Yes, there is another important category of feelings that matter to you, and these are the feelings of purpose and pointlessness you feel about some of what you do and think. I will use these adjectives as shorthand for a range of positive and negative feelings, such as fulfilment, meaning, and worthwhileness on the one hand and boredom and futility on the other. These feelings affect your happiness in ways that must be properly accounted for. You only have to think about working or studying to know that these activities can feel quite purposeful much of the time — and quite pointless at other times. These good and bad feelings matter to you every bit as much as do feelings of pleasure and pain.
Now, calling purpose a feeling suggests that it is an emotion that can be placed on a comparable footing with more recognised emotions like joy, anxiety, and anger. But I have a more general interpretation in mind here; namely, what I call feelings as sentiments. I do not mean sentimental in the tears-in-your-eyes sense; rather, sentimental in the sense of a rich array of feelings. In my definition, a sentiment is a feeling that covers the kinds of emotional pleasures and pains that psychologists generally have in mind but it additionally includes feelings about the degree to which an experience is purposeful. The adjectives for feelings of purpose are distinct from those used for pleasure. Purpose is a simpler construct than pleasure because it’s largely non-aroused, so either it’s good (purposeful) or bad (pointless).
Writing this book is a great example of doing something that feels purposeful. It feels purposeful while I am doing it; just as having a beer with my mates feels pleasurable. Helping a friend move house is another example. Lugging boxes and furniture up and down three flights of stairs all day isn’t particularly pleasant but it does feel purposeful at the time you are sweating on the stairs. Or perhaps watching that moving documentary, which may not be exactly fun but keeps you engrossed throughout. I’m sure you can think of plenty of your own examples.
There are also times when you feel the opposite — pointlessness, futility, or a lack of purpose. That work assignment where you are convinced nothing will ever come of it, which feels painful as well as pointless. Or that romantic comedy you watched last night, which was actually quite pleasurable but did not feel at all purposeful. I bet you don’t have to try too hard to think of these sorts of examples. It is surprising to me that happiness has not really been considered in this way before. There has certainly been much discussion in the academic literature about day-to-day experiences of pleasure, but purpose is not usually considered in this experience-based way. Insofar as it has been considered, it has typically been tapped into by studies that ask us general questions about whether life overall has direction, meaning, or purpose.
Just like life satisfaction questions, these kinds of questions capture overall evaluations of purpose when life as a whole is reflected upon and not the day-to-day experiences of purpose, which are what really matter to how you feel. As an example, new fathers report more purpose in their lives than their childless peers, and the effect is much less pronounced for new mothers. These results are interesting but they could simply be explained by responses being driven by what is prominent at the time of assessment. New fathers might pay more attention to the general fact that they have just had a kid as compared to new mothers, who might also be thinking about the housework (which they still do much more of). A more accurate and useful measure would consider whether new mothers and fathers also report different amounts of purpose in the daily activities of their lives.
So I am much more interested in the meaning of moments than I am in constructions of the meaning of life. There is pleasure (or pain) and purpose (or pointlessness) in all that you do and feel. They are separate components that make up your overall happiness from an experience. As I sit here now, typing these words, I feel pretty good. But most of that good feeling is not an emotional reaction to what I am writing but rather that the words, and my attempt to convey their meaning to you, generate a feeling of purpose. I am sure that you feel similarly as you go about your daily life. You might spend time tending to your garden, and this might feel purposeful in addition to — and separate from — any emotional reaction you have to looking after your roses. Or you might have a job that feels rewarding; it might even be less fun than your last job but it makes you feel happier overall.
That our happiness includes both pleasure and purpose is also reflected in what people like you tell me. Few scholars have studied what people think about happiness in their own lives, or what data governments could use to inform decisions about how we spend money on public services, and so with the support of the Office for National Statistics in the UK, Rob Metcalfe and I designed an online survey to help fill that gap. We need to have a healthy degree of scepticism about what people tell us in surveys because the responses are heavily influenced by the wording of the questions, but, when asked about happiness in their own lives and in the context of informing public policy, about as many participants were in favour of a focus on “happiness and sadness on a day-to-day basis” as were in favour of focusing on “the degree to which you consider the things you do to be worthwhile.” In other words, both pleasure and purpose matter to us (although admittedly this is a rather evaluative way of describing purpose).
To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle — the PPP.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.