes, secretly. It’s not just you. Our movie industry runs on it, the idea that change is instant and permanent. Romeo and Juliet, had they lived, would never fight over folding laundry, or so we’re led to believe. Cinderella, having done housework, would never get harsh over the maid’s more tired days. Richard Gere will never get bored and pick up other pretty women, the couple finally finding each other at the end of the movie will still like each other in a year, the woman who stops chasing the man who’s bad for her will find the new soul mate she didn’t expect to somehow be making a wise and well-considered decision. Somehow. This time. We promise.   

            We believe in instant transformation, and we believe that we’ll know it when it happens. Most of the time, though, the things that makes us happy are gradual, and are not only things we didn’t plan, they’re things we don’t even know about. For example, strangers, people we never meet, see, or know of.

            Happiness is contagious. Being in the centre of the group doesn’t make you happy, but it gives you better odds coming into contact with happy people, and that will change you.

One thing I object to, in this article, is the idea that people “become happy people.” We’re not like cakes- the timer dings, and we’re done. Nor does becoming happy mean that you stay that way.  I doubt that the original study thinks of it this way, so let’s look. With questions like this (“What’s the operational definition that they use for, ‘happiness’?”) we can look at the actual text, rather than a reporting of it. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec04_2/a2338

            Looking at the text of the study, “Emotional states can be transferred directly from one individual to another by mimicry and “emotional contagion,” perhaps by the copying of emotionally relevant bodily actions, particularly facial expressions, seen in others. People can “catch” emotional states they observe in others over time frames ranging from seconds to weeks. For example, students randomly assigned to a mildly depressed room-mate became increasingly depressed over a three month period,²and the possibility of emotional contagion between strangers, even those in ephemeral contact, has been documented by the effects of “service with a smile” on customer satisfaction and tipping.

Yet, despite the evidence that certain emotions might spread over short periods from person to person, little is known about the role of social networks in happiness or about whether happiness might spread, by a diverse set of mechanisms, over longer periods or more widely in social networks. As diverse phenomena can spread in social networks, We investigated whether happiness also does so. We were particularly interested in whether the spread of happiness pertains not just to direct relationships (such as friends) but also to indirect relationships (such as friends of friends) and whether there are geographical or temporal constraints on the spread of happiness through a social network. ^“”

            I’m going to talk a lot about Happiness, because it’s relevant to daily life. So what did they consider happiness to be?

 “To measure happiness, we use four items from the CES-D in which people were asked how often they experienced certain feelings during the previous week: “I felt hopeful about the future,” “I was happy,” “I enjoyed life,” “I felt that I was just as good as other people.” This subcomponent of the CES-D has been shown to be a valid instrument for measuring positive affect, and it has been taken as interchangeable with the concept of happiness. We defined “happy” as a perfect score on all four questions, but we obtain similar results if we treat happiness as a linear 0-12 scale that sums answers to all four questions (data not shown), with 0=rarely or none of the time (<1 day/week), 1=some or a little of the time (1-2 days/week), 2=occasionally or a moderate amount of the time (3-4 days/week), and 3=most or all the time (5-7 days/week). We performed confirmatory factor analysis and found that responses to these four questions were highly correlated with one another and therefore could be treated as additive measures of a single “happiness” scale, as documented by previous research (see appendix on bmj.com). The response rate among those who answered at least one question was 98.8%. We imputed missing items using Amelia, a multiple imputation procedure.

That’s pretty good. “I felt that I was just as good as other people.” We all want that. What this study found is that, temporarily at least (no long term future can be predicted from this yet) the people you don’t know help determine whether you’re happy.

            What?

            People you know, and identify with- people in your neighbourhood, who are in relatively the same class and lifestyle; people you’re friends with, especially same-gender; people you’re close to or even interact with regularly- are people you become like. We emulate those around us in gesture, in mood, in expression. We don’t usually notice it, but we do. One thing they spoke of in the study: put someone in with a depressed person for three months, and they’re more depressed. We become like the people we identify with, whether they identify with us or not. This shaped us from childhood onward, and it’s a huge part of getting by in everyday life. 

            People you associate with are affected by people around them. It’s a circle of contagion, and it works that way with smoking and obesity, why not with positive things, too?

            You don’t get a choice about it. You don’t even notice it. You don’t know whose smiles your neighbours have been exposed to. But this affects you.

            I’m not a big fan of happiness as a goal. Happiness is something to work for while we work for other things, because you can’t just sit around all day and stare at the sky being happy. Happy is a state, and states are things you balance into. As the study described above, happiness is being able to say, even when things go wrong, that you’re just as good as other people, that you like your life, and that you’re feeling good.

            My favourite happiness study is this one. It’s a long article that will change your life.

            We’ll come back to this article again and again, but this long study of human lives brings up that everlasting plea of humanity. How do we become happy? Valliant talks about this extensively.

            “His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).”

The moral of the story is really, really simple. When the tree gives you lemons, eat them.

            Take them in. Learn from them. Learn everything lemon. Use them any way you can, plan for a future without them, give away whatever you can get from them, share them, explore them. Cope with them. SEIZE them, grab them, and don’t let them go until you’ve wrung something vital and valuable from them. Take every last bit of lemon out of it, and steal its meaning for yourself. Learn lemon.

You’re going to have pain. That’s life. You’re going to have misery. That’s human. You’re going to have obstacle after stupid, stinking, humbling and mortifying obstacle. But- and this is the eternal point, the one writ large on my little leaf of the tree- now that you know this, what will you do? What will you do now?

            If there’s a motto to my life, that’s it. Now do something with it. Mature adaptations are the difference between happy people and unhappy people, in the long run. You are going to have the troubles of your life, all of them. What you decide, through your choice of adaptations, is what you’re also going to have. And the scary part is, you’re deciding, through the network of contagion, whether other people will feel happy, too. Other people are affecting you, and you’re affecting them. The cycle is happening all the time, and you’re part of it.

            So when life gives you lemons, you’re sharing them. It can’t be helped. And you’re going to have the lemons of other people’s lives piled on you, along with their lemonade stands and pies and everything else they do to try to cope with the life they’re living. You have to find a way to deal with that.

Whatever you do, you’re going to be a day older tomorrow, whether you’ve done anything constructive today or not. Whatever lemons you have today, you will have more tomorrow, no matter what you’ve done with them. Whether you’ve smiled at your neighbours, whether you’ve found coping strategies, whether you’ve found happiness or not.

            Is is a public service to be happy? Is this something we owe to everyone, to spread happiness? Well, we owe it to ourselves to keep things healthy, and that takes some element of health, ourselves. But we’re also individuals, and that means that we only owe it to the group not to damage them. Be you. Try for happy, if you can’t feel happy, try for healthy. If you can’t manage either, be honest about it, and start biting down on the lemons to get what you can out of it while you’re dealing with it. At the very least, no one in your social network will get scurvy.

So strangers, even now, are changing you. And you’re changing you. Happiness may not be the point (it’s just a state-measurement) but it’s definitely contagious, and definitely nicer to experience, long-term, than unhappiness. So when there are lemons, eat them. Be polite, play fair, and pick up your lemons and find ways to cope with them. Learn lemon until something else grows.