SAN FRANCISCO — The stock market has been on a roller coaster, banks are going under, unemployment is skyrocketing, and foreclosed homes pepper the landscape. What better time for a happiness conference?
In this dopamine-laden city, where the pursuit of well-being is something of a high art, a motley array of scientists, philosophers, doctors, psychologists, navel-gazing Googlers and Tibetan Buddhists addressed the latest findings on the science of human happiness — or eudaemonia, the classical Greek term for human flourishing.
Planned before the current crises, the first American “Happiness and Its Causes” conference was equal parts Aristotle and Oprah. It brought together heavy hitters like Paul Ekman, the psychologist known for deciphering facial “microexpressions” that reveal feelings, and Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford biologist. They considered topics like “Compassion and the Pursuit of Happiness” and “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.”
The conference is the latest manifestation of the booming happiness industry, subject of a growing number of books, scholarly research papers and academic courses. The concept began in Sydney in 2006 and has since expanded, its profile raised by the participation of the Dalai Lama in Sydney in 2007.
The two-day gathering in San Francisco this week, which cost $545, benefited a nonprofit group offering Buddhist teachings to prisoners. It knitted together many currents in the cultural ether: positive psychology, neuroplasticity, mindfulness-based stress reduction, the role of emotional support in cancer and the yogic ideal of “being in the present moment.”
“We know more about gloominess than cheerfulness,” Dr. Ekman said before exploring cross-cultural definitions of happiness, including nachas, the Yiddish expression of pride in the achievements of one’s offspring.
Fortunately, given recent events, a growing number of studies over the past decade have suggested that money does not equal happiness, among them one concluding that the Inuit of northern Greenland and the Masai in Kenya were just as happy as members of the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.
The latest word on happiness from the frontlines of medicine and science was condensed, a la SparkNotes, into user-friendly 15-minute nuggets.
Dr. David Spiegel, a professor at the Stanford School of Medicine and the director of its Center on Stress and Health, discussed the positive effects of group therapy on metastatic breast cancer patients, and his belief that people can live longer if they face their illnesses directly with proper emotional support. “I’ve never lost a patient to terminal crying,” Dr. Spiegel said. “Suppressing sadness is the devil’s bargain.”
Professor Sapolsky of Stanford made a similar point about humans and baboons. Modern stress disorders contributing to hypertension, heart disease and other illnesses are the result of a disjuncture between primitive conditions and our own — or, as he put it, “running for your life in the savannah versus 30-year mortgages.”
The relatively new field of behavioral neurogenetics is exploring a handful of genes that seem to be related to depression, anxiety, addictive personality, sensation seeking and other traits. But, Professor Sapolsky said in a follow-up e-mail message, a person’s risk seems not predetermined but rather the result of interactions of genes and the environment, especially stressors in childhood.
Social support is vital, no matter how healthy you are, he told the crowd. “How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.”
The audience, composed largely of the helping professions, also included a senior vice president of a large mortgage company, who would not give her name. She said she had laid off more than 500 people in the last six months, and was there to learn how to boost the morale of employees working weekends and holidays and making do with bonuses cut in half. “What truly makes people happy is a higher calling,” she said, adding that companies like hers were not totally at fault for the mortgage crisis. “Western society is too focused on blame,” she said. “In order for our customers to be happy, they have to understand that they’re accountable.”
“Happiness entrepreneurs” promoted themselves in the tea break that ended with the ting of a Tibetan prayer bell. Aymee Coget, who wants to be the Suze Orman of happiness, handed out fliers for her “Happiness Makeover,” a three-month route to “sustainable eudaemonia.” Ms. Coget, dressed to the nines in pink silk, said, “I guarantee happiness in three months.”
In the Bay Area, the happiness business has been in full flower. James Baraz, a revered meditation teacher, has a 10-month course in Berkeley on “Awakening Joy.” Among the exercises and meditations are suggestions for improving your life, including singing every day, making lists of things that made you happy and getting a “joy buddy.”
The course is a bona fide phenomenon since an article appeared in O, Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, with 300 people taking it in Berkeley and 2,500 taking it online.
“Neuroscience and spirituality are coming together,” Mr. Baraz said by telephone. “It’s not airy-fairy stuff.”
Nevertheless, a few renegades at the conference suggested that happiness was overrated. “Unhappiness about not being happy is a modern condition,” said Darrin M. McMahon, a professor of history at Florida State University. “We cannot feel good all the time, nor should we.”
Yet the national embrace of “Yes We Can” hung in the air. “We’ve had a period of borrowing money, personal gratification, consumption and self-interest,” said Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and a director of the Greater Good Science Center. “Now we will have a president who is talking about sacrifice.”
“Human beings are wired to care and give,” Dr. Keltner added, “and it’s probably our best route to happiness.”