Letters to My Granddaughter on Happiness: How It's Achieved and Its Critical Role in a Fulfilling Life

By Jim Geiwitz, Ph.D.

Letters to My Granddaughter on Happiness: How It's Achieved and Its Critical Role in a Fulfilling Life provides scientifically validated instructions that will enable you to live a life of happiness and joy. Additional benefits include an increase in productivity and creativity, a surprising increase in social attractiveness, parenting skills to raise happy and creative children, and knowledge of how to live a life of virtue the only life worth living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Apr 7, 2023
• ISBN: 9780228869092

Jim Geiwitz, Ph.D.

JIM GEIWITZ was educated at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, and earned his PhD in psychology at the University of Michigan. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Stanford University, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published 13 books on motivation and emotion, including the highly acclaimed Adult Development and Aging with K. Warner Schaie.

Book preview

Letters to My Granddaughter on Happiness

How It’s Achieved and Its Critical Role in a Fulfilling Life

Jim Geiwitz, Ph.D.

Letters to My Granddaughter on Happiness

Copyright © 2023 by James Geiwitz, Ph.D.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-6910-8 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-6909-2 (eBook)

Dedication

To Betsy Miklethun, my cousin,

who practiced the jubilation procedures all her life and,

as a result, she and all her friends and others

with whom she interacted led very happy lives.

PREFACE

This book is one which tries to answer many questions, the primary one being why are so many people unhappy?

I had studied and researched these questions as an experimental psychologist for several years. On Happiness: Letters to my Granddaughter addresses and answers these questions and many more on the topic of happiness – how to become happy, remain happy, and help your friends be happy as well.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I had the help of a number of talented friends who knew a lot about happiness (and writing about it) including my copy editor, Margaret Devenny, my technical editor, Dr. Leslie Pitchford, who evaluated the research in the book, and Cindy Young, who helped with many practical questions of style, thereby enhancing the structure of On Happiness: Letters to my Granddaughter.

Table of Contents

LETTER 1

SEEKING HAPPINESS

LETTER 2

ELIMINATING SUFFERING

Conclusions about pain after 50 years of study

The mind of clear light

LETTER 3

HOW TO ELIMINATE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS (PART ONE)

Counterconditioning

Rational control

Cognitive control

Miscellaneous methods to control your thoughts

LETTER 4

HOW TO ELIMINATE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS (PART TWO)

1. Relaxation

2. Meditation

3. Biofeedback

4. If you’re cranky, take a nap

5. Turn off the stimulus

6. Take drugs

LETTER 5

HOW TO ELIMINATE NEGATIVE EMOTIONS (PART THREE)

Best Techniques for specific emotions

Rejecting help – anger

Rejecting help – fear

Using praise instead of punishment

LETTER 6

HAPPINESS: FAKE IT ’TIL YOU MAKE IT

The great circle of life

How to become a kind and loving person

Digression 6.1 - My goals in life

Act as if you were a kind and loving person

Don’t forget yourself!

LETTER 7

HOW TO CREATE AND APPRECIATE BEAUTY

Learn to create

Digression 7.1 - Is boredom the opposite of happiness?

Learn to appreciate

Digression 7.2 - Do you have trouble falling asleep?

LETTER 8

HAPPINESS IS A SKILL

How to enjoy potentially enjoyable experiences

Learn to enjoy your work as it is

Digression 8.1 - How to solve problems in general

Self-efficacy: The key to emotional control.

LETTER 9

THE JOY OF SCIENCE

The scientific method

Digression 9.1 - The attack of the coronavirus

The power of longitudinal research

Figure 9.1 - Cross-sectional vs. longitudinal studies

The moral of the story

LETTER 10

THE JOY OF CRITICAL THINKING (DIALECTIC AS METHOD)

Dialectical Philosophy

Figure 10.1 - Increasing knowledge by means of dialectical reasoning

Conflict and Resolution

Dialectical Psychology

A summary of dialectical psychology

LETTER 11

THE JOY OF DIALECTIC

Writing, humor, music, painting, sculpture, and science as dialectical processes

The joy of the dialectic

Joy as a dialectical process

Figure 11.1 - Joy as a dialectical process

She loves me, she loves me not…

Joy is based on sex

The Jubilation Procedures as Dialectical Processes

JUBILATION PROCEDURE I

JUBILATION PROCEDURE II

JUBILATION PROCEDURE III

LETTER 12

USING HAPPINESS SKILLS AT WORK

Create beauty

Make it challenging

The Social Aspects of Work

Love your coworkers

Digression 12.1 - Dale Carnegie

LETTER 13

USING HAPPINESS SKILLS AT SCHOOL

Solving Problems

The Social Aspects of Education

Love Your Fellow Students

LETTER 14

USING HAPPINESS SKILLS AT HOME

Learn a Skill

Create a Jubilant Personal Life

Sadness and Badness

Digression 14.1 - How to enjoy being robbed

Children

Friends

Self

LETTER 15

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS HAPPINESS?

What is Happiness?

A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

The Worst Sin Passion Can Commit Is To Be Joyless

Joy Cometh in the Morning

Joy in the Virtuous Life

LETTER 16

THE ROOTS OF JOY

Joy as a Reward

The roots of joy

Creation and Appreciation of Beauty

Research on joy I

Jubilation Procedure III

Loving Relationships

Research on joy II

Jubilation Procedures I and II

LETTER 17

CURIOSITY AND ENTHUSIASM

Curiosity

Enthusiasm and zest for life

LETTER 18

DIFFERENT KINDS OF HAPPINESS

Sensory pleasures

Amusement

Excitement

Relief

Wonder

Ecstasy

Naches

Elevation

Gratitude

Schadenfreude.

RECOGNIZING ENJOYMENT IN OTHERS

Smiles

Laughter

The development of joy in children

LETTER 19A

WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO BE HAPPY

Happiness Activities:

1. Expressing gratitude

2. Cultivating optimism

3. Avoiding overthinking and social comparison

4. Practicing acts of kindness.

5. Nurturing social relationships.

6. Developing strategies for coping

LETTER 19B

WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO BE HAPPY

7. Learning to forgive

8. Increasing flow experiences.

9. Savoring life’s joys.

10. Committing to your goals.

11. Practicing religion and spirituality

12. Taking care of your body (meditation)

12b. Taking care of your body (physical activity)

12c. Taking care of your body (acting like a happy person)

LETTER 20

THE COUNTRY THAT VALUES HAPPINESS MORE THAN WEALTH

The gross national happiness index

Would you rather be happy or rich?

LETTER 21

HAPPINESS OR WELLBEING?

Strengths and virtues

Happiness vs. Wellbeing

…in conclusion

LETTER 22

WELLBEING VS INCOME

GDP vs GNH.

The vital signs of Greater Victoria

Wellbeing vs. Happiness, redux

LETTER 23

LIFE’S MOST IMPORTANT SKILL

Life’s most important skill

Pain, suffering, and unhappiness.

Suffering

Notes on desire, hatred, envy, and freedom.

Happiness, compassion, and altruism

Ethics as the science of happiness

LETTER 24

HAPPINESS’S MOST IMPORTANT SKILL: EMPATHY

How does empathy affect happiness?

How I learned empathy

Other ways to learn empathy

Mind-blindness, mind-sighted; system-blindness, system-sighted.

Problem solving and conflict resolution

Happiness and empathy

LETTER 25

HOW HAPPY ARE YOU?

A test of happiness.

Summary of the jubilation procedures

LETTER 26

THE BOOK ENDS, THE JOURNEY BEGINS

The Journey So Far

The Journey Ahead

Happiness dominates

Write your own obituary

References

LETTER 1

SEEKING HAPPINESS

Dear Kelly Jane,

As far as I can tell, I have always had the desire to be happy and not depressed. Old letters, written in high school or college, describe my efforts to discover the secret of happiness, and life-long friends tell me that we have had numerous discussions of happiness and how to attain it. I don’t think I’m far off normal in this regard; certainly, my friends entered the discussions fervently and with their own desires for a happy life. Breathes there a soul so twisted that it does not want joy?

I believe that the very purpose of our life is to seek happiness. This is the first sentence in The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama.

For most of my life, the quest for joy was conducted in intellectual bull sessions with my friends. In our personal lives, we were usually depressed. From time to time, an approach would surface – Norman Vincent Peale and positive thinking, Abraham Maslow and self-actualization – and some of us would try it. Like fat people trying new diets, we found temporary increases in the state we desired, but we always slid back into unhappiness. The sixties brought a whole decade of attempts to find joy – est (Erhard Seminars Training), Esalen, the human potential movement, not to mention a variety of drugs, notably marijuana and LSD. I and my friends tried several of these approaches, but the result was always the same: at most, temporary satisfaction. A psychologist, Will Schutz, wrote a book entitled Joy, which I read and enjoyed. (His was one of the few books that told you HOW to become joyful; the methods, such as encounter groups, were weak, however, and did not work for me.)

The hippies of the sixties were defined by their selfish desire to drop out, lay back, and enjoy life. But I was a member of the other large group of the sixties, the social activists, and I couldn’t understand how the hippies could seek happiness in the face of so much social injustice. The hippies and the activists finally came together, however, in their mutual abhorrence of the Vietnam war, and we became friends. We finally got the US out of Vietnam (or so we thought), which was the ultimate joy. And we nailed Nixon, too. So I remember the sixties as a time of joy, more than anything else, but I came out of it without the resources to maintain joy. Then came Reagan and the Dark Ages of American politics and American life.

The quest for joy became more personal and less social. I am a psychologist by profession; sometimes I think I became a psychologist as part of my quest for a means to live a joyful life. In the seventies, the Me decade, I began to work out a personal philosophy that would enable me to be happy – my social activism, like that of many of my friends, unfortunately declined. I got married, bought a house, produced a son (your father), settled down – the sources of true happiness, according to Bertrand Russell. The hormones of youth began their decline, and this too made me a happier person, for these hormones produce a lot of frustration, especially when you are as sexually unattractive as I felt at the time. Recently I discovered a letter I had written to a dear friend who was about to give it up and off himself. I don’t want to commit suicide, he cried into my telephone at 3 a.m., so please, please, tell me why I should go on living. Give me a philosophy of life. The letter below was in response to that request; it is undated, but I’m sure it was around 1985.

Dear Tony,

You asked for a philosophy of life. Well, I tell you it’s true, there is a way to live life, my way, something I discovered – perhaps it is not the only way, but it is one way. You might well be interested in better ways, since my way has a major flaw: Many people would prefer death. In this decision, I cannot guide you. It’s not that my way is unpleasant or difficult, it’s that it is somewhat embarrassing.

I now believe that I have always had the substance of life’s secret. What I lacked was the form. Only recently have I merged substance with form, in a discovery that in its clarity convinces me of its truth. My only fear is that you consider my discovery ridiculous.

In my new career as a human-factors engineer, I have been thrown bodily into the world of hi-tech communication, the world of bullets and viewgraphs. All information in this world is processed in terms of bullets and viewgraphs. All points in an argument are marked with bullets – large periods – on a viewgraph, something like a slide but more easily made. After the presentation, viewgraphs are converted to hard copy, for rereading later. All hi-tech communication is of this sort. Proceedings of conventions are collections of hard copy. Journals are thinly-disguised collections of hard copy. All speeches employ viewgraphs. The representation of knowledge in applied science is bullets and viewgraphs.

This is the form I’ve been looking for. I can now communicate to you the secret of life. I’m going to give you the bullets of life.

Guaranteed not to exceed seven in number, that magical number human beings cannot exceed if they are to recall all the bullets at a later date.

•You are not responsible for the terrible things that happen in your life, except for 10 percent

•No matter what anyone thinks, including you, you are an exceptionally attractive person – kind, witty, courageous, and loving

•The world is absurd, and it is not insanity to think so

•No one survives without a sense of humor

•There is no good reason to experience depression, anger, fear, or any negative emotion

•Don’t take anything seriously except emotional relationships

•Life is creativity and appreciation, which are the same thing from different perspectives

These bullets are not guaranteed to be totally effective, but – this I promise you – they are state of the art! And though acceptance of these bullets as the basic principle of your life may strike you as ludicrous, you might at least consider what such acceptance would cost you. Nothing. The bullets are in no way controversial. They are in fact so abstract that nearly everyone would embrace them; people would admire your principled life. In addition, the bullets require very little in the way of changes in your life. You could begin this new life tomorrow, and no one would notice, except for the smile on your face. You can hardly imagine the gains. You’ll feel great. People will love you, and rightly so. And me… I will take credit for saving your life, and people will say, My God! To think that Tony almost gave it up! What a loss, almost!, and they will thank me, consider me a hero. That’s what I want out of life: to make a difference.

Love, Jim

This letter, written over 30 years ago, represents the beginning of my personal research into the question of how to be happy. It’s not bad, but it deals more with eliminating unhappiness than producing happiness. As I mentioned above, I, like my friends, was constantly depressed, which is painful. I wanted the pain to stop. The bullets to Tony were meant to ease his pain, not to make him happy.

I thought at this time that if I eliminated the causes of my unhappiness, I would be happy. Years later, I discovered I was wrong. Eliminating unhappiness was necessary for happiness to reign in my life, but it was not sufficient.

Nevertheless, my first attempts to become a happy person focused on the negative emotions, which I perceived as the chief impediments to happiness – how can I eliminate or at least suppress these feelings of depression, anger, and anxiety? This would not be difficult, I reasoned, because clinical psychology (psychotherapy) had been developing methods of reducing or eliminating negative emotions for hundreds of years. Freud’s therapy, psychoanalysis, focused on anxiety, which he defined as fear without a clear source, a free-floating fear that led to the kinds of cognitive distortions that Freud called neuroses. Ridding myself of negative emotions took me about ten years, but I did it! I have not experienced a negative emotion – except sadness, which I do not consider negative – in the last thirty years. Not a single minute. No fear, no anger (except at politicians, whom I try to find amusing but cannot), no worry, no depression, no guilt, no frustration, no jealousy.

Once I had created for myself a life free of negative emotions, I fully expected that happiness would bloom. No such luck! My life was calm, often peaceful, sometimes blah, but there was no joy, no strong positive emotion to replace the suppressed negative ones. I began to search for ways to experience joy.

The search for joy will begin in a later letter, but I want to be clear about what I had achieved by eliminating negative emotions. I had, in effect, banished suffering from my life, no mean accomplishment. In my next letter, I will explain what I mean by that.

Much love,

Jim

LETTER 2

ELIMINATING SUFFERING

Dear Kelly Jane,

When I was very young, when I first started thinking about life, the questions in which I was most interested had to do with pain. I asked my friends, why does pain hurt? Why does our benevolent God allow us to feel pain? What’s the difference between pain and suffering? My friends weren’t terribly interested in pain, so they started avoiding me. Pain, said one, is what you’re causing me with these stupid questions.

So I investigated pain alone, never sharing my insights except for commiserating with friends about how much pain hurt, with the question of why left unasked as I and my friends took drugs, mostly aspirin, to relieve the pain.

Conclusions about pain after 50 years of study

In the 50 years I have been studying pain, I have gradually come to the following conclusions:

1.Pain hurts so that we can protect ourselves from actions that might injure or kill us. (C. S. Lewis called pain God’s megaphone; I like that.)

2.There are basically two kinds of pain: physical pain, an automatic response to body injury, and emotional pain, a human’s response to the frustration of desires. Emotional pain, such as that I experienced when my advances toward the current girl of my dreams were inevitably rejected, is often more intense, and commonly longer lasting, than physical pain. It also presents fewer risks of death or severe injury, although it may lead to suicide.

3.Pain is the fundamental source of negative emotions and, therefore, unhappiness. (I will explain later.)

4.Pain has two basic pathways to the human brain: One, operating below the level of our consciousness, activates body responses to the event causing the pain. These responses include the activation of the immune system, to prevent infections in wounds, for example, by triggering clotting, to prevent the loss of blood and to promote scarring; and the loss of consciousness, if the pain is so intense that the body decides a coma is the best altered state of consciousness, given the circumstances. The second pathway leads to the cortex, the most highly evolved part of the brain, where the pain becomes conscious, where the person in pain becomes aware of God’s megaphone. It’s the where of the experience of hurt.

5.For a person in great pain, pain relief becomes modern medicine’s most important contribution. Unfortunately, modern pain relief comes in the form of drugs, many of which, like aspirin, acetaminophen (the pain reliever in Tylenol), and ibuprofen, are minimally effective, with dangerous long-term side effects. Better pain relief comes from the opiate drugs like morphine and heroin, but they threaten addiction and a life not worth living. The body uses internal chemicals called endorphins (endogenous morphine-like substances) and cannabinoids (cannabis-like chemicals) to relieve pain.

6.An interesting discovery by psychologists is that pain-relievers that reduce body pain also reduce emotional pain. Take two aspirin if your beloved rejects you.

7.It’s interesting that the better pain-relievers are also pleasure-enhancers. I wonder if addiction is related more directly to the pleasure enhancement or the pain relief of addictive drugs. I suspect the answer is pain relief, although the pleasure certainly adds to the lure of addictions. I wonder if pain relief equals pleasure enhancement!

So if body pain and emotional pain are essentially the same and lead to negative emotions, the destroyers of our happiness, the first step toward a life of constant joy is an attempt to reduce the intensity of negative emotions, or perhaps to eliminate them completely from our daily lives. As I mentioned in Letter 1, I was convinced that eliminating negative emotions was the key, the yellow-brick road that led to contentment, happiness, and joy. Eliminating unhappiness should produce happiness, right? No, it doesn’t. But eliminating unhappiness eliminates unhappiness, which is not a bad result. It’s just not enough, not for me and not for you.

Pain Conclusion #3, above, makes the extravagant claim that pain is the fundamental source of negative emotions and, therefore, unhappiness. The more I read about negative emotions, the more I think that there are two basic emotions from which all, or at least most, other emotions flow. The two basic emotions are anger and fear, which correspond to the two basic reactions to pain (in all animals), fight and flight. Think about an animal, including humans, in the wild. If this animal experiences pain, it usually means that another animal is attacking, and to fend off this attack, the attacked animal must either fight or flee. In the wild, attacked animals will usually fight if they are bigger than the attacker and run away if the attacker is a large grizzly bear. Emotions are motivating forces, and the motivating emotion for fighting is anger, for fleeing is fear.

Thus pain, physical or emotional, triggers the emotions of anger and/or fear, which motivate the actions of aggression or running away. This is an instinctive (unlearned) response to pain in all animals, including humans. I was surprised, for example, when my dog, Ruckus, sprained his leg and I checked to see if it was broken. He tried to bite me! My beloved friend, Ruckus, tried to attack me. Similarly, my veterinarian told me that she had to be very careful when giving my