Why Do We Pursue Happiness?

This is an excerpt from Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain. 

Recently, I looked through some photos from my teen years. There I was, smiling broadly at senior prom and college holiday parties. Yet I remember my state of mind at the moment those photos were taken: sometimes as merry as my pose suggested, but often the smile was a façade. And you might think this is just the way adolescents are. But once I had a boyfriend

who grew up in Eastern Europe, and he showed me his photo album from his teen years. I was shocked to see him, his friends, and his high school girlfriend posing, on page after page, with

pouts and frowns. For them, that was cool. He was the one who introduced me to Leonard Cohen.

Americans, it turns out, smile more than any other society on earth. In Japan, India, Iran, Argentina, South Korea, and the Maldives, smiling is viewed as dishonest, foolish, or both,

according to a study by Polish psychologist Kuba Krys. Many societies believe that expressing happiness invites bad luck and is a sign of selfishness, shallowness, and an uninteresting, even

sinister, mind. When McDonald’s opened its first franchise in Russia, local workers were bemused by its ethos of employee cheeriness, according to the radio show and podcast Invisi-

bilia. What is this American smile? they asked. “We are all serious about life, because life is struggle,” as one employee put it.

“We were always a little bit afraid of America’s smile.” They were afraid, I think, because they knew that the smile wasn’t real, couldn’t be real. This has been our great secret, bursting recently into the open: We’re less happy than citizens of other countries, and much less happy than we appear. Even before we’d heard of COVID-19, even before our political divisions took center stage, about 30 percent of Americans suffered from anxiety and 20 percent from major depression over their lifetimes, according to the National Institute of Mental Health and the Journal of the American Medical Association, and over fifteen million had taken antidepressants for over five years.

But our cultural rituals—the Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, “Happy Birthday to You”—celebrate birth rather than help us live with impermanence and sorrow. We don’t honor deceased ancestors, as Mexicans do on the Day of the Dead. We don’t turn over our water glasses at night, as Tibetan monks do to remember that they might be dead by morning. We don’t write down our wishes and expose them to the elements, as the Japanese do at Mount Inari. We don’t weave imperfections into our rugs, as the Navajo do, or bake them into our pottery, as the

Japanese practice with the art form of wabi sabi. Even the sympathy cards we send deny our right to grieve, according to a study by the psychologists Birgit Koopmann-Holm and Jeanne Tsai. Compared with German cards, which feature black-and-white designs and sayings like “In deep sadness” and “Words will not lighten a heavy heart,” American cards are colorful, with cheery proclamations like “Love lives on” and “Memories will bring comfort.” Christ dies on the cross, but we focus on the birth and resurrection.

I once read about a remote tribe that required mothers to give up something precious every year, to prepare for their sons’ departures at adolescence. My boys, as I write this, are ten and

twelve. If we performed that ritual here, what would I renounce as I prepare for my sons to turn thirteen? My smartphone? My favorite dress, the one I wear to all my speaking engagements

that requires no ironing? This is no moot question. My sons are marvelous, and I expect to be thrilled when they turn into independent young men. But I don’t want to give up my dress and phone. Am I prepared to give up my boys?

After all my years considering these questions, I actually think that the answer is yes. But whatever equanimity I’ve gained has come despite our cultural practices, not because of them.

Copyright © 2022 by Susan Cain. All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.