The Path to Happiness Is Narrow but Easy
Tolstoy was onto something about unhappy families. The solution is to put your relationships first.
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Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and betrayal, begins in a moment of chaos for the Oblonsky family, when the father is discovered to be having an affair. With the parents distracted and distraught, the children “ran wild all over the house,” and every member of the family “felt that there was no sense in their living together.” Misery reigned.
Hence the novel’s famous opening line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
We all want to be happy and have happy families, so the Oblonsky hypothesis is troubling. It suggests that happy people are some sort of elite group who have found the right way. To be happy, we must stay on a narrow path; on either side are sheer cliffs. Stray from the path in any of the many ways you might, and you will fall into unhappiness. If you are like me and my family, and are a bit, well, unconventional, you might fear that you are already off the path and will not find it.
The truth, however, is more encouraging than this. Yes, there are more ways to be unhappy than to be happy. But the narrow path is a straightforward one, and almost anyone can get onto it by focusing on one big idea.
In general, positive things in life are more similar to one another than negative things are. Researchers have tested this observation in novel ways. For example, scholars have noted that attractive faces seem more alike than unattractive ones, and we rate people we find pleasant as more similar than people we find unpleasant. In one study specifically of happiness, two scholars in 2013 showed that people find happy words more interchangeable than unhappy words.
One explanation for this similarity is our perception. We have a cognitive bias for negative information over positive information. As social scientists have shown in research, threats and bad news have a stronger psychological impact than good news. That humans would acquire this bias for evolutionary reasons makes sense: Treats are nice to have but can be safely disregarded; we ignore threats at our peril.
The phenomenon is not simply a matter of perception, however—especially in the case of happy versus unhappy people. In the Journal of Happiness Studies earlier this year, two psychologists reported on a project that measured the similarity of people’s self-evaluated personalities, and compared the results with the subjects’ ratings of their own emotional well-being. The researchers found that happier people are indeed more similar in character to one another than unhappy people are.
This suggests what social scientists would call an “asymmetric distribution” of outcomes, according to which negative outcomes have a greater range and variance than positive outcomes. Or, as Jesus put it, to achieve bliss, we must “enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.” Tolstoy was right: There are lots of ways to be unhappy, but only a few to be happy.
This does not, however, mean that there are far fewer happy people than unhappy people. Using the General Social Survey, I found that 30 percent of Americans in 2018 said they were “very happy,” whereas 14 percent were “not too happy.” (By 2021, those numbers had changed to 20 percent and 23 percent, but this may be due to the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns.) Plenty of people are coming through that narrow gate.
To get on that narrow-but-well-worn path if you are off it, you need to know what exactly happier people (and families) have in common—and even more important, what they do differently than others.
Two psychologists came to a clear answer to this in a 2008 article helpfully titled “What Do Happy People Do?” To put it simply, they are social. The scholars found that, on average, “very happy” people socialize on 11 more occasions a year with relatives than unhappy people do, seven more times with neighbors, and five more times with friends. They also attend religious services seven more times each year. Happier people also rate the quality of their relationships more highly. According to research from 2002, people who label themselves “very happy” give the quality of their close friendships a 54 percent higher rating than “very unhappy” people do. Their family relationships were 73 percent better, and their romantic relationships were 161 percent better.
The same pattern appears when families that function well are studied: The path is narrow, but most navigate it successfully. In 2010, psychologists from the University of Rochester and the University of Notre Dame observed the dynamics of families over a three-year period. On each occasion that they visited the subject families, the psychologists watched as parents played with their children and interacted with each other (including discussing topics that elicited disagreement). The researchers rated the families in terms of verbal aggression and the extent of negativity and conflict, and found three basic models: one happy, two unhappy.
They called the happy model “cohesive,” and this was characterized by emotional warmth and harmonious communication. Fifty-nine percent of the families fell into this category. One unhappy model, labeled “enmeshed” (comprising 22 percent of the families), could be warm but also had high hostility, destructive meddling, and little cohesion. The other unhappy model was called “disengaged” (almost 19 percent), and this featured relationships that were cold, controlling, and withdrawn.
From all the evidence, we can conclude that the happiness club may be elite, but it is not exclusive. Membership does not depend on whether you have a certain net worth, family configuration, or set of ideological views. It requires that you be generous in love and allow yourself to be loved. This is harder for some people than for others, of course, according to circumstances and personality, among other influences. And life offers us many options instead of love: fear, hatred, envy, distraction by politics or social media, to name just a few.
Staying on the narrow path demands a conscious focus on your relationships, not leaving their quality and intensity to chance. It means treating them with the kind of seriousness that people usually reserve for their money or career. It also means chipping away at the aspects of life that can distract you and crowd love out. But everyone has the potential to do these things—even the Oblonskys.