This is the first of two articles on “happiness”. The second one will be on “joy and pleasure.” Wanting, liking, joy, and pleasure all can lead to happiness, the seeking of happiness, and the finding of happiness. This article is on the difference between wanting and liking, which are both related to finding happiness in life.

It goes without saying that everyone wants to be happy, but sadly, most people fail to find real happiness in life. Even more interesting is the fact that if someone’s goal in life is “to be happy,” they probably won’t be…happy. In other words, happiness cannot be a goal you achieve. It has to be a byproduct of what you think, feel, and do. We know that many different things bring happiness to different people. We are not all the same in what makes us happy. We do know, however, that happiness is about love. More about love later. But let me start with some of the things that brings happiness…and love to life.

I read a very interesting article in one of my psychology journals recently written by a neuropsychologist, Kent Berridge, who is a professor at the University of Michigan. Dr. Berridge, together with some of his colleagues, have been studying “wanting and liking” for many years and have found some interesting brain functions that differentiate these two very human phenomena.

Wanting

I am writing this blog near Christmas. One of the things about Christmastime is that it is a time of “giving,” or at least that is what most of us adults think about Christmas. But for kids Christmas is certainly more about getting more than giving, and we expect nothing less of our kids. It’s so fun to watch you kid open up that big Christmas present and be so happy he got his new bike or X-box. However, there is something more about Christmastime than the giving and getting of presents: the wanting of something, again, mostly for kids. I can’t really think of anything I “want” for Christmas, and neither can Deb. We have agreed for several years to forgo giving each other presents because at this time in our lives individually, and our life collectively, there isn’t much that we really need, much less want. We often repeat what daughter # 2 said when she was 5 or 6. She was with Grandma in a store and had picked out one thing to have Grandma buy, but Grandma asked her if she wanted anything else. Without a blink she said, “I have enough.” Out of the mouths of babes….

But I do remember wanting things for Christmas. I vividly remember when I was about 8 or 9 living in Massachusetts that I dearly wanted a very specific toy, namely a toy shaped like the old telephone operator’s plug-in board system. You know, the kind of thing you see in the old 1940’s movies where the operator (female, of course) is sitting in front of this machine and plugging in and unplugging all sorts of “long distance calls.” I got it for Christmas. I think I felt tremendously happy at getting this most wanted toy of the year. But I never played with it. I didn’t play with it because it didn’t have a purpose. It just looked good. It wasn’t fun. I remember my father insisting that we play with it, so I did, but I didn’t enjoy playing with it. It was boring. I had wanted it but it didn’t like it when I got it. I had wanted the operator’s board toy more than I liked it.

Liking

It is certainly enjoyable to simply like something. I like playing basketball, for instance. I also like writing. I like going to our cabin. I like doing a lot of things. And there are many things that I like that are not activities: I like my wife, I like my friends, I like my family members…even if I don’t always like them. I also like property, like my 2000 Mustang convertible, and the 1966 Mustang I bought 50 years ago. I like my books. I even like my files, by which I mean those papers that are “filed away” in a “file drawer” for those of you who singularly think a “file” is something on the top of your computer screen.

There are degrees of liking, of course. I like my wife more than anyone. I like playing basketball more than golf, waterskiing, and bocce, all of which I occasionally play. I like some books more than others. And there are things on the other side of the liking spectrum, namely things that I don’t like to some degree or other. I find, however, that the more I concentrate on the things I do like, the things I don’t like matter less to me.

Wanting something is fun, and we should never give up wanting things, whether these “things” are ideas, people, places, or material things. A good portion of life should be dedicated to wanting something, working for it, having it, and then using it. We might add…then giving it away. But it is important to know that wanting is not the same as liking. As good as wanting can be, it can get us in real trouble. It can lead to us wanting something that we actually don’t like.

Wanting can lead to addiction. The research that Dr. Berridge has done, as noted above, is partly about how wanting can lead to addiction. Specifically, he notes that people who are addicted to something want the things they are addicted to more than they like them. For instance, apparently want things but don’t particularly like them. The things they hoard clutter up their houses, and they rarely care for these things aside from keeping them. More specifically, alcoholics want to drink more than they actually enjoy drinking; opioid addicts want heroin derivatives more than they actually like the experience of being high.

I wrote to Dr. Berridge and told him that I appreciated his work and how I found it helpful in my understanding of addictions in specific, and wanting vs liking in general. He was kind enough to write back and we started a bit of a correspondence. I am about to summarize Dr. Berridge’s neurological research that may not do adequate justice to his work, but I will indulge myself with my thoughts about the practical implications of his research findings. Simply put, Berridge found that there were two distinctly different places in the brain where the feelings of liking and wanting occur. In other words, when he (and his colleagues) did some examination of brain functioning, they found that these seemingly identical experiences were actually quite different brain functions. Furthermore, there were differences in the chemistry of the brain during liking and wanting. Berridge (and colleagues) found that wanting comes largely from a chemical change in the brain, namely an increase in endorphins, while liking is more of what we might call an electrical process. An even more interesting finding with the Berridge research is that people often “want” something that they do not actually like. So what does all this have to do with happiness?

Finding happiness

Wanting and liking are both ingredients of happiness. In my next blog I will discuss joy and pleasure, but for now allow me to talk about both the value of wanting, the danger of wanting, and the notion the fact that I may not like what I want.

A good portion of happiness is implicit in wanting something, working for it, and achieving it. So wanting is not bad. In fact, an important symptom of emotional depression is what we call anhedonia, which means not having interest in anything and not wanting anything. Wanting is fun and we should enjoy it. But if this wanting is to lead to happiness, it has to be connected with working to get what I want and then finally getting there. Too often people are left singularly with wanting something but never get the ball rolling into working to achieve it. People say they “want to lose weight” but they don’t want to do the work to have these things. They want to have lost weight; they don’t actually want to do the hard work of losing weight by diet and exercise. This wanting without working is childish and needs to be worked out in childhood or through honest hard work as an adult.

We can give kids a bit of liberty in wanting without working, but these days there are other challenges for kids. I am quite concerned about the “screen play” and “screen time” that many kids have these days because watching a screen character do impossible things gives kids the impression that he or she can just get to some place of excellence. Kids need to learn that they need to work to get what for what they want. This is no small task because kids naturally think they should just get what they want. Kids often don’t like something they want. Wanting is wonderful but it is not enough to find happiness.

The second ingredient of happiness, beyond wanting, is liking. Liking is much akin to joy, which we will discuss in the next blog, but is substantially different from true joy. Liking always wanes. So it is important to know that when we like something, it is fun and enjoyable but this feeling will not last…and doesn’t need to last forever. It is good enough to simply like something for a moment or two, or even like someone for a season but not forever. Some things, perhaps like your set of teacups, you might like until you die, and you may like your family members until you die, but most of our liking things wanes over time.

There are roughly four kinds of liking: property, people, experience, and ideas. These four fall in line with the four temperaments we have discussed previously and are at the center of how we evaluate personality (caretakers, lovers, players, and analysts). It seems so odd to people with a “lover” temperament that someone can like (or love) property as much or more than people, but it is absolutely true. I wrote more on this in my Love is Not Enough blog. If we keep in mind that we always lose something that we like, whether it is property, people, experience, or idea, we will be better able to enjoy what we like in the moment. And we can return in our minds to times of having liked something.

Happiness is composed of wanting, liking, pleasure, and joy. We will discuss the last two ingredients in the next blog, Happiness II: pleasure and joy.

Further reading:

Berridge, K.C. and Kringelback, M.L. (2015). Pleasure systems in the brain. In Neuron, Vol. 86, Pp. 646-664.

Berridge, K.C. and Robinson, T.E. (2016). Liking, wanting, and the incentive-sensitization theory of addiction. In American Psychologist, Vol 71, pp 670-679.

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2017). The positive power of sadness: how good grief cures anger, anxiety, and depression. Los Angeles: Praeger Publications