Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (26 page)

The
happiness set point
is the factor responsible for roughly half of your potential happiness. The set point, like the personality traits that are a part of it, is stable over time and pretty much genetically determined.

Next up are the
life circumstances
, which, surprisingly, only account for 10 percent of your happiness; these life circumstances
include both positive and negative events (a happy, stable childhood or a traumatic one; winning academic awards or failing miserably at school), as well as marital status, occupation, job security, income, health, and religiosity. The researchers note that people who make more money are indeed relatively happier; that married people are happier than single, divorced, or widowed people; that religious people tend to describe themselves as happier than those who aren't religious; and that healthy people self-report more happiness than their sick counterparts. But Lyubomirsky and her colleagues also point out that all of these various circumstances combined only account for 8 to 15 percent variation in happiness levels:
“These relatively weak associations
have been deemed surprising and paradoxical, given well-being researchers' initial expectations that circumstantial factors such as income and physical heath would be strongly related to happiness.”

Daniel Gilbert's work on happiness explains this surprisingly low figure in terms of both the impact bias and the human ability to adapt rapidly to new circumstances. (That's why the bliss you expected when you got that promotion doesn't last, but then again, neither does the emotional devastation of being dumped by your lover.) As Lyubomirsky and her colleagues note,
“the hedonic adaptation tends to shuttle
people back to their starting point following any positive circumstantial change.” So much for the likelihood that your winning the lottery will make you a whole lot happier.

The good news is that while the happiness set point and life circumstance account for 60 percent of what determines how happy you feel, a full 40 percent comes from intentional activity, and that puts you in charge of that piece of the happiness pie.
Intentional activity
is, as you might imagine, a huge grab bag of all the things people do, including behavioral activity (taking a walk in the woods or getting together with a close friend), cognitive activity (reframing situations to feel more positive), and volitional activity (striving for personal goals).

Remarkably, unlike circumstantial changes to happiness, which are relatively ephemeral because of adaptation, intentional
activity has long-term effects.
Sheldon and Lyubomirsky tested this hypothesis
in a series of experiments that compared the longevity of the effect of an improvement in circumstances on happiness with that of intentional activity. In their first study, they had participants self-select into groups with a positive change in circumstances and those who had a positive change in activity. The researchers found that circumstantial change gave less of a boost over time than did continued activity. Their second study took measures over twelve weeks and found that intentional activity boosted happiness over time, though not incrementally; instead, the initial bump in happiness was sustained at the same level by the activity. Their third study measured changes in psychological well-being and found the same pattern.

There's one caveat, though; circumstantial change can have a more lasting impact on happiness if the initial circumstances weren't meeting the individual's basic needs. In other words, moving from a three-bedroom house to a larger one won't sustain happiness—you'll simply get used to the bigger space—but moving from a dangerous neighborhood to one where you feel safe will. It partly depends on what the original circumstances were. In addition, how you deal with circumstantial change in your life also affects whether you will adapt to the change and find yourself back at your happiness set point. Circumstantial change can make you happy for longer, as the researchers write,
“only to the extent that one takes action
to keep the new circumstances ‘fresh'—i.e., by remembering to appreciate or feel gratitude for them, or by making the effort to take advantage of the opportunities for positive experiences that they afford. In other words, this is feasible when one engages in intentional activity with respect to the circumstances in one's life—that is, when one
acts
upon one's circumstances.”

Not surprisingly, many of the points about how to judge whether to quit a goal also apply to the choosing of new goals and activities that will deliver happiness or subjective well-being. First, Lyubomirsky and her colleague assert that the goodness of
fit between the person and the activity is important; we've seen this observation made elsewhere in different contexts. Second, they underscore the importance of beginning with effort and maintaining that effort. It's easier to maintain effort if the activity is self-­sustaining and intrinsic or puts you in flow.

The bottom line is that while we may be lousy at figuring out what will make us happy now or in the future, have a happiness set point that is based on who we are and is stable over time, and may be prone to adapt to or ignore changes in circumstances that should make us happy, there's still lots of wiggle room.

The Big Takeaway

The research we've looked at in this chapter points to the efficacy of conscious behavior and how it can help you drive the car that's you. These theoretical concepts can all be translated into motivated behaviors that can help you choose goals that are congruent, satisfying, and attainable. You can use these cognitive strategies—of mind-set and implementation intentions—to engage in new goals. Similarly, the research on happiness suggests that while there are aspects of happiness you can't influence, there are enough aspects that you can. How you think about what makes you happy—deciding to count your blessings, for example—turns it into intentional activity. Both conscious thinking and acting consciously will feed your sense of self and make you feel empowered. Similarly, while the Mercedes in your driveway or the Guccis in your closets won't sustain your happiness, how you think about them—the work you did in order to pay for them and how that work made you feel—may.

Resetting your compass after disengagement is an act of faith and bravery, but it is also full of possibility. The self that emerges from this transition won't be the same self that began the process. It's our hope that what you've learned from this book will give you permission to take your leave and wave good-bye when you need
to, no matter what the culture or onlookers say, and that you'll do it consciously, gracefully, and intelligently. We hope too that the period of not knowing what's next after you've quit will yield to a time when you feel confident. And ultimately, you will take full advantage of that piece of the happiness pie that's yours alone.

 

Afterword

The Wisdom of Quitting

One of the interesting things about writing this book was listening to women and men from different generations talk about what they'd learned about persistence during their childhoods. The baby boomers grew up hearing stories of persistence from parents and grandparents who'd lived through both the Great Depression and World War II. The theme of persistence was closely bound up with heroism and echoed in books, movies, and school lessons. Yet this generation's rejection of the sunk-cost thinking that prolonged the Vietnam War changed how the group thought about persistence. In that context, the virtue of persistence became conflated with conservatism, a lack of realism, and a fondness for lost causes. Many young people “quit” their parents' cultural expectations, for a time at least, and a number of them did, as Timothy Leary exhorted, “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Consequently, the boomer's children—those now in their twenties, thirties, and forties—appear to have had more leeway in terms of being able to change their minds about their commitments as children. Nevertheless, these young people also report that even if their parents hadn't touted persistence as a virtue, the parents often modeled it.

The questionnaire for this book—not a scientific survey but a call for stories—revealed how ambivalent most people still feel about admitting to having quit something important, even if, in
the end, quitting was the right thing to do. The cultural portrait of the quitter—that never-will-amount-to-anything person who lacks staying power—still looms large. While the parents of the baby boomers tended not to let their children quit anything they signed up for—if you begged for a saxophone, you would be forced to practice it—the boomers themselves appear to have tried to navigate the difficult shoals of teaching a child the value of exertion and sustained effort, on the one hand, and giving that child the freedom to explore an activity and to abandon it when it turned out not to be a good fit, on the other.

“It's hard figuring out why your kid wants to quit,” one mother said. “Fear of failure is always a bad reason to quit, and I never let my children abandon an activity if I thought that was what was really afoot. On the other hand, there's nothing to be gained by forcing a child to persist at something he hates.” Another mother took the opposite point of view, writing that there was something to be learned by finishing what you started. She said that life was full of situations that required you to persist when all you really wanted to do was quit. That's true enough.

Quitting a team sport presents the thorniest problem for most parents, balancing individual desires against the commitment made to others. One father of a thirty-three-year-old recalled his decision to allow his son to quit ice hockey, even after investing in all the expensive paraphernalia for the sport: “I wonder whether I was okay with it because the sport wasn't important to me. Would I have reacted differently if it'd been golf, a sport I have played all of my life? I wonder.”

Both the enormous popularity of Amy Chua's
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
and the brouhaha that accompanied its vision of disciplinarian, persistence-fueled parenting to maximize a child's achievements make it clear that most people still aren't sure whether quitting deserves a place on their agenda.

This book doesn't promote quitting as a stand-alone answer. If quitting isn't accompanied by engagement with new goals, it's not an answer at all. In a celebrity-obsessed culture that focuses
on extrinsic goals—chiefly, money and fame—perhaps our job as people, parents, and mentors is to focus less on the value of persistence and more on the nature of the goals we set for ourselves and encourage in others.

We now know that persistence is hardwired in the human species; what needs to be learned is discernment, knowing which goals are worthy of effort and meaningful enough to provide happiness or satisfaction. As technology continues to shape children's and adolescents' definitions of self—where worth means popularity and attention, as judged by the number of followers on YouTube and Twitter, text messages, and “friends” on Facebook—it seems more important than ever to focus on goals that are intrinsic to, and coherent with, the self, rather than extrinsic. In a world where distraction is ubiquitous—cell phones by the pillow, multiple screens open all the time—making sure that children are encouraged to focus on goals that mirror themselves and supported in that effort should be a priority. In a quick-fix culture where the end is too often valued over the means, children need to be taught that goal seeking is a valuable journey in and of itself and that it's not just the end—the achievement—that matters.

For all that culture disparages it, quitting is, inevitably, part of the life cycle, easier at some stages and harder at others. Managing our thoughts, feelings, and actions lies at the heart of both quitting with mastery and living with satisfaction.

Quitting consciously and thoughtfully affords us a different view of decisions, whether they are our own or those of others. As one young man, thirty, wrote of his own experience dropping out of college twice and then becoming a college teacher, “It has changed my views because quitting something is often an attempt to affirm something larger that we can't yet grasp. And while I find it frustratingly negative to hear people phrase their decisions in terms of quitting, I now try to listen instead to the positive move they are struggling to make that they don't yet have the words to express.”

Amen to that.

 

Acknowledgments

The endnotes and bibliography tell all, but this book wouldn't exist without the amazing work of psychologists, economists, and other social scientists who have explored why people do what they do, arriving at new findings on the processes of thinking, automaticity and the unconscious, self-regulation, and goal setting. New discoveries in the workings of the brain continue to enlighten and excite. While these researchers aren't responsible for how these ideas are used or expressed, without them and the body of work they created, this book would have been merely an interesting concept and would have ended up in whatever Elysian fields exist for unsupported but nifty ideas.

On a personal note, the intellectual journey of discovery fueled by exploring this body of work has been exciting and discomfiting at times; I'm still getting used to the idea of consciousness as an illusion.

Many thanks to Elizabeth Kaplan, my agent, for not quitting, and to Dan Ambrosio for seeing the book through and for his enthusiasm. Thanks to Carolyn Sobczak for listening to me bemoan the death of the blue pencil and for being so patient.

Friends and strangers rallied to send e-mails exhorting folks to admit to quitting and to talk about letting go, failure, and regret as well as the joys of starting over and reinventing the self. In alphabetical order, thanks to Jacqueline Freeman, Leslie Garisto, Ray Healey, Ed Mickens, Patti Pitcher, Claudia Karabaic Sargent, and Lori Stein. Thanks, too, to all of those who shared their stories but preferred not to be named; you know who you are and I appreciate
your help. A special thanks to Karyl McBride for her morning e-mails.

On the home front, a huge merci to Alexandra Israel.

—Peg Streep

I would like to thank—above all—the individuals and groups with whom I've worked over the years. Their courage and tenacity to finding their way and pursuing their dreams has helped me value quitting as an art form.

Professionally, I will group Dr. George Weinberg, Dr. Louis Ornont, and Dr. Larry Epstein together, though each man is distinctive and has created a swath of therapists who have benefited from their unique talents. Each has enlarged my sense of the possibilities in the human spirit and my technical ability to be a therapeutic presence in people's lives.

Finally, my work with Dick Bolles, author of
What Color Is Your Parachute
? encouraged me to see career change as a metaphor for spiritual opportunity. No one has contributed more to enabling people in transition to envisage their future as a process of discovery than Dick.

—Alan Bernstein