PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
With inalienable rights come unavoidable responsibilities.
Seven words in our Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” have helped define America since its formation as a nation. While we can take pride in our efforts to protect and preserve life and liberty, our performance at pursuing happiness appears a lot more mixed.
Defense of our right to “life” began in our struggle to survive as a nation at a time when Great Britain attempted to suppress discontent within its American colonial territories. Those American colonies succeeded in their struggle for independence and went on to secure our right to life through territorial expansion as a nation and the settling of the West as a people.
Yes, treatment of native Americans and racial minorities was abysmal. Our arrogance, abuse and indifference to their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness as fellow human beings was a disgrace. But slowly, very slowly, the right to life of all Americans has become increasingly protected and respected, though the work is yet to be completed.
Americans’ right to “liberty,” to freedom of expression, ownership of property and due process under the law is manifested in hard-fought battles, from an internal civil war through two world wars and current military engagement abroad. The outcome has been laws and protections of civil liberties at home and a new world order of international organizations and alliances globally. Two centuries of struggle have produced dividends of relative peace and the security of freedoms we come to expect.
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Our “pursuit-of-happiness” is proving a lot more elusive for a lot of Americans. That’s because, this writer contends, we have yet to define it and to learn how to practice it in sustainable and equitable ways.
Until the middle of the 1900s, we had little time to engage in pursuing happiness when our very security as a nation continued to be under threat. Understandably, happiness had to take a back seat to our survival, to settling and securing our frontiers and to fighting foreign wars that threatened to our sovereignty.
It has taken nearly two centuries to get to a time, in the middle 1900s, when continuing increased numbers of families, particularly middle-class white households, could count on living the “American dream.”
Racial and ethnic inequities have not disappeared, but during the last half of the 1900s, as the civil rights movement spread across the country, an increasing share of Americans could count on a more level playing field to participate in the country’s prosperity. The pursuit of happiness became an attainable aspiration.
Before the end of the last century, however, our pursuit of happiness began to take a troubling turn. The happiness that comes from success has morphed into the miseries of excess. This writer looks around now and he witnesses too many examples of where The Great American Success Story has morphed into The Great American Excess Story:
Excessively wide income and wealth disparities with continuing trends toward the rich getting richer and the poor becoming poorer.
A world record in our levels of air and solid waste pollution and in carbon dioxide and methane gas emissions;
Health issues, particularly obesity and substance dependence, afflicting excessively high shares of our population;
Ballooning financial indebtedness threatening the livelihoods of many of American workers and their families;
A world leader in the numbers of deaths because of drug overdoses and violent gun deaths and in incarcerations, particularly among young men of color.
While few countries approach America’s levels of per capita income and wealth, that monetary measure belies the assertion that we lead the world in happiness and well-being.
The United Nations' World Happiness Report, 2022, ranks countries of the world based on a multifactor index that includes: fair and sustainable socio-economic development; conservation and promotion of a vibrant culture; environmental protection; and good governance. In 2021, America ranked 16th behind Finland (#1), Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Australia and several other much smaller and lower per capita income countries. Over the ten years that the UN has tracked and compiled its national happiness index, America has gradually moved down, not up, in the world happiness rankings.
Also disturbing, Americans’ excesses are now putting our lives and liberty at risk and creating growing headwinds against future economic growth and broad-based prosperity. That in part because our free-market consumer culture has largely defined happiness for us as “things,” as goods and services. And it’s our pursuit of ‘things’ that puts us at odds with each other, with other nations, with nature, with the planet, leaving us, understandably, unhappy with ourselves.
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The good news is that there is still time, because time is what we will need to change the course of our consumer culture. We live on a tolerant and resilient planet that has been forgiving – up to a point - of our wastefulness and largess. When alerted, we have responded responsibly to a number of challenges to our health, wellbeing and happiness. During this writer’s lifetime, some examples of meeting those challenges include:
Scientific studies and published works like “The Silent Spring” led to the banning of DDT;
Atmospheric ozone depletion research led to banning of hydrofluorocarbons;
Technological advances in renewable energy production and in energy conservation are slowly reducing our dependency on fossil fuels as power sources;
Public safety net programs that have rescued tens of thousands of Americans with funds to restore livelihoods lost from natural disasters.
Such experiences – and there are many more – offer the promise that we can find ways to get ourselves on sustainable paths toward prosperity and happiness.
But first we must work at rebuilding trust in ourselves and at warning other nations of the of the unintended consequences of attempting to emulate our consumer culture. Our mixed happiness performance as a free-market economy and democratically representative form of government is raising doubts among even our strongest international allies. Daily, we are showing our ineptness at handling abundance and prosperity responsibly.
This is notable in the extravagant wastefulness with which we handle, yes, our waste. While others in the world go hungry and poorly clothed, America literally fills hundreds of dumpsters each day with uneaten food and still useful clothing. Not unnoticed either are the mountains of coal ash and the acres of chemical “lakes” that dot our country sides with the by-products of industrial plants that produce our stuff.
We’re literally drowning in things and in the toxic waste from producing them. Our global neighbors observe us and shake their heads.
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So first, let’s realize that in the 75 years since the end of World War II and the beginning of America’s unprecedented period of prosperity, we have made only limited progress toward achieving happiness by following the materialistic path we are on. We just haven’t learned yet how to achieve a prosperity that is both sustainable and fair.
It most likely will take time to identify and explore pathways, other than being a consumer culture, to claw our way up the list of countries on the happiness index. Fortunately, there are steps we can take, even by those of us most addicted to the “material things” approach to happiness. To begin, we can:
Say “No!” more often. We can work at restoring delayed gratification and rebuilding household assets, by getting on a pay-go trajectory toward major purchases – houses, cars, higher education. Our pioneering ancestors did that; it’s time we re-examine that approach to life despite our outwardly greater material wellbeing.
Recognize the benefits we derive in helping neighbors advance along with us. Public tax and spend wealth transfers are not the preferred ways, with a few exceptions. Public investment in education, particularly post-high school technical training programs, financial literacy training and life-skills equipping, are critical. Yes, bring back – in contemporary trappings - the quaint “Marriage and the Family” and “Home Economics” classes that fell out of favor in the 1960s and 1970s. Teach the generations that follow us practical mathematics, for example, how to fill out tax returns and not just how to calculate the area of parallelograms;
Locate work opportunities where people live, where communities have sprung up. Press our political leaders to legislate and implement fiscal incentives to locating production facilities and generating jobs in communities where people live and where the social capital already exists for building happiness locally;
Advocate for public programs that put people to work in the “restorative economy.” Replace or rebuild deteriorated transport systems, power infrastructure and affordable housing, particularly in dying rural communities and decaying urban centers. Make sure that these facilities meet higher standards of resilience necessary for anticipated more powerful climate events;
Reallocate our retirement savings investments away from fossil fuels. Good returns on investment now exist in renewable energy, energy conservation and infrastructure restoration industries;
Undo the damage of indebtedness – particularly from predatory lending. Programs facilitating forgiveness of loans – e.g., college debt - in exchange for public service or future graduated tax commitments from those who, once free from education debt can pursue employment, can boost their earnings and expand tax revenues needed for supporting the restorative economy and critical public services.
Above all, we can recognize that as a nation – and as a world leader, which other people look to for guidance – we have yet to get it right when it comes to achieving lasting and widespread happiness. Let’s learn from our misguided efforts and apply that knowledge to charting and following a better future path toward securing a happiness that is broad-based and sustainable. We can even benefit from observing experiences of other countries higher on the happiness scale than we are.
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This writer has had the good fortune to live most of his life in the unique period of American history when the pursuit of happiness may have achieved its apex in this country. My generation is now taking its final bow on this stage of America’s history. Our final act can still be one of sharing riches earned and lessons learned from our successes and mistakes.
Most of us are too old to act or even march in the streets to advocate for the changes necessary to get coming generations onto stable and sustainable pathways toward broad-based prosperity and happiness. But we have the monetary wealth, practical experience, and basic knowledge that we can share. So, let’s do it. Then, we people of a certain age should slip behind the scenes and let those following us take the stage and act. ###