The pursuit of happiness
If even celebrities are dissatisfied, what can the rest of us hope for?
When Lisa Sandonato was in college two decades ago, a professor gave her class an assignment that was first a bit jarring, then eye-opening.
"Write your own obituary," the professor told his students. "What do you want your obituary to look like?"
In other words, what kind of life do you want to live? It is a question that underlies "The Bucket List," the new film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two men who make a list of all the things they want to do before they kick the bucket.
Sandonato, now 38 and living in Weymouth, began compiling such a list shortly after college. She has checked off each item - living for a year in a mountain village in Italy, sipping champagne at Maxim's de Paris on New Year's Eve, visiting Mayan ruins in Mexico - as she has done it. "I want to leave a pretty decent obituary," she explains.
But long before the obit writers have the final word, there is a corollary question that Sandonato and the rest of us wrestle with: What constitutes true happiness? Two weeks ago, cries of "Happy New Year!" rang out across the land, but how do we make it happen?
Maybe having money, looks, youth, fame, professional success, and heartthrob status would do it. Or maybe not, to judge by com ments from a fellow most observers would assume to be sitting at the top of the world: New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady.
"Why do I have three Super Bowl rings and still think there's something greater out there for me?" Brady asked in a "60 Minutes" interview from 2005 that was rebroadcast a few weeks ago. "I mean, maybe a lot of people would say 'Hey man, this is what is.' I reached my goal, my dream, my life. Me, I think, 'God, it's got to be more than this.' I mean this isn't, this can't be what it's all cracked up to be."
Huh? Exactly what hope is there for the rest of us if Tom Brady feels compelled to ask (in the words of that noted existentialist Peggy Lee) "Is that all there is?"
But Brady is not the only celebrated figure to make it to the top, only to find the view from up there a bit wanting. Consider British singer-songwriter Lily Allen, who sold nearly 2 million copies of her debut album and is all of 22 years old. Yet she recently opined that being famous and successful "doesn't leave time for what's important," and mused: "Maybe I could retire at 25 . . . I'd like to live in the country and have a walled garden, and chickens and pigs."
Contentment has also proven elusive for Amy Adams, star of the Disney film "Enchanted." Adams, 33, fretted recently in Newsweek: "Did I choose the right road? . . . I've fulfilled all my childhood dreams. Now what?"
Eternal quest
We can roll our eyes at celebrity angst and say that we'd like to have their "problems," but the questions posed by Adams may reverberate deeper than we'd care to admit. The pursuit of happiness is such an obsessive theme - it's right there in the Declaration of Independence, people - that philosophers and just plain folks alike are perennially drawn to it.
If you doubt it, scan the shelves of your local bookstore. There will, no doubt, still be plenty of copies of 2006's best-selling phenomenon "The Secret," in which author Rhonda Byrne put forward what she claimed was the secret of happiness. But this month alone brings three new contributions to the literature of happiness: "The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World," in which NPR correspondent Eric Weiner chronicles his travels to 10 countries to find out what makes their citizens happy; "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy," in which scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that being miserable is more of a spur to creativity than being happy; and "The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die," in which author and TV host John Izzo asked 235 elderly people how and where they found happiness.
"I've always been interested in the question of why some people live well and die happy, and some people die as if they missed the party," explains Izzo. So he asked his interviewees, who ranged in age from 60 to 106, such questions as "What brought happiness to your life?", "What do you wish you'd learned sooner?", and "What do you regret?"
"Almost no one regretted something they tried in their life that didn't work out, yet almost everyone said they wished they had risked more," Izzo says. "They said the greatest fear at the end of life is not death or failure. It's that you didn't even try." The men in particular regretted not showing their wives or children how much they loved them. "What I've discovered is my BMW doesn't visit me in the nursing home," one retired businessman told Izzo.
So what were some of the secrets of happiness? In addition to living in the moment and being true to yourself, the consensus of the interviewees, Izzo says, was: "If you want to be a person who's happy, be a giver." In other words, focus not on yourself but on the needs of others. "They said when you're young you think your greatest happiness will come from what you get from life, but looking back they realized the only things that gave meaning was the fact that they gave," says Izzo.
Wish lists
That sounds about right to Ali Santarlasci. She started a mental "bucket list" four years ago, with trips to Greece and the Galapagos Islands among her goals. But shortly after that, her husband was diagnosed with cancer. These days, she is focusing her energies not on dreams of travel but on his day-to-day needs. "Right now my priority is to make his holidays, his whatever, the best they can be," says Santarlasci, 58, of Billerica. "If I do that, that makes me happy. When you do that, you're not focusing on what is missing."
To 22-year-old Alyssa Swan of Medford, the quest for happiness is woven into every decision she makes, from where to work (she is employed at Fidelity Investments) to how to spend her vacations. Last summer, working through her list, she went to Spain and ran - briefly - with the bulls in Pamplona. "I saw a bull running toward me, and I jumped over the fence," she recalls.
Swan plans to find time eventually to backpack across Europe, go on a safari in Africa, and watch the sun set over an Egyptian pyramid. Meanwhile, both of her roommates are considering major life changes geared toward happiness: One wants to spend a year as a snowboard instructor; the other wants to move to England. Swan says she believes her generation makes a higher priority of happiness than their parents or grandparents, whose goals, she says, largely consisted of "go to college and then just get married and work."
"Speaking for myself and most of my friends that are my age, it's experiencing the things that life has to offer," she says. "They all want to work very hard, but they want to be happy doing it, instead of just for money."
Happiness was also a high priority for Daniel Klein when he was Swan's age, but he drifted professionally for 15 years after college. For disapproving friends and family Klein had a ready wisecrack: "I'm taking my retirement early." Finally, disgusted with himself, he made a sort of bucket list in his 30s. He found it a couple years ago and discovered that he had done most of it: He had indeed written a novel, had indeed married a European woman. Now 68, Klein is enjoying success as coauthor of the best-selling "Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes."
Finding peace
So what do the philosophers tell us about the path to happiness and meaning? "Heidegger said the only way to really feel alive is to be constantly aware that you're going to die," replies Klein, then adds with a laugh: "In other words, you haven't really lived until you've thought about death all the time." The point, he says, is that "if you think you have an infinite amount of time, it's easier not to appreciate the here and now. We spend a lot of time postponing our satisfactions."
Not that homo sapiens is a species easily satisfied. "Perfect happiness, I don't think, really exists," says Sandonato. "It's human nature."
True enough. But still we keep searching. Even Tom Brady.
In his poem "The Anatomy of Happiness," the inimitable Ogden Nash explained why we do:
Lots of truisms don't have to be repeated but there is one that has got to be, Which is that it is much nicer to be happy than it is not to be, And I shall even add to it by stating unequivocally and without restraint That you are much happier when you are happy than when you ain't.
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. 