Collective effervescence is an eye-catching name for the magic of shared experience and moving in unison. As described by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, it picks out those times when people come together in synchrony for an experience that's different and often greater than those you can have alone.

It might be gathering and singing at a music festival, swaying to the music as one being at a concert, experiencing the wonder of nature together, when the crowd erupts together as a goal goes in and hugging the person next to you, taking a yoga or spinning class, worshipping together, the pilgrimage to Mecca, or that magical Shawshank Redemption moment listening to the duet from The Marriage of Figaro as one. Despite my feeble clarinet skills, I remember a brief goosebump feeling when the school orchestra played it all correctly. And I remember my hair standing up when Twickenham Stadium carried Swing Low, Sweet Chariot in unison.

Collective effervescence is something we missed during the pandemic. It was identified in Dacher Keltner's book Awe as one of the 8 Wonders of Life.

Also see: forest bathing, notice when you're happy, 5 ways to wellbeing

Collective effervescence

Don't compare your back-of-house with others' front-of-house.

Usually, we only see others' front-of-house, and because we know all about our own house it's easy to find ourselves comparing how we're doing in the back with how others are doing in the front. Often a recipe for unhappiness.

I remember wondering how a friend was so calm before their first child. They said, "I'm like a duck, calm on the surface, but underneath my legs are kicking like crazy."

The truth is we don't know how others are doing so best not be comparing at all.

This idea is inspired by an exercise about the hidden parts of parenting from The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Philippa Perry, though I'm pretty sure as a metaphor it can be quite widely applied.

Front of house, back of house

To feel great joy we have to be ready to feel vulnerable. I found this counterintuitive. As Brené Brown shares, if we can't tolerate joy, if we're not open to being vulnerable, we can find ourselves dress-rehearsing tragedy — when things are at their best we might be telling ourselves that it won't last, we don't deserve it, something will go wrong. An antidote to this she says is to practise gratitude. Be thankful and appreciative of what we have.

For a lightweight intro to some of Brené Brown's work you could do worse than spend an hour watching The Call to Courage on Netflix.

Also see: Hope and Listening with passion

Joy and vulnerability

Meh. Blah. Can't be bothered? Not excited about the future? Perhaps you're languishing.

Adam Grant's NYT article, There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing, resonated with so many people as the coronavirus pandemic drew on. While not having a mental illness or being clinically depressed, many of us associated with a general stagnation or apathy towards things — an absence of, or poor, mental health. Languishing is a counterpoint to how we might feel in prime mental health, full of wellbeing or Flourishing.

While languishing may not be necessarily dangerous in itself, if you're languishing you may be at higher risk of mental illness.

Naming our state can be a first step to doing something about it

Looking for small wins that show us progress

Asking how our friends and family are doing — having the opportunity to speak to someone about it

You also might consider working on the 5 Ways to Wellbeing, getting in some forest bathing, walking a labyrinth, aiming for some flow, noticing when you're happy, or seeing what might bring you hope.

The term languishing for that part of the mental health continuum is from Corey Keyes. See for example, Corey L. M. Keyes. “The Mental Health Continuum: From Languishing to Flourishing in Life.”Journal of Health and Social Behavior, vol. 43, no. 2, 2002, pp. 207–222.

Armchair and inspiration, as usual, from Bill Watterson.

Languishing

Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life.  

"What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy."

When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity.

When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself.

Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist:

When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive.

By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD.

I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV.

The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work.

Flow

Some simple wisdom from Kurt Vonnegut: notice when you’re happy.

“My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important.

He said that when things were really going well, we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.

Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is”

"So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

More on well-being? Here are 5 ways to wellbeing

If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is

Ah, that satisfying, superior, at once gleeful and slightly sinful feeling when the aggressive driver that overtook you gets his comeuppance and gets flashed by a speed camera. That feeling is Schadenfreude, a nifty German word made up of schaden for damage, harm or hurt and freude for joy. Taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes.

I hadn’t thought much of it before reading some excerpts from Tiffany Watt Smith’s book Schadenfreude. She makes the compelling case to examine the moments where we feel superior at another’s expense as a small window into ourselves. A little twinge of joy when a colleague doesn’t get a promotion might reveal your jealousy of their situation or a deep-down resentment of unfairness. If the person who pushed in front of you in the queue drops their ice cream straight after buying it, your secret twinge of joy might be a sense of justice and equity for obeying the rules when they didn’t. Schadenfreude can be a little boost to your own self-esteem.

For a mini-intro, try Tiffany Watt Smith’s TED Ideas article: Do you secretly feel good when others stumble? 5 ways to make peace with this very human emotion.

Schadenfreude

A beautiful Japanese word for the acquiring and piling up of books without reading them. Constructed from 2 words loosely meaning piling up and reading.

The sketch is loosely based on my parents’ bedroom while I grew up, both of whom are experienced and talented tsundoku-ers/tsundokists.

Tsundoku

I assumed fun is all the same. Fun is fun. But then, when I first heard about Type I and Type II fun, I had to admit there was some validity in there being different types of fun.

Type 1 fun is like eating ice cream, or skiing with ski lifts to whisk you back up to the top — you love it while you’re doing it, and when you think back on it you remember how good it was. Straightforward— sounds like fun.

Type 2 fun, on the other hand, is the sort of enjoyment you get from something like running a marathon or climibing a mountain. You often have to admit that it wasn’t necessarily all fun at the time. In fact, it could have been quite hard and might have hurt a bit (like the swimrun event I did last weekend). But when you look back on it, you think of it as often more fun and fulfilling than the Type I fun.

Type 3 fun is usually type 1 or 2 fun that went wrong. Though it was supposed to be fun, things actually got a little hairy – like you got lost, or it got dark, and it got cold, or you had to be rescued — but…it sure makes a great story when you make it back.

HT: my brother shared this with me having learned it from his mountain guide doing classic Type II fun.

The fun scale

I love this term. From the Japanese shinrin-yoku, it means to soak in the atmosphere of a forest. And I think it’s not too far of an overstatement to say that a walk in Nature is about the closest to a miracle cure we have. There appear to be myriad benefits from simply spending time in Nature. As my sister put it, if it was a drug we’d be prescribing it.

Though we didn’t call it forest bathing at the time it’s definitely some of my happiest memories, like here, here, here, here, and here.

Forest bathing

People in the last year of a decade, say, 29, 39, 49, 59, are known as 9-enders — a term from Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield. While it could have been that one year is kind of like the next year, Adam and Hal propose that as we approach the end of a decade we are more likely to do a kind of meaning audit of our lives. And in the years just before the end of a decade, if we may have fallen short, or feel there’s something else we want to accomplish, we’re much more likely to do it then than in any other year of a decade.

In practice, as Dan Pink shared in his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, these are, therefore, the times when we’re more likely to do something extreme like running a marathon for the first time and, sadly, also committing suicide.

Read more in Dan Pink’s Atlantic article: You’re Most Likely to Do Something Extreme Right Before You Turn 30, Dan Pink, The Atlantic

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Dan Pink

People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age, PNAS, vol. 111 no. 48, Alter and Hershfield, 2014.

9-Enders

Update: for times when you really need to remember a password I still like this technique, for all other times — which is to say, ideally every time — I suggest using a password manager. Use a password manager to generate unique passwords for every service so long and complex that you couldn't possibly be bothered to type it and that will force you to always use the manager instead.

However, for the few passwords that you can't avoid typing they might as well remind you of something good. I have found this makes me happier.

Choose passwords that make you happy

Buy experiences instead of things. Help others instead of yourself. Buy many small pleasures instead of a few big ones. Drawn directly from the excellently entitled paper:

If money doesn’t make you happy then you probably aren’t spending it right. Dunn, Gilbert, Wilson, 2011.

Sketchplanations tagged with happiness