A Push for Better Happiness/Purpose Models

Know the well-being skill that grows stronger as your life purpose reaches completion.

There is an older adult I fear becoming. You know him. A kid’s soccer ball rolls onto his lawn and he carries it inside and he keeps it because he is the curmudgeon. I confessed this fear to a guy named Harry during a week in a Florida community with quite a lot of senior citizens (some who forget it is not 1967).

Harry told me that there is another path to being an old man, and mentioned his father….

Peter Bandy is 102. He lives in a memory care community in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where a stroke has made starting a conversation hard for him. The aides who bring him pudding see an wrinkled man in a chair. Eighty years before the pudding, that man was a waist gunner on a B-17 with the 303rd Bomb Group, flying out of Molesworth, England.

Flesh out an image of your worst office job. Now cut a rectangular hole in the wall, remove the wall, drop the temperature to fifty below, and station men in fighter planes whose only job is to kill you through the hole. The waist gunner stood at that open window at 25,000 feet holding a .50 caliber machine gun while flak bloomed around the formation in little black puffs capable of erasing the man beside him. Peter did this 35 times and finished his tour in October of 1944, and the Army gave him a Distinguished Flying Cross (his crew photo survives, nine of them squinting into English daylight, Peter seated dead center in the front row, one of their planes named Thunderbird - link).

We forget that a man dozing through Wheel of Fortune was once 22 and hanging halfway out of an airplane over occupied Europe. Wind him back far enough and he is somebody you would have wanted sitting shot gun and you drove around town at night with the cops chasing you, somebody you might have loved. The ball-confiscating curmudgeon and the war hero and the grandfather asleep in the recliner are one continuous person.

Resist forgetting the younger versions of elders. We will want the same attitude adjustment years from now.

Which returns me to the lawn. Underneath my fear of it sits a darker assumption, that vitality is the fuel of the young lad and laddess. That happiness runs on novelty and the slow stacking of accomplishments, and once the stacking stops and the work is finished and the kids are launched, the tank runs dry. By that arithmetic Peter at 102 should be coasting on fumes.

Savoring is the deliberate act of catching a good moment and stretching it. Holding the chocolate on your tongue instead of swallowing immediately. In a month-long diary study, people felt happier on the days they savored their small pleasures, and the lift was biggest for the people built to savor by temperament (link). Fine. Noticing nice things is nice, which surprises nobody. Stay with me as I’m going to walk you through far more sophisticated scientific findings…

Because a study asked whether savoring pays off most for people whose lives hold the fewest good things. The financially impoverished. Stress mongers. When pleasant events were everywhere, the ability to savor barely moved the needle on life satisfaction. When pleasant events were scarce, savoring kept a strained person afloat (link). The fewer pleasures coming through your door, the more each rides on your skill at tasting it.

The flip side is that money, the prize we chase through our striving years, sabotages the ability to savor. Wealthier adults score lower on it. In one experiment, researchers showed people a photo of a fat stack of cash and then handed them a piece of chocolate. The cash group chewed faster and enjoyed it less, like they had somewhere better to be (link). A photo of money was enough to ruin a chocolate.

So the people best built to savor turn out to be the ones we pity. A four-year study of 4,491 adults averaging 82 years old found the high savorers held more life satisfaction and fewer depressive symptoms, and that savoring softened the slide in well-being that age usually enforces (link).

Peter spent his first eighty years building war missions, and a marriage, and some kids. The construction finished a long time ago. The buildings are up and the materials are all in storage for someone else’s use. Whether the last act comes out rich or hollow rides on one skill, whether he can still taste a good moment inside the finished building.

You can train this before the recliner claims you, while a hundred competing pleasures are still dulling your palate . Pick a plain good thing today and refuse to let it pass without contemplation. And when the soccer ball rolls onto your lawn, remember that you are choosing which old man you evolve into. Hand the ball back. Better, kick it back, shank it into the hedges, and let the kids laugh at the grown man who tried.

Peter chose decades ago. On a recent morning his brother Theodore asked him would you like to go to McDonald’s? There is a Quarter Pounder with your name on it.

Peter smiled. Eighty years after the flak, the kid in the center of the WWII photograph knows what elicits great joy/vitality/satisfaction. Go want something that small today.

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Todd B. Kashdan is the author of several books including The Upside of Your Dark Side (Penguin) and The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively (Avery/Penguin) and Professor of Psychology and Founder of The Well-Being Laboratory at George Mason University.

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