For a chapter in his book Better Living (a title used with a measure of irony), Kingwell makes a week-long visit to The Option Institute and Fellowship, a personal-development institution in Sheffield, MA unique among its peers in its explicit focus on the elusive condition of happiness. The whole chapter, all 54 pages of it, is delightfully snarky, more than a little hilarious, and characteristically insightful.
You will have to read the book if you want the snarky and hilarious parts, but I will share a portion of his conclusion from the week:
About the only wisdom I gleaned from the week’s exercises, and this happened outside of class, was a valuable reminder that happiness is not, as we tend to think, a prize to capture: not a condition to reach, a peak to scale. The attainment rhetoric that leads people back to the shopping mall every weekend, or into desperate flights about jobs, money, peak experiences and multiple sexual partners, just pathologizes happiness.
Happiness does come from within, but that doesn’t mean it’s a choice. Happiness comes from within in the sense that it is a matter of rational satisfaction with your character and actions, a mental and moral condition—hard-edged, lucky, demanding and fragile. And there are no shortcuts—no twelve-step programs, no courses of therapy or drugs, no purchasing plans or career strategies—to that. It is not a place to get to, it is a state of mind and character to cultivate.
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I was curious to find out more about the characters in the chapter, so I visited the Option Institute website, where I was greeted by this amazing banner:
And here is the founder, “Bears,” talking about happiness being a choice:
I love how he ends it (another idea that Kingwell dismantles in the book): “I’d rather be happy than right.”
(And if you enjoyed that video, here is another one you might like. The first 20 seconds are great.)
