"Managing Happiness"

LISTEN. I've gone back to school this summer. 

I don't mean teaching (though I do have one independent study student, living abroad); I mean actually studying and learning, reading and watching and getting points and positive reinforcement for correct answers. It's my first-ever online MOOC course, Harvard's "Managing Happiness," which I stumbled serendipitously upon while scrolling, on the very first day of class. No commute required. 

I've shared this with the students who've enrolled in the latest upcoming rendition of my MTSU Philosophy of Happiness course, in case any of them are interested in over-achieving and beginning early to polish the apple. It really would be a good prequel/preparation for what we'll do in the Fall. 

The theme of our course this time is the crucial role of relationships (friendly, intimate, and otherwise) in our happiness or its absence. We'll be reading and discussing Happiness: A Very Short Introduction (Haybron), The Good Life (Waldinger), Against Happiness (Flanagan et al), Four Thousand Weeks (Burkeman), and The Philosophy of Epicurus.

I completed Module 1 yesterday -- At the end of this module, you will recognize that happiness is a major area of study in neuroscience and social science: it is observable, measurable, and manipulable. You can learn to understand your own happiness and get better at happiness! -- and enjoyed doing it. Here's some of what I posted in the discussion boards, in response to various questions you can probably infer:

I stumbled across this course the day it was scheduled to begin, and registered for it because I teach a Happiness course (from a philosophical perspective, with attention to the thought of Aristotle, Epicurus, Montaigne, J.S. Mill, William James*,...) and am always interested to see how others come at the subject. Then I was pleased to learn that Arthur Brooks, whose podcast and Atlantic Monthly work I've admired, is the teacher. I'm really looking forward to digging in. 

*WJ said: If we were to ask the question: “What is human life's chief concern?” one of the answers we should receive would be: “It is happiness.” How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.

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Growing up in the American midwest (Missouri), and living most of my adult life in the south (Tennessee), I've always been surrounded by people who insist on Jefferson's "pursuit of happiness" as our shared birthright. But they also are strongly motivated by what William James (in a 1906 letter to H.G. Wells) called "our national disease":

"the moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease." September 11, 1906

In over a century since, I don't think our disease has yet found a cure. Best not to catch it in the first place. Maybe a course like this can help inoculate the patient/student. I think discovering James's philosophy of happiness, and philosophy in general, has helped inoculate me.

...

I think the implicit message of my upbringing was that it's more important to be good and do the right thing than to be happy. This is generally the view I would later identify with Immanuel Kant, who thought it's more important to be worthy of happiness (because you've behaved rationally and dutifully) than actually to achieve it. My father was temperamentally disposed to happiness, but my mother suffered from manic depression which, from a child's perspective, made happiness seem fragile and randomly distributed. I think I decided at a relatively early age that I would have to take responsibility for my own happiness, that I couldn't count on it being delivered automatically in our household. Perhaps this was my good fortune, to learn this lesson while still so young.

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I'm glad Arthur qualified "faith" as including one's life philosophy. The meaning of life, on my view, is not singular, and it is not dependent upon some form of supernatural or externally-sourced redemption or salvation. There are countless meanings, values, and purposes that life may subtend. I call myself a humanist, and agree with Kurt Vonnegut that doing the right thing without expectation of extrinsic reward or punishment is one of the central meanings of a good, fulfilled, happy life. I'm also sympathetic with John Dewey's notion of "the continuous human community" (from the first proto-humans of pre-history to who knows what in the remote future) as a deep source of meaning. And I think evolution and the prospect that it may allow the expansion of meaning and our "heritage of values" (Dewey again) is profoundly meaningful. And, like William James I call myself a meliorist: I think the largest meaning of our lives is bound up with the never-ending project of making life better.

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Wife, grown daughters, sister, brother-in-law... at age 66, immediate family are all younger. Sadly, one of our daughters has chosen to move far away and maintains minimal contact. But I find it gratifying to stay in touch by sending her weekly postcards. When I do, I feel the connection between us. When she sent me a photo of a display she's made in her home, of those postcards, I was very deeply gratified.

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My teaching colleagues and students are one community, my neighbors another, like-minded people (humanists, meliorists, Jamesians, baseball fans, dog fanciers) near or far, met or not, another. And I have a small friend group of half-a-dozen fellow former grad students, now all approaching (or having surpassed) retirement age, with whom I make a point of meeting up once a year in August before we resume our respective teaching responsibilities. 

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Teaching feels meaningful, especially so when I can tell that I've made an impression on a student. Learning things that will inform my teaching feels meaningful. Parenting, when our girls were young, felt like meaningful work AND play (I was for a time an at-home dad). Writing something I think is true and important always feels meaningful.

And that, by the way, is why I post to this and other little-noticed blogsites. It motivates me (in a way that standard academic work frankly does not) to try and write true and important things. And it helps me prepare to teach.

This MOOC is going to help me teach Happiness in the Fall, I can tell already. And it's going to be fun right now. Seems like a good way to spend a portion of summer.