There is a swing on the path that leads up and over the headland from the village of Nazare. This is me on that swing last month. Happy.
We watched the first episode of the two-part Apple documentary on Steve Martin, which charts his early life through the development of his stand-up act, his early forays into television and movies and which ends in 1980 when he walked away from stand-up comedy, as he puts it, jumps off the train of stand up and onto the train of movies.
During the 15 years in which he developed and honed his act, he kept detailed notes about his experience and many of those diaries are shown in the documentary. Lovely notes and remarks about what worked and what didn’t, how he was feeling, the goals he set for himself and what he was learning as he tried to build a new approach to comedy on the shoulders of those who inspired him. It is very interesting to see how many of his bits are interpretations of bits by comedians working in the 1940s, 1950s and early 1960s.
Some of those notes deal with existential questions and in one he makes a note to the effect of “what if happiness is not the end, but rather the work is the end.” It was during this period I think that he started to develop gratitude that he could just do the work he is doing and not focus on happiness as an outcome. The trailer for the second part of the document seems to make this pursuit of happiness a big part of the story so I’m looking forward to that.
But that little throwaway line kind of lodged with me. Lots of my work is immensely satisfying in its own right, even when it’s challenging. I get to travel around and work with a huge diversity of issues and people. It feeds the way my brain works to be doing a bunch of different things, even though I sometimes can’t keep them all straight.
The work is the end. Happiness is generally there too. Are they related? Do they need to be?
What’s your take?
I agree with your two points; that the documentary is interesting and well done, and that the satisfaction of work like yours is the process of being in the doing of it.
Hi Chris: Thanks for this. I’m partway through the first part of the doc and it is amazing. I just love Steve Martin. My experience tells me that the pursuit of happiness on its own is not fruitful. The times I am most happy is when I’m engaged in something else – and I realize how happy I am. Like when my eldest daughter rode her bicycle for the first time without training wheels
Victor Frankl captured this thought:
“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication…In the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
The work itself might indeed be the “end”; the joy of the work enough.
Thanks Chris
Kari
I recently heard a great take on the relationship between joy and happiness somewhere in social media land that resonated with me. “Joy is an inner feeling; happiness is an outward expression. Joy plows through hardships while connecting you with meaning. That’s why you can have joy without feeling happy. Think of it like this: joy is the foundation that the flag pole called happiness is cemented in. That flag of happiness can go up and down while it’s cemented in joy.”
For me, the work is joyful and provides moments of joy. Sometimes there’s a lot of happiness associated with it; other times not so much. The joy of the work connects me to meaning – in fact, the joy of it reveals and uncoverrs the meaning of it. Happiness is really besides the point.
There’s a concept in Alexander Technique called “end-gaining”, where you attempt to get to the desired outcome by seeking it in the most direct way possible (to “gain the desired end”) and in doing so undermine the possibility of realizing it (https://sparkmotionbody.com/blog/end-gaining-what-it-is-why-you-should-be-aware-of-it/). My go-to embodied example of that is posture. If you try to intentionally put your body into the shape you understand as “good posture” (notice right now if in reading the word “posture” you made subtle movements in your body to enforce and impose this “correct” shape and positioning), you will not achieve good posture, because “good posture” is not a single fixed position or shape. Rather what actually functions as good posture is mindful and good use of the self in dynamic movement which happens not through conscious, constantly monitored engineering of the body but the ability to be free and open in one’s movements without effortfully micromanaging them. I was so surprised when after a year of Alexander training, people would stop me in the street to comment on how good my posture was. A personal trainer did an assessment of my standing posture and had literally no notes. Never once did my Alexander teacher and I set out to give me good posture. Rather, we worked on, in Alexander style, increasing my body awareness, releasing entrained patterns of movement built up from childhood, and increasing my freedom to mindfully allow my whole self to organize toward ease and freedom of movement. Good old-fashioned complexity practice.
It’s also known in the evaluation world as Campbell’s Law (“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor”) and Goodhart’s Law (“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”). The more we try to engineer a complex outcome directly, the more we can subvert our very purposes in pursuing it, where pursuing the more proximal end (of purposeful work, of freer and more easeful movement) as our main goal can, if other conditions are also met, allow the more distal end to emerge. Or as Kari put it, through Victor Frankl’s words, “success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”
Fantastic….worthy of a blog post of its own. Snowden often uses to cobra story from India where, in an effort to get rid of cobras, the English governors put a bounty on their heads. What ended up happening is that people started breeding cobras in order to get the bounty. When the English governors found out about it, they stopped paying out the bounty and the Indian cobra farmers just let their cobra go and in the end, there were more snakes than in the beginning.