For who knows what is good for mortals while they live the few days of their vain life, which they pass like a shadow?
Ecclesiastes 6:12
Why Happiness Never Seems to Last
Happiness is a shell game. You guess what will make you happy, flip it over and, more often than not, it’s empty. Psychologists have a name for this phenomenon: affective forecasting error. It’s a fancy label for what Ecclesiastes already taught. We are bad at judging what will make us happy.
Ecclesiastes also taught about another quirk of the human mind, the so-called hedonic treadmill. To put it simply, we get used to pleasure quickly. The “amazing!” of morning becomes the “okay” of midday and the “what’s next” of evening. This keeps us ever unsatisfied and forever running in place. Or as the wise man said, “All rivers run to the sea, but the sea is never filled.” Round and round we go.
In short: We are bad at guessing what will make us happy; and if we do guess correctly, it doesn’t last long. So what’s the good news?
Gratitude: Recognizing Life as a Gift
The good news is that we can’t engineer our own happiness through pleasure seeking, and if we accept that, it can lead us to a better foundation of our well being. While we cannot outline here the full dimensions of that foundation, it’s enough to point out its key characteristic: gratitude.
Psychologists have long studied and measured the positive benefits of gratitude in mental resilience. While it may seem at first glance the banal result of “thinking on the bright side,” gratitude runs much deeper. Gratitude heralds the truth that our source of well being is rooted outside ourselves. It would be nonsensical, after all, to be grateful for what we ourselves produce. As Richard Beck explains, “Doxological gratitude cultivates the experience of life as gift[.]”[1] More than just mentally listing the niceties of one’s life, true gratitude seeks deeper fellowship with the truth that what is most precious in life is not something that we can attain, earn, or manufacture – it is given to us by a God who loves us.
How Worship Reorients Our Hearts
I want to suggest that the reorientation of the self to a life of gratitude is one of the key events that happens every Sunday morning when we gather with fellow believers to worship God in song. Richard Beck explains, “As we see in Paul’s exhortations [Col. 3:16], singing is a central practice of doxological gratitude. Singing is the practice of ‘giving thanks to God the Father for everything.’ Singing is how we cultivate and express to God the ‘gratitude in [our] hearts.’”[2]
I’ve often wondered why I sometimes feel so awkward going into a time of worship. Is it just me? Do you ever look around and think: this feels a bit strange? In contemplating the matter, I’ve come to realize the unsettling truth that this strangeness is the result of living in cross purpose with gratitude, of treating my life as my own personal achievement. My soul feels awkward because it thinks: Shouldn’t I be praising myself?
Facing up to the orientation of your life and repenting whenever necessary is one of the key tasks of our worship every Sunday. Worship is the best compass we have to see the direction our life is heading, whether towards the anxious self-provisioning of pleasure or the unshakable kingdom. This is the call of the Psalmist to worship, to acknowledge these deep truths:
Know that the Lord is God.
It is he that made us, and we are his;
we are his people,
and the sheep of his pasture.
Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
and his courts with praise.
Give thanks to him, bless his name.Psalm 100:3-4
[1] Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2014), 102.
[2] Beck, Slavery of Death, 103.
