Happy by Design
“It’s tough to make predictions--especially about the future.” --Yogi Berra
It’s a consistent finding that human beings are bad at predicting what will make them happy. There are lots of reasons for this. We put too much faith in money and things. We underestimate how stable our happiness set points are, and how resistant they are to change. We confuse current preferences for lasting values. And half the time, we aren’t even sure what we mean by happiness in the first place.
One fundamental flaw in the way we view happiness is that we conceive of it as something to discover. We have this idea in our heads that our happiness is out there, somewhere, waiting for us to find it. If we could just find the right partner, the right job, the right hobby or the right guru, happiness would be delivered to our doorstep like a package from the Amazon fulfillment center.
But what if we can’t find happiness at all? What if we have to build it? What if we need to start from scratch, with our hunches and our experience and our wild leaps of faith, and build it from spare bicycle parts, the way the Wright brothers built the first airplane?
When you go out searching for happiness, you end up rejecting a lot of options. None of them quite give you what you’re looking for--or if they do, they don’t seem to last. But if you want to build happiness, you don’t just throw stuff away. You piece together a prototype, you crash it in the wheat field, and then you build a better one. This is the breakthrough revelation of Design Thinking: it’s not about getting it right--it’s about making it better.
A while back, I wrote about David Whyte’s idea that we have three marriages: to others, to our work, and to ourselves. In combination, those three marriages make up our marriage to our lives. And if we want that marriage to be long and happy, it requires of us what all marriages do: hard work, constant recalibration, and persistence.
So the next time we wish we could throw our lives in a dumpster and find a new one, we should probably look a little closer. The lives we’ve led up to this point are all prototypes. What can we learn from them? What can we scavenge? What spare parts might eventually fly?
