The one thing the founder of humanistic psychology wrote about — and was too scared to publish — and why saying it now is the most compassionate thing to do.
Profound. At 94 and fortunate, I am grateful to see that my inherent melancholy is not sinful, unappreciative, over-sensitive or selfish. It is inherited. Thank you.
20 years in the field of psychology studying happiness plus my own journey of coming to terms with a rare condition that causes progressive vision loss, and I've landed on: choose to accept the things you can't control and choose to make the best of them. I appreciate your take on the same thing and how the research aligns.
This is beautiful and so compassionately conveyed. I have done a fair bit of thinking about socio-economic inequality, and I now see that biological inequality (beyond racial prejudice, for example) has always been in the shadows exercising influence over outcomes. Thanks for sharing this important work.
Wow! Great article. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of advising others to do what works for me, such as keeping gratitude journals, without ever considering how grating that advice might feel.
I love the gradient metaphor and the idea that each of us has a different starting point. The effort required to climb is not the same for everyone.
Thanks for the Maslow excavation gift. One thread I'd pull: Maslow's line that social injustice is easier to accept than biological injustice because the latter is a blank wall with no vocabulary. That's true of our 'modern' vocabulary. All the wisdom traditions actually had those vocabularies — karma, grace, providence, the divine lottery — imperfect, but they let people live beside the wall without self-blame. We rejected them and offered the self-help gospel instead, which manages to keep karma's cruelest habit (your suffering must be your conduct) while discarding all its consolations. Gratitude-journal scolding is karma without grace. What strikes me is that your twin studies and Maslow's "gratuitous grace" conclude what Pascal Bruckner did philosophically: happiness as an unbidden gift, not a duty. Science appears to be catching up to our oldest answer — that the individual does not have to be victorious.
This is an excellent and long overdue addition to the science of being happy; about the peddlers who are trying to sell you the secret formula to achieve it, and how most of them are simply on a par with the salesmen who sold the emperor his new clothes. Not only do their tools and techniques rarely do much good, but they perpetuate the myth that when they don't work as promised, it must be your fault for not trying hard enough.
Genetic limitations are obviously very important in human traits such as height and intelligence. But there is a profound reluctance to think that genetics applies to most other areas of human behaviour as well. And in our capitalist and consumerist society, many would-be happiness sales-people have realized that there is very little money to be made in telling you to "accept your limitations and do your best within them."
Fortunately there at least a few books out there that do make exactly this point, for example "Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless" by Steve Salerno - about how the self-help movement has made many of us addicts, always ready to embrace the next fad or hack or short-cut rather than putting in real effort - and "Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America " by Barbara Ehrenreich, about how forced positivity and its relentless pursuit has led to an epidemic of toxic self-blame in those who can't achieve the promised benefits.
I am also reminded of a small episode in the novel "Davy" by Edgar Pangborn. Davy, a servant boy, is elected to be the King of the Fools for one day. His first act: " I decreed that everyone without exception must immediately live happily ever afterward; somehow I could think of no more fitting decree from a King of the Fools." Unfortunately we still have a great many "experts" telling us that the key to being happy is simply to want it hard enough.
I lover your post, found me at the right time. I'm a clinical geneticist, and have seen this with patients. However, my Mom, now with likely LBD, not yet diagnosed, fighting her own fight her whole life, successfully, until now.. I think I have not fully understood her up until now.
Thank you so much for that text. After a first professional phase as a marketeer working with maslow’s pyramide and countless discussions with colleagues on humanism I changed course and opened a field in innovation starting with positive psychology and regional development. After 10 years on this second professional endavour and my own journey that text closes the circle. Why? In my view it is not about that I, you and we all can do work on our happiness levels with 50% of what is ‚changable‘. And the other half is about the genes and they are, so let‘s focus on the first 50%. I would say: No, it is about compassion and this honest love for people and that they have an individual biological footprint - and this starts with myself. Knowing about it and over time accepting it (psychological and bodywise) is in my experience relevant that the work on the other 50% becomes relevant. This form of compassion is a major key in leadership and for employees relating with leaders to accomplish a task and/or follow a certain purpose. On this track called life, we find the love you wrote about. And my biggest wish is that we individually and eventually also collectivelly learn to be and communicate with the (biological) diversity of humans in our societies. Regards from Switzerland.
Liked this article a lot. I think it contributes nicely to the discourse around reducing blame for one’s condition but also presenting an invitation for personal agency.
One thing I feel aware of is people using the biological interpretation as a sort of “identity” which justifies where they are, or what they’re doing. So, someone may adopt the sense that they are “a depressed person”, and Buddhist psychology informs us that forming an identity around one’s mental state like this can be harmful.
The truth is, with any one particular person, I don’t see how we can fully claim the reason they’re not getting better is genetic. It could be that they suffered trauma, haven’t found the right therapy, or could change something in their life. It could also be genetic. I think my problem with the biological way of thinking is I’m not sure it’s fully applicable to any individual person. This is not to say at all that they deserve blame for where they are at. It’s also not to say someone should “try harder” if something like gratitude journaling didn’t work, that would be dogmatic within one modality. It’s more that regardless of if it’s biology or environnement, they don’t deserve to be blamed for not being able to get better.
But, I think if someone concludes their unhappiness is genetic, that could add a fixidity to their mind that I’m not confident we know is there. Perhaps if it helps someone to believe it is genetic, that is fine, but that would be more of a pragmatic than epistemological justification.
Anyways, great, compassionate article and wanted to think aloud about this, as I feel it’s a really important issue! Loved your book Rise Above.
Such great points you make. It is true that we should acknowledge our biology and give ourselves grace for what we were given. But also hold that there is agency in optimizing our biology to the best it can be to live to our individual potential. Everyone is unique and their potential is unique. The important thing to remember is that despite our biology we have the ability to impact our lives by the positive choices we make to live fully and move in a path towards well-being if we choose. We are not locked into our biology as much as we think, there is room for creating and building upon our biology with knowledge, guidance and practices we can learn that enhance what we were given.
Your essay names something bioethicists have been circling for decades. Maslow's claim was that we've built a moral vocabulary for social unfairness and almost none for biological unfairness. I'd push back gently: we have some, it just hasn't made it into the well-being conversation.
Disability scholarship has spent forty years showing that a great deal of what presents as fixed biological limitation is really a mismatch between a body and an environment built for someone else's body. Change the building, change the disability. Rawls got at the same problem from the other direction with the natural lottery, arguing that the distribution of native endowments is arbitrary from a moral point of view, which is exactly why institutions have to be designed with it in view rather than around it.
This was so thought provoking, thank you. Some genetic testing I had done suggests that I have inherited low dopamine levels, which I feel subjectively translates to my struggles with attention, learning, and comprehension of more complex ideas. Stimulant medications help incredibly well with these symptoms, but I also inherited the addiction gene in a severe enough way that make these a non option for me. I'm hoping this material will lead me to an understanding of where my efforts to learn and grow might be better placed :)
“they are working against a gradient steeper than the gradient most people work against.”
Now, take this to a Kobe Bryant workout. (You know why I chose him.) He would *want* the steeper gradient. He would know it’s *necessary* to reach the highest levels of performance.
I have a friend who is sunny *all* the time and just seems to love *everything*. They would score well on the moment-to-moment happiness beeper scores, but I would never trust their judgment on a co-worker or a restaurant. Permanent happiness is a block to that kind of clear critique.
This lays bare the great problem of the Happiness Industrial Complex — happiness isn’t the goal! Morally good accomplishment through personally meaningful lives is the goal. Some of us feel great all the time on the journey to that goal — and thus the accomplishment is *harder*. And some of us feel rotten all the time on the journey to that goal — which makes the accomplishment easier (because we just can’t settle) but the journey is harder to live through.
What do you think of this reframing of the issue? It’s meant to be a “yes, and” to the biological truths you (and I) want to bring to light.
I like this, Ed. A lot of people who aspire to greatness have realized the power of intentionally creating steeper gradients (i..e, increasing challenges relating to basketball) for growth. I agree with this AND highly doubt Kobe would ever want a steeper gradient when it comes to mental disorders like severe depression, which was the focus of my article.
Oh of course I didn't mean to imply the steepness should always go up! When people tip into severe depression, they need help. It's not remotely responsible to say to them, "aren't you lucky". But perhaps some of that depression can be treated earlier with a better set of expectations and frame of mind. There's a spectrum here isn't there.
We need more of this honest holding of both/and in psychology and self-help. Too often, marketing emphasizes a single, universally-applicable approach to any number of sincerely complex problems to sell books or other offerings, with no ethical regard for the impact on the recipient who is genuinely seeking relief and, when the solution fails, blames themselves and gives up on trying.
I sometimes read your newsletters, then leave them in my inbox to be read later. It's akin to how I eat a caramel apple, by tucking the caramel covering between my cheeks and teeth to taste later. So I'm posting now, nearly a month after you sent this newsletter, to say how much I admire the way you offer the truth to people. Upon my first read of this post, I was reminded of your Scientific American article, "Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously," because of how thoughtfully and honestly you tackle research or findings that are impalatable to some.
Upon my second reading, I thought about how these findings remind me of the hopeful benefits of pharmacogenetics, and made me feel for all the people who have tried to feel better, but were upended not because they didn't adhere to taking their meds, but because their genes or enzymes or receptors were working against them, or rather against the medicine.
And upon my third reading, I have taken this post as good advice because I have been the insufferable person suggesting how others can best attain happiness. I've never suggested a gratitude journal, but when others would say they were doing that practice, I would annoyingly offer up how it may be even more effective if they journaled what they were grateful for "IN" the moment, rather than "after the fact."
Anyway, you've inadvertently made me a better friend, partner, and loved one to those I hold close. Thank you for that.
Profound. At 94 and fortunate, I am grateful to see that my inherent melancholy is not sinful, unappreciative, over-sensitive or selfish. It is inherited. Thank you.
20 years in the field of psychology studying happiness plus my own journey of coming to terms with a rare condition that causes progressive vision loss, and I've landed on: choose to accept the things you can't control and choose to make the best of them. I appreciate your take on the same thing and how the research aligns.
definitely
This article is so important and so profound. So many implications of all these points.
The metaphor of the gradient we are each on is so illuminating.
Thank you.
This is beautiful and so compassionately conveyed. I have done a fair bit of thinking about socio-economic inequality, and I now see that biological inequality (beyond racial prejudice, for example) has always been in the shadows exercising influence over outcomes. Thanks for sharing this important work.
Thanks Chris!
Wow! Great article. I’m sure I’ve been guilty of advising others to do what works for me, such as keeping gratitude journals, without ever considering how grating that advice might feel.
I love the gradient metaphor and the idea that each of us has a different starting point. The effort required to climb is not the same for everyone.
Thanks for the Maslow excavation gift. One thread I'd pull: Maslow's line that social injustice is easier to accept than biological injustice because the latter is a blank wall with no vocabulary. That's true of our 'modern' vocabulary. All the wisdom traditions actually had those vocabularies — karma, grace, providence, the divine lottery — imperfect, but they let people live beside the wall without self-blame. We rejected them and offered the self-help gospel instead, which manages to keep karma's cruelest habit (your suffering must be your conduct) while discarding all its consolations. Gratitude-journal scolding is karma without grace. What strikes me is that your twin studies and Maslow's "gratuitous grace" conclude what Pascal Bruckner did philosophically: happiness as an unbidden gift, not a duty. Science appears to be catching up to our oldest answer — that the individual does not have to be victorious.
This is an excellent and long overdue addition to the science of being happy; about the peddlers who are trying to sell you the secret formula to achieve it, and how most of them are simply on a par with the salesmen who sold the emperor his new clothes. Not only do their tools and techniques rarely do much good, but they perpetuate the myth that when they don't work as promised, it must be your fault for not trying hard enough.
Genetic limitations are obviously very important in human traits such as height and intelligence. But there is a profound reluctance to think that genetics applies to most other areas of human behaviour as well. And in our capitalist and consumerist society, many would-be happiness sales-people have realized that there is very little money to be made in telling you to "accept your limitations and do your best within them."
Fortunately there at least a few books out there that do make exactly this point, for example "Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless" by Steve Salerno - about how the self-help movement has made many of us addicts, always ready to embrace the next fad or hack or short-cut rather than putting in real effort - and "Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America " by Barbara Ehrenreich, about how forced positivity and its relentless pursuit has led to an epidemic of toxic self-blame in those who can't achieve the promised benefits.
I am also reminded of a small episode in the novel "Davy" by Edgar Pangborn. Davy, a servant boy, is elected to be the King of the Fools for one day. His first act: " I decreed that everyone without exception must immediately live happily ever afterward; somehow I could think of no more fitting decree from a King of the Fools." Unfortunately we still have a great many "experts" telling us that the key to being happy is simply to want it hard enough.
I lover your post, found me at the right time. I'm a clinical geneticist, and have seen this with patients. However, my Mom, now with likely LBD, not yet diagnosed, fighting her own fight her whole life, successfully, until now.. I think I have not fully understood her up until now.
Thank you so much for that text. After a first professional phase as a marketeer working with maslow’s pyramide and countless discussions with colleagues on humanism I changed course and opened a field in innovation starting with positive psychology and regional development. After 10 years on this second professional endavour and my own journey that text closes the circle. Why? In my view it is not about that I, you and we all can do work on our happiness levels with 50% of what is ‚changable‘. And the other half is about the genes and they are, so let‘s focus on the first 50%. I would say: No, it is about compassion and this honest love for people and that they have an individual biological footprint - and this starts with myself. Knowing about it and over time accepting it (psychological and bodywise) is in my experience relevant that the work on the other 50% becomes relevant. This form of compassion is a major key in leadership and for employees relating with leaders to accomplish a task and/or follow a certain purpose. On this track called life, we find the love you wrote about. And my biggest wish is that we individually and eventually also collectivelly learn to be and communicate with the (biological) diversity of humans in our societies. Regards from Switzerland.
Liked this article a lot. I think it contributes nicely to the discourse around reducing blame for one’s condition but also presenting an invitation for personal agency.
One thing I feel aware of is people using the biological interpretation as a sort of “identity” which justifies where they are, or what they’re doing. So, someone may adopt the sense that they are “a depressed person”, and Buddhist psychology informs us that forming an identity around one’s mental state like this can be harmful.
The truth is, with any one particular person, I don’t see how we can fully claim the reason they’re not getting better is genetic. It could be that they suffered trauma, haven’t found the right therapy, or could change something in their life. It could also be genetic. I think my problem with the biological way of thinking is I’m not sure it’s fully applicable to any individual person. This is not to say at all that they deserve blame for where they are at. It’s also not to say someone should “try harder” if something like gratitude journaling didn’t work, that would be dogmatic within one modality. It’s more that regardless of if it’s biology or environnement, they don’t deserve to be blamed for not being able to get better.
But, I think if someone concludes their unhappiness is genetic, that could add a fixidity to their mind that I’m not confident we know is there. Perhaps if it helps someone to believe it is genetic, that is fine, but that would be more of a pragmatic than epistemological justification.
Anyways, great, compassionate article and wanted to think aloud about this, as I feel it’s a really important issue! Loved your book Rise Above.
Such great points you make. It is true that we should acknowledge our biology and give ourselves grace for what we were given. But also hold that there is agency in optimizing our biology to the best it can be to live to our individual potential. Everyone is unique and their potential is unique. The important thing to remember is that despite our biology we have the ability to impact our lives by the positive choices we make to live fully and move in a path towards well-being if we choose. We are not locked into our biology as much as we think, there is room for creating and building upon our biology with knowledge, guidance and practices we can learn that enhance what we were given.
Your essay names something bioethicists have been circling for decades. Maslow's claim was that we've built a moral vocabulary for social unfairness and almost none for biological unfairness. I'd push back gently: we have some, it just hasn't made it into the well-being conversation.
Disability scholarship has spent forty years showing that a great deal of what presents as fixed biological limitation is really a mismatch between a body and an environment built for someone else's body. Change the building, change the disability. Rawls got at the same problem from the other direction with the natural lottery, arguing that the distribution of native endowments is arbitrary from a moral point of view, which is exactly why institutions have to be designed with it in view rather than around it.
This was so thought provoking, thank you. Some genetic testing I had done suggests that I have inherited low dopamine levels, which I feel subjectively translates to my struggles with attention, learning, and comprehension of more complex ideas. Stimulant medications help incredibly well with these symptoms, but I also inherited the addiction gene in a severe enough way that make these a non option for me. I'm hoping this material will lead me to an understanding of where my efforts to learn and grow might be better placed :)
You said:
“they are working against a gradient steeper than the gradient most people work against.”
Now, take this to a Kobe Bryant workout. (You know why I chose him.) He would *want* the steeper gradient. He would know it’s *necessary* to reach the highest levels of performance.
I have a friend who is sunny *all* the time and just seems to love *everything*. They would score well on the moment-to-moment happiness beeper scores, but I would never trust their judgment on a co-worker or a restaurant. Permanent happiness is a block to that kind of clear critique.
This lays bare the great problem of the Happiness Industrial Complex — happiness isn’t the goal! Morally good accomplishment through personally meaningful lives is the goal. Some of us feel great all the time on the journey to that goal — and thus the accomplishment is *harder*. And some of us feel rotten all the time on the journey to that goal — which makes the accomplishment easier (because we just can’t settle) but the journey is harder to live through.
What do you think of this reframing of the issue? It’s meant to be a “yes, and” to the biological truths you (and I) want to bring to light.
I like this, Ed. A lot of people who aspire to greatness have realized the power of intentionally creating steeper gradients (i..e, increasing challenges relating to basketball) for growth. I agree with this AND highly doubt Kobe would ever want a steeper gradient when it comes to mental disorders like severe depression, which was the focus of my article.
Oh of course I didn't mean to imply the steepness should always go up! When people tip into severe depression, they need help. It's not remotely responsible to say to them, "aren't you lucky". But perhaps some of that depression can be treated earlier with a better set of expectations and frame of mind. There's a spectrum here isn't there.
We need more of this honest holding of both/and in psychology and self-help. Too often, marketing emphasizes a single, universally-applicable approach to any number of sincerely complex problems to sell books or other offerings, with no ethical regard for the impact on the recipient who is genuinely seeking relief and, when the solution fails, blames themselves and gives up on trying.
I sometimes read your newsletters, then leave them in my inbox to be read later. It's akin to how I eat a caramel apple, by tucking the caramel covering between my cheeks and teeth to taste later. So I'm posting now, nearly a month after you sent this newsletter, to say how much I admire the way you offer the truth to people. Upon my first read of this post, I was reminded of your Scientific American article, "Taking Sex Differences in Personality Seriously," because of how thoughtfully and honestly you tackle research or findings that are impalatable to some.
Upon my second reading, I thought about how these findings remind me of the hopeful benefits of pharmacogenetics, and made me feel for all the people who have tried to feel better, but were upended not because they didn't adhere to taking their meds, but because their genes or enzymes or receptors were working against them, or rather against the medicine.
And upon my third reading, I have taken this post as good advice because I have been the insufferable person suggesting how others can best attain happiness. I've never suggested a gratitude journal, but when others would say they were doing that practice, I would annoyingly offer up how it may be even more effective if they journaled what they were grateful for "IN" the moment, rather than "after the fact."
Anyway, you've inadvertently made me a better friend, partner, and loved one to those I hold close. Thank you for that.