What Moskowitz did to make us so happy was to persuade Ragu and Prego to give us different kinds of spaghetti sauce. Before 1990 they made only one kind, but thanks to Moskowitz they now make extra chunky, sweet basil, creamy garlic - more than 30 sauces altogether. Dream up a sauce and you can find it or something pretty close to it on your grocer's shelf. Gladwell says, "What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy." Moskowitz's great idea quickly spread from Prego and Ragu to other food companies, which is why Starbucks offers so many different kinds of coffee. The best general coffee you can make gets only about a 60 (out of 100) rating from coffee drinkers. But if you offer three varieties (say, light roast, dark roast, and hazelnut), the consumer rating goes from 60 to 78. Gladwell concludes, "The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is the difference between coffee that makes you wince and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. That is the final and I think most beautiful lesson of Howard Moskowitz, that in embracing the diversity of human beings, you will find a surer way to true happiness."
Gladwell's speech is a light and informative romp through the work of a food industry genius, and is probably not meant to be taken as a serious reflection on the nature of true happiness. But I will take it that way anyway because of the insight it provides into a common notion about what makes us happy. Happiness - popularly regarded - is satisfied desire. You're unhappy because you don't have what you want. If you get it, you'll be happy.
Take for example pop culture treatments of heaven. Heaven is bliss, right? What could be more blissful than getting whatever you want? In the apocalyptic comedy This Is The End, party boys Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel are raptured to heaven and greeted at the Pearly Gates by their friend Craig Robinson, who materializes a marijuana joint between Rogen's lips. Rogen whoops, "That's insane!" and Robinson responds, "No, no, no. That's heaven. Anything you can think of - it's yours." So Rogen imagines himself a Segway scooter, and one pops into existence under his feet. Baruchel goes bigger - he wants the Backstreet Boys in concert. Sure enough, the boy band marches in and rocks the heavenlies with a rousing performance of "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)". The party is on, and presumably all live happily forever after.
But do they? I want to see what that heaven looks like a day or two later. Maybe even 15 minutes later, when all are weary of getting whatever they want and find that they are bored out of their minds.
Alice Sebold seems to understand this. In her 2002 bestseller The Lovely Bones, the young teenage protagonist Suzie Salmon is murdered and goes to heaven. She finds that her heaven overlaps with, but is not identical to, other people's heavens. That is because everyone is getting whatever they want. So, for example, in her heavenly high school Suzie only goes to art class and her textbooks are Seventeen, Glamour and Vogue. The ice cream shop always has her favorite flavor. "Do you like it here?" a friend asks. "No," she answers. "Me either." After five days they complain to their intake counselor that they are bored. In fact, the Gladwellian happiness (if I may call it such) of Suzie's heaven makes it such a crushingly dull place that she spends pretty much the rest of the book just spying on her friends and family back on earth.
Though Sebold perceives that satisfied desires don't make you happy (at least not for long), it seems to me that she is unwilling to abandon the idea entirely. It just needs to be tinkered with, delved into a bit more deeply, extended. The problem is that you don't really know what you want. As Suzie's counselor in heaven explains, "All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why - really know - it will come." That is, your basic notion that satisfied desire will bring you joy is not flawed. It does work, but you will have to go on a pilgrim journey of self-discovery to know what your deepest desires truly are.
C. S. Lewis would have none of that. In his fantasy novel The Great Divorce, he makes the place where departed souls get whatever they want not heaven but hell. Early in the book, a businessman explains to the first-person narrator why Hell-Town is so big. "You see, it's easy here. You've only got to think a house and there it is. That's how the town keeps on growing." He laments this fact. "The trouble is they have no Needs...It's scarcity that enables a society to exist." His plan to remedy the problem involves taking a trip to heaven on the regularly-scheduled flying bus so that he can bring back goodies that even hell can't conjure up. Read the book to see why his scheme must fail. The businessman still regards the granting of desire as an ultimate solution to the problem that he (or society) is facing. But the mere satisfaction of a desire for some New Thing (maybe heaven has it!) will get him no closer to the goal.
Rev. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan likes to tweak ambitious young professionals regarding their illusion that if they can just make enough money, marry the right person and gain renown in their field that they will be happy. "No you won't," says Keller. He quotes from a 1990 essay written by Village Voice columnist Cynthia Heimel, who knew some major celebrities back when they were busing tables and washing dishes. They thirsted for stardom, and a select few actually got it. She writes, "They worked, they pushed, and the morning after each of them became famous, they wanted to take an overdose. Because that giant thing they were striving for, that something that was going to make everything okay, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment and happiness, had happened. And they were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable." Heimel's conclusion is one of the darkest zingers you will ever read: "I think when God wants to play a really rotten practical joke on you, he grants you your deepest wish and giggles merrily when you realize you want to kill yourself."
That kind of cynicism is at least 3,000 years old. Much of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes strikes me as a rambling suicide note from a man who got everything he ever wanted. King Solomon had the time and wherewithal to pursue the satisfaction of every desire, and after gratifying all of them, concluded that life was empty.
What I find particularly compelling about Solomon's quest for happiness is that he pursued the fulfillment of different types of desires. Pleasure, for example: “I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem as well — the delights of a man’s heart.” But he concludes, “Laughter is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?”
So he seeks happiness in the fulfillment of Purpose: “I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.” That does not work either: “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind.”
Realizing that his mistake was in focusing on externals, he decides what he really wants is the life of the mind. “I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,” he writes. But it's another dead end: “The making of many books is endless, and much study is a weariness of the flesh,” and “with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.” Solomon drew up a variety of bucket lists, checked off every item, and found that despite everything “I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind." The testimony of the ages seems to be that neither earth nor pop-culture heaven nor Purpose nor the vast resource of our own minds seems to have whatever it is we're looking for.
Here I believe is the reason for the spoiled expectations of Gladwell's coffee, Rogen's and Sebold's heaven, Lewis' hell, Hollywood stardom, and Solomon's riches. In each case, the satisfaction of a desire has been elevated to an Absolute. As such, it is made to do work it can never fulfill. We want the fuel of desire to speed us to the stars when it cannot even burst us free from the gravity of earth.
Note what is conspicuously missing from Rogen's and Sebold's heavens. Neither has a true Absolute. In these wish-fulfillment paradises there is nothing that doesn't change, that cannot be altered by our desires. There is nothing that just Is, that remains forever Itself, that cannot be adjusted or wished into or out of existence. In these popular conceptions of bliss, shape-shifting heaven conforms to us. Essentially, that makes us the God of heaven. And deep within, we know that that is a throne upon which we cannot sit. A satisfied desire is certainly a good thing. But when we elevate it to an Ultimate thing, a thing "greater than which none can be conceived", it is quickly unmasked as an unworthy pretender to Deity, and the sign of that unmasking is existential despair. We become, in Heimel's words, "howling and insufferable".
St. Paul levels an intriguing charge against sinners in Philippians 3:19 when he says, "Their god is their stomach." I don't believe he means they are merely gluttonous. "Stomach" here stands for desire, and "their god" is that which is, to them, their Absolute, their Driving Force, That Which Commands And Must Be Obeyed. These are people who cannot conceive of a happiness greater than getting what they want, and so all their mortal energies are directed toward that end.
It is a dead end. While gratified wishes are not bad, they are not Ultimate, and must never be treated as such. Only when the satisfaction of desire is dethroned as a god can it be embraced as a gift. Happiness is indeed a gift, and, like all gifts, derives from a Giver. Acknowledge him, worship him, give thanks to him, submit your will to his. "Will I be happy then?" you ask. Ah, there's the problem. First things first. You must learn to value something above and beyond your own happiness.
