Apple Pie and the Art of Human Happiness

Thriving in a lonely wilderness

They say that men hunt, and women gather. This is an accurate description of the Apple Pie family: Every summer the males muster together, debate over a crude map of the area, and go out in search of wild apples. Our prey is not particularly cunning, but well camouflaged among the vivid summer foliage, and protected by numerous lookalikes which taste like stale sweat. The native wildlife is wary but unaggressive, and can usually be placated by knocking at the entrances to their simple dwellings and showing them the sacks we use in our hunting.

Many a warm afternoon has been wiled away wandering the suburbs of sleepy, small town New England where all shapes and sizes of apples grow along the roadside, from tiny red or yellow crab apples to much larger specimens which, possibly due to hybridization, have the same piquant aftertaste of the smaller crab apples. The trees are not tall, and once you find a good one it’s no effort at all to pick bright apples from the branches or right from the ground, throwing the bad ones into a pile off the side. And every season, one of the first trees to ripen grows in our very own backyard. Summer is a good time in New England.

But when January snows blanket the ground, the last apples are picked, and there’s not much to do except shovel the paths clear…

…it may seem that the summer’s joy lies very much behind us. Yet with time and care, the treasure of those warmer days can be carefully safeguarded, set aside for an unknown future, tucked away by the bottom of the basement stair where the dreams of distant summer-times can slumber safely in a small canvas bag. Apple pie in summer may be no surprise. But in the depths of winter, it’s absolutely wonderful.

Not pictured: Two hours spent cutting them up, making the crust, getting it all into the oven, driving to the store to buy cream, whipping the cream, and shooing children out of the way.

Now that the surprise has sprung, and the first pie is already eaten, the younger members of the Apple Pie family have turned to the serious discussion about how slices from the remaining two pies should be doled out. My advice has simply been to eat them. After three months, the time for waiting is over; if you are ever going to be happy about anything, you had best enjoy what’s right in front of you.

A good enough strategy for this specific situation. But life is full of little eddies and whirls, situations peculiar to the individual person who often wonders what to do, in general, to be happy? This question will be especially poignant for my readers who, sadly, don’t know how to make their own apple pie. It is for the sake of such somber people that this post is written.

What Can You do to be Happy?

To psychologists, the study of happiness can be broken down into positive affect (being happy), freedom from negative affect (not being sad) and life satisfaction, though all of this tends to be studied under the umbrella of Subjective Well-Being (SWB). Though it may not exactly roll off of the tongue, subjective well-being is the term I’ll use throughout this article; it’s the term you should use if you’ve a mind to poke around for studies on Google Scholar.

Unfortunately actual advice from the scientific community on successfully improving your satisfaction with life is rare, and optimism may be muted given the typical finding that about half the variation in subjective well-being is attributable to heritable personality traits (Bouchard & Loehlin, 2001).

But there are some practical lessons to be found by sifting carefully through the literature. The next few quotes are all from John Helliwell’s 2011 article, “How can subjective Well-Being be improved?” Many of his suggestions take the form of public policy recommendations, but there are snippets of useful advice for individuals as well. If you’re keen to check through the research off of which these conclusions are based, you can find them all in the original article, cited in the references section below.

The first finding pertains to health. Social interactions improve recovery after a stroke, and doing things together with others can increase your pain threshold:

[W]hen conditions are experimentally controlled, adding modest but meaningful social interactions significantly increased the subjective well-being of seniors in a UK residential care facility. Similarly, prospective studies show that stroke victims with more social contacts recover faster and more fully, especially if the social connections can be maintained.

The basic and inherent nature of the social nature of humans is revealed by experiments showing that even just rowing in synchrony elevates pain thresholds by one-third over doing the same workout in isolation. (Helliwell, 2011)

So no surprise, here. Having friends, close relationships with family, and good relationships at work is very important for building and maintaining subjective well-being. Though the replication crisis should make us wary, this is a very common finding. In particular, larger and more homogeneous social networks promotes subjective well-being (Van der Horst & Coffé, 2012; Churchill & Smyth, 2020). In other words, having more friends like yourself makes life better.

But there is another road to improving subjective well-being: Generosity.

Although all positive social connections are associated with higher subjective well-being… altruism – doing things for others – has enhanced power to improve SWB, to an even greater extent than people realize. Regular peer-to-peer counseling between patients with multiple sclerosis was found to benefit the givers significantly more than the recipients. Students assigned to give money away were happier than those who spent it on themselves, and more so than they expected. (Helliwell, 2011)

Given the effort some people go to obtain money from others, legally or otherwise, it may be surprising that altruistic acts make us feel better than acts centered on ourselves. But this may help to explain human ethical intuitions about doing good for others—we feel good when we help people.

Importance of Proximity

Everyone knows that helping others is what we’re supposed to do. But the way in which altruism has been encouraged on moral grounds has always veered into the usual moral quagmires where philosophers seem to enjoy spending their days. Ultimately these ethical discussions obfuscate the practical importance of altruism as a way for people to thrive for their own sake, as well as the sake of others.

You may have heard about Peter Singer, a utilitarian philosopher and well-known supporter of effective altruism. At the end of the 20th century, Singer (1997) proposed a thought experiment to his students: What if, on the way to school, you found a child drowning in a pond? Would you think that we have a duty to save that child? Would this even be the case if so would ruin a set of expensive clothes you were wearing, or if it would make you late for class? Would it matter if other people are walking by, ignoring the child?

Singer’s students consistently told him that yes, they would save the child, and no other issues—about clothes, tardiness, other people ignoring the child, nothing—would make any difference about how they felt.

Singer argues that this proves we have a duty to help people all over the world, who are, figuratively if not literally, drowning. “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.” (Gharib, 2021.)

But Singer is using human intuition as the basis for morality, a mistake I’ve pointed out elsewhere. That this kind of reasoning doesn’t work is aptly demonstrated by the way people are not very excited about the prospects of sending money to help children they’ve never seen in cities they’ve never heard of.

Arguments like “Because you feel compelled to help others nearby, you are also compelled to help others far away” don’t make any sense at all. Indeed, we could easily reason backwards to say that nobody has any duty even to save a child drowning right in front of them: “Because you don’t feel compelled to help people far away, you aren’t compelled to help people right in front of you.” Why would anyone do this?

Philosophers often want to smooth over contradictions in human intuition by asking us to choose one intuition over another. In this particular case, that gives us two obvious choices: take our intuition about helping people nearby, and apply it to people everywhere, or, take our intuition about ignoring the troubles of people far away, and apply that to people nearby.

Or instead, we might realize that for human beings, proximity really matters:

Life is more local than most people realize. This is true both for the relative strengths of near-by and far-way trade, migration and capital movements (with the distant much less frequent than could be justified by transport costs) and for the densities of, and SWB derived from, social connections. Thus we find that while local, provincial and national senses of belonging, and their related identities, all provide significant, and simultaneous, support for Canadian life satisfaction, a sense of belonging to the local community has the much the largest effect, bigger than the sum of the other two effects together. In fact, it would appear that a good part of the strong life-satisfaction effect of trust in neighbors is mediated through a sense of belonging to the local community, since the direct effect of neighborhood trust is one-third less when the equation also contains the respondent’s sense of belonging to the local community. (Helliwell, 2011)

This is what humans are like: whether you think it should, or shouldn’t, proximity matters to us. There will always be exceptions, of course, but it’s clear that humans just like to be nice to people around them. For most of us, at least, this is one of the things that makes us happy.

The importance of directing altruism to those nearby us may arise due to a basic fact about reality: When we help those near to us, we ultimately help ourselves. A book, a game, or a belt sander we buy for a friend increases the amount of books, games, and belt sanders in our neighborhood. When we plant an apple tree in the neighbor’s yard, how likely is it that we will never be able to pick the apples that grow along its boughs?

Moreover, the feeling of trust and cooperation which builds when we help someone close to us encourages them to return the favor. When people are nice to me, I know where to direct my own altruism: right back to them, building camaraderie and trust between ourselves in a way that makes us all stronger.

Trust is Important

Survey data from many countries suggests that both trust and social connections have independent linkages to subjective well-being. Indeed, when respondents are
asked to evaluate separately their trust in several different domains (e.g. in the workplace, in the police, among neighbours) their answers differ substantially, and trust in each of these dimensions is among the strongest correlates of SWB. To have or not have trust in each of these key areas of life has the life satisfaction equivalent of more than a doubling of income. (Helliwell, 2011)

There’s something of a debate in biology about whether humans are eusocial, like ants who cooperate communistically, or merely prosocial, habitually cooperating with society in ways that benefit others around them. I tend to think we’re merely prosocial, but even so, look at what this means: We combine our talents together to form enormous societies where individuals fulfill the duties of numerous social roles, meeting the needs of kin, neighbors, employers, and the government every day. If we didn’t do this, we’d be stuck at the level of small families, and other tribes who were capable of cooperating would presumably have displaced us long ago. Instead we form enormous societies capable of working together to erect buildings over 800 meters—half a mile high—to sequence our own genomes, and to produce the device you’re reading this on.

How is all of this achieved? By disinterested, disconnected agents cooperating with each other purely out of a sense of individualistic self interest?

Some may well think so. But I think we want to live around people we trust—neighbors, co-workers, police—because if we can trust them, then rather than having to live in a state of low-level paranoia, we can relax into happy cooperation with people around us. Although, again, everybody is different, and some people do like this more than others, general human nature is not stupid: We would rather spend time cooperating in order to build and grow and succeed, rather than wasting effort in strife and zero-sum competition that benefits no one in the long term.

It is easiest to cooperate with people when we’ve formed close relationships with them—it’s easiest to cooperate with family, and with friends.

A Philosophical Interlude

So all the above is based on psychological research. Given the replication crisis, we may well wonder whether there is something else we could use to verify their findings. What about philosophers? When they aren’t busy telling us how we should be, and just write about what actually is, they seem to say that our social bonds are, well, really important:

Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friends.

—Epicurus of Samos

And:

In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old, they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life, they incite to noble deeds.

—Aristotle

And:

Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.

[P]ity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.

—King Solomon the Wise

Of course, Mediterraneans weren’t the only philosophers with ideas about the good life. What about people elsewhere, like maybe my own ancestors? Despite the fact that the Germanic Heathens were essentially illiterate barbarians in the time of the Bible, ideas attributed to Woden do still survive to the present day, preserved in a text known as the Hávamál.

Given that we are talking about the Vikings’ chief god here, you might be forgiven for suspecting that Woden’s thoughts on what is best in life largely revolved around crushing his enemies, seeing them driven before him, and hearing the lamentations of their women. But in reality, the Hávamál actually reads very much like the world’s first edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People:

Mutual giving makes for friendship,
So long as life goes well.

Not great things alone must one give to another,
praise oft is earned for nought;
with half a loaf and a tilted bowl
I have found me many a friend.

To his friend a man should bear him as friend,
to him and a friend of his;
but let him beware that he be not the friend
of one who is friend to his foe.

—Woden

OK so maybe I truncated one of those quotes to edit out some weapon-related advice. But strangely, it turns out that weapons themselves don’t even seem to make anybody that happy. Here are the words of the first European to identify the process for making gunpowder, and, well, it turns out that no matter how great it is to blow things up:

Without friends the world is but a wilderness.

—Francis Bacon

Who Can Keep the World From Being But a Wilderness?

Francis Bacon taps into a deep human experience: When you’re lonely, life feels cold and empty, even surrounded by other people. Indeed, the wilderness itself is formed of those unfriendly faces, like stark, leafless trees that don’t bear fruit. It’s only people we like who bring warmth and color to our existence. Not everyone can do this. The English verb “to like” comes originally from simple similarity—we like people when we notice a likeness in them; when we perceive ourselves to be alike.

This is the repeated finding of psychological science. Those who are like us, become our spouses (Glicksohn & Galan 2001; Escorial & Martín-Buro 2012) and our friends (Selfhaut et al., 2010; Lönnqvist & Itkonen 2016). Likeness is important enough that, even though friends are genuinely similar to one another, respondents’ ratings of their friends are biased to make them seem more similar still (Lee et al., 2009). People want their friends to be more like them than they actually are.

But where does this leave people who are unusual? If everyone likes those who are like themselves, what about those of us who are different? I know, I know, lately “different” has taken on the connotation of being diagnosed with some kind of psychological problem, but this isn’t always the case. For every person who faints at the sight of a chess board, there’s a Magnus Carlssen. For every person who falls down when they try to throw a bean bag, there’s a Walter Johnson. For every person who can’t blow their nose without giving themselves a paper cut, there’s a Sadako Sasaki. When I write about some people being different, I mean that in the broad sense, the way Magnus, Walter, and Sadako are different. For those of us who happen to be blessed, cursed, or just strange, the ordinary socialization that makes life worth living can lie, seemingly, forever out of reach.

This is the finding of a much-discussed paper from the turn of the millennium, titled “Smart teens don’t have sex (or kiss much either).” In this case the headline doesn’t say it all: the effects they found were strongly curvilinear, such that people at the highest, and lowest, IQ levels both showed lower social connectedness. It’s not easy to be strange. (Halpern et al., 2000.)

In fact, this social isolation of people at the high end of the intelligence scale has been observed in children for decades:

[G]enerally speaking, a leadership pattern will not form—or it will break up—when a discrepancy of more than about 30 points of IQ comes to exist between the leader and the led… Among school children—as among the peoples of all times—the great intellectual leaders are unrecognized, isolated, and even ridiculed by all but a few…

Hollingworth (1942)

This is a problem that often persists into adulthood; for an excellent review of overall social adjustment of the very intelligent, see Wigtil & Henriques (2015) in the references section. But being very smart isn’t the problem; it’s being way, way smarter than anybody else around you:

Sheldon Cooper, the genius physicist from “The Big Bang Theory” TV series is often portrayed as being detached and distant from normal folk, particularly because of his use of complex language and arguments. However… Sheldon could still be a leader—if he can find a group of followers smart enough to appreciate his prose! (Antonakis & House, 2017)

Sheldon looks bizarre because everyone else defines what’s normal. In a world filled with Sheldon, Sheldon is normal. No matter who you are, the trick to having a good life is to find a path that leads to a world of people who are normal to you.

Finding the Right Path

People are often surprised when they stop to think about the solar system in constant motion—the Earth forever spinning, falling and falling and falling through empty space. We are most definitely not stationary. Nor is our sun; Sol follows the same elliptical dance around Sagittarius A*, the great black hole at the center of our galaxy.

This motion is thoughtless, effortless, an endless drifting through the cosmic dark. Indeed, the Earth can’t not orbit the sun! To change our trajectory so that we tumbled into Jupiter or ceased to spin on our axis would require the expenditure of Yottajoules of energy. (Hint for readers who aren’t up on their metric system: this is a lot of energy)

For most of us, our lives follow a predictable trajectory. An outside observer could, comparing our lives with thousands of others, predict our career, the rough timing and success of our relationships, and the nature of our retirement, and where we finally were laid to rest. It doesn’t take effort to follow the obvious path. It takes effort to change it.

People tend to focus on the here-and-now, but we have virtually no control over the here and now. At the time of this writing, there is snow everywhere around my house; there are no apples to be picked. By thinking carefully about which variety of apples to save, and where, and how, in October, I was able to alter the foreseeable future and bring pies into the Ides of January. By January it is already too late; you have to wait for next year.

The wise way to find happiness is to make decisions in the present that lead to happiness far down the line. When you reach a fork in the road, take the path that goes where you want to end up, and that way, you won’t wear yourself out constantly struggling to make things better in the present.

So think about what your future will be like if you’re still under the thumb of your domineering stepfather, or if you haven’t addressed your alcoholism, or if you haven’t dealt with the emotional baggage of a tragedy from your childhood.

More specifically, think about what your future will be like if you never develop interesting skills, get an education, or start a career. Think about what your future will be like without a club or a church to go to where people share your interests. Think about what your future will be like without a satisfying marriage, or a family.

If you’re on a path right that doesn’t lead to any of those things, I recommend that you do some serious thinking right now, and get ready for a struggle. It’s worth struggling if that means turning around, changing direction, and getting onto a path that will take you to a better place in the future.

But why work so hard to get on the path to education, or a club, or a career, or marriage, or children? After all, everybody knows that money isn’t everything, clubs are a pain, marriages take work, and children aren’t for everybody. But if you’re strange, then the surest hope of finding the human relationships that make life meaning is to be around other people like you.

How to do that?

Here’s What Worked For Me

Learning to draw. People will gladly spend 20 seconds looking at your artwork, if it’s any good. The great thing about drawing is that it can also helps to sort out people who won’t be good friends when they object to your style or subject matter.

Starting a fiction writers’ group. Writing isn’t a skill I’d suggest you cultivate to make friends; “Do you want to spend a half an hour reading something” is a much, much bigger investment than “Do you want to see a drawing?” I absolutely love writing fiction just for its own sake, but that doesn’t build social connections on its own. Joining writers’ groups didn’t work that well either, because I hated everyone else’s fiction. But starting my own group allowed me to tailor it to exactly the kind of thing I like to read, and for me, that worked really well.

Learning to play chess. I hated chess as a youngster. But I kept it up, and over the years countless people have been happy to sit down over a board. It turns out people who play chess are generally pretty cool.

Starting roleplaying groups. For me this was kind of the same as fiction. I learned to like chess, but no amount of exposure can ever make me like that popular roleplaying game I won’t mention. (You know what it is, and if you don’t know, you’re better off.) So I made my own game that I liked, and then got people to play it. Years ago I would have told you this was probably not the way to make friends, but that was years ago when I spent hours and hours alone perfecting it, and since then I’ve played more times than I could count, and well, tabletop roleplaying games may be pretty geeky, but they are also a great way to make friends.

Sitting right next to attractive people in class on the first day. If you sit far away from someone you’re interested in, you’re constantly looking in their direction (and trying not to look), and making excuses to go by where they sit (and trying to seem casual), and the whole thing is just going to be a dismal failure. Sit next to them on the first day. Give no explanation. It must be a reasonable place to sit, because they sat there themselves, right? Then talk to them casually, and three months later realize that either a relationship has effortlessly formed because your path was good, or else, realize that they are annoying and go sit somewhere else.

Getting married and having kids. This has been the very best, the very most successful thing for me ever. Starting groups and finding cool people to hang around with feels like trying to build glorious sand castles on the beach at low tide; one way or another, people will move away, you’ll switch jobs, and the tide will come sweeping in. But with a spouse, you just have to put in the work to communicate and maintain the relationship, and with kids, they are automatically a lot like you not only because they share half your genes, but because even the half they don’t inherit from you comes from your spouse, who is also like you.

So this is what I would say is the very best advice for someone who is unusual. Some of them are still pretty young, but I’d already rather talk to the older kids than to random adults. Compared to my older kids, most grown-ups I meet already seem less interesting, less full of ideas, and more saddled with frustrating notions I have to talk around to avoid offending them.

I’m a happy man today—much, much happier than before—because I patiently built the skills required to be interesting to other people, because took advantage of the university as a means to marriage, and marriage as a means to children. Here in the strange world of modern America, one’s friends may come and go, but family ties can only be broken deliberately.

Apple pie is my insurance policy. So long as I know how to make it, these kids won’t forget their old man on the holidays. Whatever else I may say about my wife and children, I am very, very glad for them.

References

Antonakis, J., House, R. J., & Simonton, D. K. (2017). Can super smart leaders suffer from too much of a good thing? The curvilinear effect of intelligence on perceived leadership behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(7), 1003.

Awaworyi Churchill, S., & Smyth, R. (2020). Friendship network composition and subjective well-being. Oxford Economic Papers, 72(1), 191-215. PDF

Bouchard, Thomas J. Jr.; Loehlin, J.C. (2001). "Genes, evolution, and personality". Behavior Genetics. 31 (3): 243–273.

Escorial, S., & Martín-Buro, C. (2012). The role of personality and intelligence in assortative mating. The Spanish journal of psychology, 15(2), 680-687.

Halpern, C. T., Joyner, K., Udry, J. R., & Suchindran, C. (2000). Smart teens don’t have sex (or kiss much either). Journal of Adolescent Health, 26(3), 213-225.

Helliwell, J. F. (2011). How can subjective well-being be improved. New directions for intelligent government in Canada, 283-304. PDF

Hollingworth, L. S. (1942). Children above 180 IQ Stanford-Binet: origin and development. DigiCat.

Jones, G. (2015). Hive mind: How your nation’s IQ matters so much more than your own. Stanford University Press.

Lee, K., Ashton, M. C., Pozzebon, J. A., Visser, B. A., Bourdage, J. S., & Ogunfowora, B. (2009). Similarity and assumed similarity in personality reports of well-acquainted persons. Journal of personality and social psychology, 96(2), 460.

Lönnqvist, J. E., & Itkonen, J. V. (2016). Homogeneity of personal values and personality traits in Facebook social networks. Journal of Research in Personality, 60, 24-35.

Malaka, Gharib. (2021, September 29). Why Peter Singer — The 'Drowning Child' Ethicist — Is Giving Away His $1 Million Prize. Goats and Soda. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/29/1039417879/why-peter-singer-the-drowning-child-ethicist-is-giving-away-his-1-million-prize

Selfhout, M., Burk, W., Branje, S., Denissen, J., Van Aken, M., & Meeus, W. (2010). Emerging late adolescent friendship networks and Big Five personality traits: A social network approach. Journal of personality, 78(2), 509-538.

Singer, P. (1997). The drowning child and the expanding circle. New Internationalist, April 1997. PDF

Van der Horst, M., & Coffé, H. (2012). How friendship network characteristics influence subjective well-being. Social Indicators Research, 107(3), 509-529. Full Text

Wigtil, C. J., & Henriques, G. R. (2015). The relationship between intelligence and psychological well-being in incoming college students. Psychology of well-being, 5(1), 1-19. PDF.