We drift for a bit. Somebody starts a lawnmower on shore. A duck hunter with a shotgun rows by in a camouflaged skiff. “Maybe the desire we feel is more a natural part of our evolution, something we need to survive and progress along the cultural scale,” I say. “Otherwise we keep living in grass huts with mud floors.”
“It may be evolutionary and wired into us, this survival thing,” Holmes says. “But now the very thing that helped us survive is working to destroy us—relentless consumption. We have to have a new evolutionary part happen.” It’s a curious notion, humans intentionally choosing their evolutionary path. Survival of the happiest instead of survival of the fittest.
One step in that evolution, says Holmes, is understanding that quality time is so much more important than money. Studies show that Americans’ buying power has tripled since 1960, but the percent of people who say they are happy has declined from 40 percent to 30 percent. “People say, ‘Time is money. Time is money. Time is money. I could have made money with my time.’” He laughs like he can’t believe how we’ve been duped. “Well, time is not money,” he says. “Very few of us will run out of money, but every one of us will run out of time.”
I’m scribbling notes as we drift close to shore, so Holmes begins to paddle. Even though we’re going backwards, he makes it work, and we steer out to the middle of the lake, where its beauty opens around us.
“Do you know the most common reason I hear for people not doing what they really want to do?” Holmes asks. He pauses and just looks at me.
I wait for the answer.
“A mortgage. People say, ‘I would do that, but I have to make a mortgage payment.’” Holmes shakes his head, smiles and takes another stroke with the paddle. “I tell people the opposite of what financial planners say. I tell them to pay off that mortgage as soon as you can so you can do what you really want to make yourself happy.”
I can’t help it: I sense a bit of hypocrisy. I’m talking to a Ph.D. psychologist who is married to a physician. “Both you and your wife have worked very hard, given up a great deal of time in pursuit of career, and you have undoubtedly achieved a certain income level,” I say. “What about people who can’t afford to repair their car or meet the rent payment, who have legitimate financial issues in their lives? Wouldn’t working hard to earn more make them happier?”
“Studies show time and again that happiness doesn’t have anything to do with income level,” he says. “But the perception that it does is part of this unhappiness epidemic. Often the pursuit of money takes us away from the very things that do make us happy—spending time with people we love,” he says. Holmes schedules light days at the office specifically so he can spend more time with his family.
But also, happy people deal with suffering in a certain way, whether the suffering results from financial problems or bigger things, like the loss of a child. “Happy people understand that suffering does not represent the totality of their selves, that there is so much more to their lives,” he says.
The fact that people watch The Wizard of Oz over and over again reveals that intuitively we all understand that the ability to be happy lies within each of us, postulates Holmes. All the main characters on the journey think they are missing something they need to be happy. But at the end, each learns they’ve had the power to be happy all along. And when Dorothy becomes angry with the Good Witch of the North for not telling her sooner that she had the power, the Good Witch says, “If I had told you, you wouldn’t have believed me. You had to learn it for yourself.”
But even people who do “get it,” who are able to see reasons for happiness, must be deliberate about their happiness, practice their happiness on a daily basis. “Just as people who stay fit must exercise each day or there is an atrophy of their physical well being,” Holmes says. “Happiness is a daily discipline, it is a practice, to remind ourselves to be happy and not get distracted by this other stuff in our culture, which is so easy to do. You just get swept away.”
By now, we’ve run out of time, and Holmes has steered us back to the boat launch. Two guys in an orange county truck are parked there with their windows rolled down, eating sandwiches and watching the lake. We step out of the canoe and Holmes says to one, “What a beautiful day!”
The guy lights up, flashes a big smile. “It sure is!” he says.
I look around once more. What more could we want?
This story was originally published in the January 2004 issue of Traverse.
Jeff Smith is editor of TRAVERSE.