If ur not having a good time… play IT! (Part II)

The pursuit of happiness is a team sport

In Part I, I talked about a family member who’s been through a lot, and our mutual friend, who advises that one’s happiness is entirely up to one’s self. His view is, ‘if #1 is happy, everything else will fall into place.’ While his advice has merit, there is a tragic flaw.

It is analogous to the flaw in Milton Friedman’s 1980s mantra, “the business of business is business.”

We are part of one another’s lives, part of our coworkers’ lives, part of our families’ lives, our lovers’ and our friends’. What we do affects them, and vice versa. We can ignore this, but we can’t change the fact of it. Even if we exit stage left, we affect them still.

So the game of individual happiness can only be won by finding the ease and joy in considering one another’s needs, and balancing them with our own. In short, the pursuit of happiness is a game of integrated thinking.

It turns out, happiness isn’t an individual sport, like jogging. It’s is a team sport.

Friends and family are crucial to helping us gain the perspective we need. Without their help understanding the needs of the important ones around us and how we’re affecting them, I assert that the balance that leads to sustained happiness is not possible to find at all.

I am not saying that we have to find our happiness at all times through doing fun things with our key others. We all need ‘me time.’ We have to balance our energy across family time, work time, and play time with our partners and friends.

But the key is for at least a few from each of our circles of friends, coworkers, and family members to hang out together from time to time. When they do, they help us gain insight into what others are feeling, or how what we are doing comes across, and this helps us navigate the balance of our own well-being with that of others.

Think of a time when you talked with a friend or coworker about how so-and-so was behaving, and they knew and hung out with that person too, and offered a perspective on where that person was coming from that helped you understand it better, and feel less upset by it. Maybe you came away from that conversation with a clearer idea about what you could do that would make things better.

Conversely if the circle we spend time with tends to ignore one or more of the other key parties, we may get out of balance with that party in our own lives, or find ourselves shifting our behavior away from our own goals and toward the priorities of that circle at the expense of our inner happiness.

And there’s a particular danger: when we share our difficulties with others with peers who don’t know and hang out with those others, we run the serious risk that their well-intentioned advice will be off-base, because it lacks important facts or context.

So the game of lasting personal happiness is actually a game of integrated thinking (IT). Our ‘key parties’– our self, our children, our partner/coparent, our coworkers, and our other friends and family– are our teammates. For one of us to win, we have to win together. We not only run the risk of failing if we don’t give them the chance to play with each other; we cannot win.

Becoming a parent puts stress on even the best teams in this game. It’s hard to socialize with friends who don’t have kids now that I am a parent, for sheer logistical reasons most of all; they aren’t particularly aware of how difficult it is to get away for the number of hours they typically do, in the location and at the time of day they do. Unfortunately, instead of either of us finding a way we might meet in the middle, in quite a few cases we’ve just lost our connection. And, tragically for some of them who are parents, and who chose not to give up the connection to their unchanging social circle, they have lost their connection with their kids and partners instead.

Have you noticed that people go kinda nuts who find themselves in a situation where they are no longer accountable to the circle around them for how they are balancing their key others’ needs? Think not (only) of Ted Bundy, but of an ultra wealthy person who never hears the truth anymore about the ways their behavior is harmful, because nobody wants to lose access to their power– or become the target of their wrath. The wealthy person ends up depressed and neurotic.

This phenomenon affects us all, if in more subtle ways. If Will’s fun social time always leaves out his coparent, and there’s no hangout time among that coparent and Will’s group of friends, Will may be unaware of how she is affected or why she’s unhappy, and the friends can’t help Will get perspective on how his actions are affecting the situation, or constructively talk through what might help improve the dynamic. A downward spiral ensues. Whereas if Will’s coparent does hang out sometimes with the group of friends and they get to know each other, when there’s a rough patch, each coparent can get a relatively more neutral perspective from their mutual friends. This gives the coparents more options for how to diagnose and improve the situation.

We need to know how we are affecting each of our key parties’ well-being, and to know we are at least doing them no harm, so we can attend to it if we are. When they feel good because of us, it feels lovely, and regenerates the soil of our own happiness.

And, just like in soccer where one person cannot possibly cover the entire field, being able to reach the goal of our own happiness relies on the coworkers, friends, coparents, and other loved ones who once in a while help us get perspective on how we are affecting them, and figure out how we can best get our own needs met while honoring their wellbeing too. By ensuring our key others are not harmed, and ideally are helped, while we pursue our own happiness, we can reach the goal of lasting happiness.

But if we play that individual happiness is an individual sport, at the end of the day there will be many losers.

The bottom line is this: our peers determine if the game is win-win or win-lose based on the rules they play by.

What are the integrated thinking rules– the “IT game”?

1. Individual happiness is a team sport.
2. There are 5 key parties whose well-being matters and is key to one’s own. These key parties are all on our team, and need to play with each other to win.
3. The goal is well-being for the other 4 while we attain happiness for #1.

Let’s play!