Happy Is As Happy Does
believe that a person whose only sources of pleasure were food, sex, and watching television
would not score very high on the well-being scale. If you examine your own life, I think you
will find that the most dependable and consistent sources of well-being consist of opportunities
to gratify your human effocivace motivation, as Harry Murray called it, doing something useful
and doing it well.
Finally, we come to the question of emergenesis. How is it that happiness seems to depend
upon a configuration rather than a sum of genetic effects? I am much less confident about this
one but I suspect that at least part of the answer has to do with the mutual fit or compatibility of
our individual talents and proclivities, one with another. Having high scores on the MPQ’s
Social Closeness scale, meaning a strong desire for intimate personal relationships, combined
with an equally high score on Aggression, for example, would seem to be a bad fit. But having a
high score on Social Potency, which means wanting to take charge and influence people,
combined with a relative lack of social shyness, would be a good or happy fit. Being high on
Social Potency and also on Aggression turns out to be a good fit for people planning a career in
business management or, probably, politics. These are over-simplified examples but they convey
the idea.
To sum up, then, I believe that the data plus a certain amount of reasonable extrapolation
indicate the following: Our average levels of subjective well-being are determined largely by the
things we do and the things we do are strongly influenced by our unique genetic makeup. We
can continue following the path laid out by our four grandparents or we can change direction, at
least to some extent. The conclusion I come to is much the same as our grandmothers used to
preach: Happy is as happy does.