Declare Your Independence—From Misery

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

On this day, Americans celebrate one of the most famous statements on happiness ever made: the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that there is an “unalienable right” to the “pursuit of happiness.” The Founders talked a lot about happiness, in fact, and much of their thinking reaches us today through their personal correspondence and other writings.

As a happiness specialist, I have always been puzzled by something about this early-American happiness advice. It almost always seems defined in the negative, focusing on what to abstain from or avoid in life and on the need to moderate natural urges. Finally, it dawned on me that, as wise as they were, the Founders were mixing up getting happier with minimizing the sources of unhappiness.

This distinction is not hair-splitting. As I have written previously, negative and positive emotions are separable and measurable. (You can take a test of your own levels here to see where your greater challenge resides.) In fact, it is fair to say that the early American philosophy is not about learning how to enjoy life, find satisfaction, or discover life’s meaning. It is about clearing away the self-imposed sources of misery that make pursuing happiness difficult or impossible.

Today is a good day to look at a few of the lessons embedded in this important distinction. If your unhappiness is higher than it should be, or if you feel you are getting in your own way too much, this 248-year-old wisdom might be just what you’re looking for.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The meaning of life is surprisingly simple]

A useful approach to understanding the attitudes of America’s Founders toward well-being can be found in Jeffrey Rosen’s new book, The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. Rosen shows that these men believed that well-being came from tranquility of mind, and that self-management and avoidance of temptations was the way to achieve this tranquility. Further, they believed that successful self-government relies on personal self-government. In other words, a prerequisite for a successful country is that we individually avail ourselves of our unalienable right—although today’s America has a more inclusive and expansive notion of who has such rights than the Founders envisioned.

In their various writings, the Founders went into considerable detail about how precisely to do this. Over and over, they emphasized how important were the stumbling blocks that come from human excess and egotistical tendencies. These primal urges might give us a short-term edge in survival or gene propagation but, they feared, would also lead to turbulence, conflict, and insecurity. Here are four examples drawn from their work.

1. Curb your appetites.
No survey of American wisdom could skip over the legendary aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin, who composed one of the most famous self-improvement books in history in the form of his autobiography. “To Temperance he ascribes his long-continued health,” he writes (referring to himself in the third person), and “to Industry and Frugality,” he attributes “the early easiness of his circumstances and acquisition of his fortune.” This could easily be interpreted as Franklin advising that good health and economic prosperity are secrets to happiness. In fact, he is asserting the negative: that poor health due to excess and poverty from wasteful spending are avoidable sources of misery.

Franklin was spot on. To begin with, many sorts of intemperance are associated with unhappiness. For example, in the past, nearly 64 percent of alcohol-dependent people have been found to be depressed. No doubt, many depressed people self-medicate with alcohol, but the evidence suggests that the causality generally works in reverse: Excessive drinking provokes the depression. And regarding money, much evidence shows that going into particular types of deep debt can lead to depression and anxiety. In other words, managing your vices is protective against unhappiness.

[David Frum: The other July 4]

2. Don’t think you’re so great.
The Founders would definitely disapprove of our cult of self-esteem, which aims to bolster motivation and confidence through affirmations of one’s own excellence. John Adams, in particular, had harsh words for excessive egotism, in no small part because he was acutely aware that this was his personal Achilles’ heel, which held him back as a statesman. “Oh! that I could … conquer my natural Pride and Self Conceit,” he wrote in his private diary. “How happy should I then be.” Adams was correct in his self-assessment—as Rosen notes, he was widely pilloried “as one of the most self-regarding men of his age.”

Greater humility might have made Adams happier, but it certainly would have helped him be less unhappy, according to research by psychologists published in 2016. In a sample of more than 3,000 Americans, the researchers found that personal humility—learning from others, acknowledging one’s limitations, being excited at the success of a friend—strongly predicts lower levels of anxiety and depression. The authors also noted that the mechanism behind this is that humility moderates the ill-effect of stressful life events.

3. Avoid idleness.
The Founders were high-achieving types—none more so than Thomas Jefferson, who was simultaneously a statesman, a diplomat, a lawyer, an architect, and a philosopher. His pursuit of happiness—or, rather, his avoidance of misery—focused on avoiding idleness, and he clearly believed that the formula worked for everyone. As he wrote in a 1787 letter to his daughter Martha, “A mind always employed is always happy.” But then he clarified: “The idle are the only wretched.”

Scholars have inquired into boredom over the years, with mixed findings. On the one hand, being bored can prompt a person to reflect on life in useful ways. On the other hand, ennui may be associated with poor productivity, bad mental health, even physical problems. But when it comes to idleness, as opposed to boredom—that is: having nothing to do, or experiencing low engagement in tasks at hand—Jefferson was clearly right. Being idle is associated with depression, as well as loss of control and competence. We can overcompensate and make ourselves too busy to avoid idleness, and that is also a danger for well-being. But staying occupied with meaningful tasks is a guard against misery.

4. Shun the limelight.
If you are at all in the public eye, and no matter how virtuous you are, one idol is almost irresistible: fame. In The Federalist Papers (“No. 72”), Alexander Hamilton calls the desire for recognition “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” But a miserable passion it is, leading to frustration. Indeed, more than a century earlier, the poet John Milton observed that fame leads those who strive for great things to “scorn delights and live laborious days.”

Celebrity, like other earthly rewards such as wealth and power, seems desirable possibly because of an evolutionary imperative to survive and pass on our genes, which is easier to do when one has higher status in a community. But that urge is anachronistic in a more advanced, globalized world, where “fame” means simply being known by millions of strangers—which has little utility in evolutionary terms. Still, the urge persists—and can even be called a form of addiction today, one that leads, as addictions generally do, to misery.

[Read: The best Fourth of July movie: ‘Independence Day,’ obviously]

The Founders’ broader message is clear: The independence we seek as people with a God-given right to pursue our happiness goes beyond freedom from an external tyrant such as King George III. True independence involves release from the subjugation of personal urges and weaknesses. We must stand up to our destructive desires to spend more than we have, to drink more than we should, to admire our own image, to fritter away our time, to seek the admiration of others.

George Washington summarized this adroitly in a letter to his mother: “Happiness depends more upon the internal frame of a persons own mind—than on the externals in the world.” Indeed, to follow and honor the Founders, a good way to celebrate this Independence Day might just be to declare yourself independent of the inner tyrant that wants to subjugate you to your unhappy impulses.