Happiness: Experience Rich and Theory Poor?

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell promotes the idea that small actions can spark “social epidemics”, that are good for our well-being. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to happiness and other small social movements like the ones supported by UnLtd. We can get so caught up in the mechanics of delivering a project that is neither a full-time job nor an income source that we can overlook the need for the idea to be promoted to wider, less-involved groups (other than over dinner-tables). Apart from this blog and a few other efforts like the Fun Federation I’ve been concentrating on finding suitable groups and venues for delivering the Happystance workshops.

It has taken months for me to set up tomorrow’s taster workshop at a meeting of the people who are involved in local carers’ groups. It’s a good opportunity to give an interested audience an experience of Happystance but I know that I’ve been neglecting the wider promotion of what I’m working on. There is a quiet crisis of unhappiness in Britain. And it is so paralysing that even when there is an opportunity to discuss it (like my recent letter to my local newspapers), it excites no response. Either happiness is perceived as an issue that is too trivial to engage with or there is a failure of imagination when asked to imagine that things could be different.

Gladwell argues that social epidemics propagate with the correct conditions and the activities of certain influential people with abundant weak ties. Crudely, weak ties can be characterised as acquaintances where there is little social capital tied up in the relationship. Strong ties can be summed up as friends, family and others with whom you have a lot of social capital invested.

Gladwell describes the influencers with weak ties who are essential to the spread of a social epidemic. He identifies

• connectors, in touch with different groups of people;
• mavens, experts in one area;
• salesmen, who can win customers/others over.

Martin Ruef is among those who argue that there is a more robust combination, exploration and transmission of ideas in networks of weak ties rather than strong ties. Weak ties “allow for more experimentation in combining ideas from disparate sources....” Ruef contributed to a study that reports that “entrepreneurs who spend more time with a diverse network of strong and weak ties...are three times more likely to innovate than entrepreneurs stuck within a uniform network.”

Speaking in a recent interview, Malcolm Gladwell argued that “People are experience rich and theory poor. People who are busy doing things-as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops-don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organise their experiences and make sense of them” (as the interview is an subscription audio-file, I trust Gladwell will forgive me for anglicising the spellings). He offers his books as a potential organising structure for people’s lives.

I’m taken with the Gladwell claim that “people are experience rich and theory poor”. When I run Happystance events the participants can initially be uncertain that happiness and resilience are appropriate topics for workshops. It is a striking example of being “theory poor” when many people claim that the only thing that would make them happy is winning the lottery, despite the flakt that we are fourteen times more likely to be murdered than to win the lottery jackpot.

When it comes to being “experience rich” it seems as if the experience that people recall is likely to be that of hedonism, rather than the other components of happiness, the meaningful life and the engaged life. Csikszentmihalyi described these different types of experience in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi’s research led him to conclude that flow tends to result in personal growth by a careful balance between challenge and skills. One surprising finding is that “People seem to get more flow from what they do on their jobs than from leisure activities in free time”.

Contrary to expectation, “flow” usually happens not during relaxing moments of leisure and entertainment, but rather when we are actively involved in a difficult enterprise, in a task that stretches our mental and physical abilities. Any activity can do it. Working on a challenging job, riding the crest of a tremendous wave, and teaching one’s child the letters of the alphabet are the kinds of experiences that focus our whole being in a harmonious rush of energy, and lift us out of the anxieties and boredom that characterize so much of everyday life.

 

It turns out that when challenges are high and personal skills are used to the utmost, we experience this rare state of consciousness. The first symptom of flow is a narrowing of attention on a clearly defined goal. We feel involved, concentrated, absorbed. We know what must be done, and we get immediate feedback as to how well we are doing. The tennis player knows after each shot whether the ball actually went where she wanted it to go; the pianist knows after each stroke of the keyboard whether the notes sound like they should. Even a usually boring job, once the challenges are brought into balance with the person’s skills and the goals are clarified, can begin to be exciting and involving.

Gladwell ends The Tipping Point with the assertion that

what must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.

Providing that “right kind of impetus” is part of the work of social enterprises.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project