Happy From 9 to 5

A post by Charlie Gilkey about whether people would buy a $47 step-by-step program to achieve happiness prompted a very lively discussion.

So I started thinking, is happiness a teachable skill? And therefore, can we learn how to be happy at work despite it not filling our souls or not being our “purpose”?

To answer my own question I went back to Martin Seligman’s book “Authentic happiness”. The preface told me that studies show that we have a predetermined level of happiness already set in us, and you can’t change that particular level. That is why primarily unhappy people will never feel happy in the long run and neither primarily happy people will feel unhappy forever.

However, despite this setting, which can be lower or higher, there is another happiness level that we can modify, increase and keep high long term.

Happiness seems to be based on values such as hope, secutity and trust. Can we learn about them when what we do for a living sucks, when we are scared about our future?

Seligman goes on to say that empoverished, depressed and suicidal people worry about more things than just easing their suffering. They worry, at times with desperation, about virtue, purpose, integrity and meaning. He also points that the experiences provoking positive emotions make negative emotions to vanish quickly.

It turns out that whenever it takes us the use of our virtues and strengths, the positive experience lasts longer and makes your life better.

Ok, then having bad experiences and overcoming them through the use of my virtues and strengths makes that my memory of them don’t last as much as those where I either couldn’t overcome them or where I got a struck of luck.

This brought me to a post by Bob Sutton about the good aspects of having a bad boss. His point is that if we didn’t have bad bosses, we wouldn’t think about changing the way things are, we wouldn’t be better.

My questions then turned more metaphysical: do we really have to go through hell to reach heaven at work? How long does heaven last? Is there a correlation between how much heaven lasts and the amount of time we spent in work hell? Is there a higher purpose then for bosses and coworkers from hell?

I don’t have answers for that.

In any case, happiness as a broad concept, according to Seligman, can’t be taught (therefore learnt), the same way we can’t learn enlightment. It’s a subproduct of something else.

There is still hope though. What we can learn is how to develop our strengths in order to live a better life every day, hence, to also have a better worklife despite our “karmic” place in the corporate/business food chain.

We can learn to find meaning in our life, in what we do. That is something we can do, something we can learn. Happiness is not a competition with others, it’s just raising the bar for ourselves every day.

We raise that bar with our virtues and stregths.

Now, where’s that program again?