On the other hand, when we set out to make our own happiness, we’re focused on activity that generates
intrinsic
rewards—the positive emotions, personal strengths, and social connections that we build by engaging intensely with the world around us. We’re not looking for praise or payouts. The very act of what we’re doing, the enjoyment of being fully engaged, is enough.
The scientific term for this kind of self-motivated, self-rewarding activity is
autotelic
(from the Greek words for “self,”
auto
, and “goal,”
telos
).
17
We do autotelic work because it engages us completely, and because intense engagement is the most pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful emotional state we can experience.
As long as we are regularly immersed in self-rewarding hard work, we will be happy more often than not—no matter what else is going on in our lives. This is one of the earliest hypotheses of positive psychology, and a fairly radical idea. It contradicts what so many of us have been taught to believe—that we need life to be a certain way in order for us to be happy, and that the easier life is the happier we are. But the relationship between hard work, intrinsic reward, and lasting happiness has been verified and confirmed through hundreds of studies and experiments.
One well-known study conducted at the University of Rochester, published in 2009, neatly upturns one of the most common assumptions about how happiness works. Researchers tracked 150 recent college graduates for two years, monitoring their goals and reported happiness levels. They compared the rates at which the graduates achieved both extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, with self-reported levels of well-being and life satisfaction. The researchers’ unequivocal conclusion: “The attainment of extrinsic, or ‘American Dream,’ goals—money, fame, and being considered physically attractive by others—
does not contribute to happiness at all.
” In fact, they reported, far from creating well-being, achieving extrinsic rewards “actually does contribute to some ill-being.” If we let our desire for more and more extrinsic rewards monopolize our time and attention, it prevents us from engaging in autotelic activities that would actually increase our happiness.
On the other hand, in the same study the University of Rochester researchers found that individuals who focused on intrinsically rewarding activity, working hard to develop their personal strengths and build social relationships, for example, were measurably happier over the entire two-year period
completely regardless of external life circumstances
like salary or social status.
This research confirms what dozens of other major studies have found: happiness derived from intrinsic reward is incredibly resilient. Every time we engage in autotelic activities, the very opposite of hedonic adaptation occurs. We wean ourselves off consumption and acquisition as sources of pleasure and develop our
hedonic resilience
. As research psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leading expert on intrinsic reward, explains: “One of the chief reasons for the durability of happiness activities is that . . . they are hard won. You’ve devoted time and effort.... You have made these practices happen, and you have the ability to make them happen again. This sense of capability and responsibility is a powerful boost in and of itself.” In other words, we become better able to protect and strengthen our quality of life, regardless of external circumstances. We rely less and less on unreliable and short-lived external rewards and take control of our own happiness. “When the source of positive emotion is yourself . . . , it can continue to yield pleasure and make you happy. When the source of positive emotion is yourself, it is
renewable
.”
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The prevailing positive-psychology theory that we are the one and only source of our own happiness isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a biological fact. Our brains and bodies produce neurochemicals and physiological sensations that we experience, in different quantities and combinations, as pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction, ecstasy, contentment, love, and every other kind of happiness. And positive psychologists have shown that we don’t need to wait for life to trigger these chemicals and sensations for us. We can trigger them ourselves through scientifically measurable autotelic activities.
In fact, from a neurological and physiological point of view, “intrinsic reward” is really just another way of describing the emotional payoffs we get by stimulating our internal happiness systems.
By undertaking a difficult challenge, such as trying to finish a task in a shorter time than usual, we can produce in our own bodies a rush of adrenaline, the excitement hormone that makes us feel confident, energetic, and highly motivated.
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By accomplishing something that is very hard for us, like solving a puzzle or finishing a race, our brains release a potent cocktail of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine. These three neurochemicals in combination make us feel satisfied, proud, and highly aroused.
20
When we make someone else laugh or smile, our brain is flooded with dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and reward. If we laugh or smile, too, the effect is even more pronounced.
21
Every time we coordinate or synchronize our physical movements with others, such as in dance or sports, we release oxytocin into our bloodstream, a neurochemical that makes us feel blissed out and ecstatic.
22
When we seek out what we might describe as “powerful” and “moving” stories, media, or live performances, we’re actually triggering our vagus nerve, which makes us feel emotionally “choked up” in our chests and throats, or we’re firing up our nervous system’s pilomotor reflex, which gives us pleasurable chills and goose bumps.
23
And if we provoke our curiosity by exposing ourselves to ambiguous visual stimulus, like a wrapped present or a door that is just barely ajar, we experience a rush of “interest” biochemicals also known as “internal opiates.” These include endorphins, which make us feel powerful and in control, and beta-endorphin, a “well-being” neurotransmitter that is eighty times more powerful than morphine.
Few of us set out intentionally to trigger these systems. We don’t think of happiness as a process of tapping strategically into our neurochemistry. We just know what feels good and meaningful and satisfying, and that’s the kind of activity we’ll do for its own sake.
Of course, we’ve also developed many external shortcuts to triggering our hardwired happiness systems: addictive drugs and alcohol, rich but unhealthy food, and chronic shopping, to name a few. But none of these methods are sustainable or effective in the long term. As scientists have shown, hedonic adaptation to extrinsic reward will cause our shortcut happiness behaviors to spiral out of control until they no longer work or we can no longer afford them, or even until they kill us.
Fortunately, we don’t have to fight this losing battle. As long as we’re focused on intrinsic and not extrinsic reward, we never run out of the raw materials for making our own happiness. We’re hardwired with neurochemical systems to make all the happiness we need. We just have to work hard at things that activate us and immerse ourselves in challenging activities we enjoy for their own sake.
Writer and self-described happiness explorer Elizabeth Gilbert puts it best: “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.... You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.”
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We have the biological capability to create our own happiness through hard work. And the harder we work to experience intrinsic rewards, the stronger our internal happiness-making capabilities become.
SO WHICH INTRINSIC
rewards, exactly, are most essential to our happiness? There’s no definitive list, but a few key ideas and examples appear over and over again in the scientific literature. My analysis of significant positive-psychology findings from the past decade suggests that intrinsic rewards fall into four major categories.
25
First and foremost, we crave
satisfying work
, every single day. The exact nature of this “satisfying work” is different from person to person, but for everyone it means being immersed in clearly defined, demanding activities that allow us to see the direct impact of our efforts.
Second, we crave
the experience, or at least the hope, of being successful.
We want to feel powerful in our own lives and show off to others what we’re good at. We want to be optimistic about our own chances for success, to aspire to something, and to feel like we’re getting better over time.
Third, we crave
social connection
. Humans are extremely social creatures, and even the most introverted among us derive a large percentage of our happiness from spending time with the people we care about. We want to share experiences and build bonds, and we most often accomplish that by doing things that matter together.
Fourth, and finally, we crave
meaning
, or the chance to be a part of something larger than ourselves. We want to feel curiosity, awe, and wonder about things that unfold on epic scales. And most importantly, we want to belong to and contribute to something that has lasting significance beyond our own individual lives.
These four kinds of intrinsic rewards are the foundation for optimal human experience. They’re the most powerful motivations we have other than our basic survival needs (food, safety, and sex). And what these rewards all have in common is that they’re all ways of engaging deeply with the world around us—with our environment, with other people, and with causes and projects bigger than ourselves.
IF INTRINSIC REWARD
is so much more satisfying and effective in boosting our happiness than extrinsic reward, then shouldn’t we all naturally spend most of our time tackling unnecessary obstacles and engaging in autotelic activity?
Unfortunately, as Sonja Lyubomirsky eloquently explains: “We have been conditioned to believe that the wrong things will make us lastingly happy.”
26
We’ve been sold the American dream. And increasingly, it’s not just Americans who are giving up real happiness in favor of the pursuit of wealth, fame, and beauty. Thanks to the globalization of consumer and popular culture, everyone on the planet is being sold the same dream of extrinsic reward. This is especially true in emerging economies like China, India, and Brazil, where more and more people are being ushered onto the global hedonic treadmill, encouraged to consume more and to compete for limited natural resources as a way to increase their quality of life.
But there is cause for hope. One group is opting out of this soul-deadening, planet-exhausting hedonic grind, and in larger and larger numbers: hard-core gamers.
Games, after all, are the quintessential autotelic activity. We only ever play because we want to. Games don’t fuel our appetite for extrinsic reward: they don’t pay us, they don’t advance our careers, and they don’t help us accumulate luxury goods. Instead, games enrich us with intrinsic rewards. They actively engage us in satisfying work that we have the chance to be successful at. They give us a highly structured way to spend time and build bonds with people we like. And if we play a game long enough, with a big enough network of players, we feel a part of something bigger than ourselves—part of an epic story, an important project, or a global community.
Good games help us experience the four things we crave most—and they do it safely, cheaply, and reliably.
Good games
are
productive. They’re producing a higher quality of life.
When we realize that this
reorientation toward intrinsic reward
is what’s really behind the 3 billion hours a week we spend gaming globally, the mass exodus to game worlds is neither surprising nor particularly alarming. Instead, it’s overwhelming confirmation of what positive psychologists have found in their scientific research: self-motivated, self-rewarding activity really does make us happier. More importantly, it’s evidence that gamers aren’t escaping their real lives by playing games.
They’re actively making their real lives more rewarding.
CHAPTER THREE
More Satisfying Work
P
laying
World of Warcraft
is such a satisfying job, gamers have collectively spent 5.93 million years doing it.
It sounds impossible, but it’s true: if you add up all the hours that gamers across the globe have spent playing
World of Warcraft
since the massively multiplayer online (MMO) role-playing game (RPG) first launched in 2004, you get a grand total of just over 50 billion collective hours—or 5.93 million years.
1
To put that number in perspective: 5.93 million years ago is almost exactly the moment in history that our earliest human ancestors first stood upright.
2
By that measure, we’ve spent as much time playing
World of Warcra ft
as we’ve spent evolving as a species.
No other computer game has ever made so much money keeping so many players occupied for so long. Each
WoW
player spends on average between seventeen and twenty-two hours per week in the virtual world, more time than any other computer game attracts.
3
And the number of subscribers has steadily grown from 250,000 in January 2004 to more than 11.5 million in January 2010, making it the single largest paying game community in the world. (Like many MMORPGs,
WoW
requires players to pay a monthly fee—on average, fifteen dollars—in order to access the virtual world.)
WoW
developer Activision Blizzard currently reaps an estimated $5 million every single day in global subscription fees alone.
4