The Unsexy Work of Well-Being

The world of professional golf might be hiding a secret to happiness. Recently, as I delved into the statistics of professional golfers, I stumbled upon a compelling observation that sparked a profound reconsideration of my approach to cultivating flourishing. In golf, your score is a reflection of your birdies (the good) minus your bogeys (the bad), each counting equally. It was a simple revelation: the players who consistently made the most birdies, those exemplary moments in a round of golf, were not necessarily the top-ranked professionals. Instead, the list was populated by relatively unknown players. Conversely, when I examined the list of players with the fewest bogeys, mistakes in a round of golf, it was dominated by the best players in the world. This juxtaposition begged the question: is happiness akin to making great moves (birdies), or is it more about avoiding pitfalls and mistakes (bogeys)?

This thinking outlines two fundamental approaches to the pursuit of happiness. First, we can actively cultivate the causes and conditions of well-being, akin to making birdies on the golf course. Alternatively, we can focus on rooting out, overcoming, and eliminating the detractors of our well-being, akin to avoiding bogeys. If the golf analogy holds true, then perhaps our efforts are better spent on eliminating factors that diminish our well-being rather than primarily focusing on adding positive elements.  Why might this be the case?

It's remarkably easy to derail our lives and our happiness in an instant.  We also likely encounter more ways to sabotage ourselves than we do opportunities to boost our happiness.  There are plenty of creative ways to quickly dive bomb your life if you were so inclined.  You could cheat on your spouse, gamble away all of your assets, or shoot up heroin in a mere 15 minutes.  I don’t think it’s possible to create the same magnitude of positive impact in the same time frame.  Cultivating the positive causes and conditions of well-being takes time.  It’s a bit like growing crops.  What we plant in the spring, we don’t harvest until the fall.  But, we can set fire to our crop field anytime, and watch it burn to smithereens quite quickly. 

Religions know this.  The 10 Commandments are mostly a list of what not to do.  Happiness is the natural state in Buddhism, but it gets covered up by “defilements” which need to be eliminated.  Psychology is mostly a list of what can go wrong in our minds.  The wisdom traditions and sciences focused on our well-being and the highest good seem far more concerned with our potential to blow it than our need to go out and make it happen.  In fact, our attempts to go out and make happiness happen in a jiffy are often exactly those sins, defilements, and bogeys that the wise are cautioning us against.

The reason I’m writing this article is because I don’t think most of us appropriately value the importance of avoiding happiness bogeys.  I think we are over-wired to pursue what we think will add to our happiness rather than focus on eliminating what detracts from it.  This is the case because the active pursuit of happiness is sexier.  You’re more likely to share your great moves with your friends than be excited about avoiding the dumb ones.  However, I think we’ll get larger happiness returns from eliminating our well-being detractors.  Not doing something might not feel as important, after all it is the absence of something, but that absence might be the most essential part of our happiness recipe.

Certainly, it is essential to cultivate our flourishing, to plant seeds that will ripen, and be an active participant in the cultivation of our happiness.  My thesis here is that we get a bigger happiness ROI (return on investment) by doing the less sexy work, eliminating what detracts from our flourishing.