That iPhone (and your happiness) is impermanent

It's a truth of existence that material things won't bring you lasting happiness. Things break. Or get outdated. Maybe the iPhone 5 brought you bliss -- but now the iPhone 6 is about to be introduced. And that might make you even happier. Until you find the bugs in it or the 7 is rumored.

Expecting things to make us happy only leads to disappointment, which leads to wanting new things. That desire for something to improve the present moment is what creates stress and dissatisfaction, aka unhappiness, the Buddha said.

A new study, Waiting for Merlot: Anticipatory Consumption of Material and Experiential Purposes,  found that people get more enduring happiness when they spend money on experiences than on acquiring things. That extends to waiting in line for those things.

People tended to be more competitive about purchases, and a comparison of news reports about people waiting in line found that long waits for material purchases were more likely to end in violence, researchers said.

One of the study's authors, Amit Kumar, a doctoral student at Cornell University, speculates that experiences give people the opportunity to bond and socialize. Even when if you aren't guaranteed a ticket to a concert or a taco from the cool new food truck, people often enjoy waiting in line. "While waiting for concert tickets, people reported singing songs together, or people would be playing games with each other while they're waiting," he says.

Waiting for the experience became part of the experience, not something that was preventing acquisition of The Thing That Would Give Us All the Happiness.

Westerners speak of the "pursuit" of happiness, which generally depends on running after external conditions ... There is only one problem: The very nature of desire is that it cannot be satisfied -- at least not for long.

The happiness that I'm talking about is not "pursued." In fact, the more we remains elf-contained and do not pursue thoughts or fantasies, or rush from one attractive object to another, the more we can access a wakeful contentment that is always with us. ... This wakeful state of ease is quite joyful and approaches a profound sense of well-being. -- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

It's important to note that contentment doesn't require you to renounce your smartphone or wear nothing but caftans. It's OK to like things -- just know that the happiness they bring is conditional, impermanent, and dependent. It won't last. Contentment, though, is unconditional, luminous, and always there. Pursue that.

Do what makes you happy

The Buddha lists discipline as one of the six paramitas, or transcendent actions, that help us move toward enlightenment. It's not one that most people are eager to talk about. Discipline brings up fears of shame, blame, and deprivation. Buddhist teachers say it's not so. In the Shambhala teachings, it's said that discipline bring joy.

New scientific research agrees.

The research, published in the Journal of Personality, concludes: "Self-control positively contributes to happiness through avoiding and dealing with motivational conflict."

Time reports:

Through a series of tests — including one that assessed 414 middle-aged participants on self-control and asked them about their life satisfaction both currently and in the past — and another that randomly queried volunteers on their smartphones about their mood and any desires they might be experiencing, the researchers found a strong connection between higher levels of self-control and life satisfaction. The authors write that “feeling good rather than bad may be a core benefit of having good self-control, and being well satisfied with life is an important consequence.”

Additionally, self-control appears to be linked to mood: Those who reported more self-control experienced fewer bad moods. But that's not because they denied themselves things they wanted.

This didn’t appear to linked to being more able to resist temptations — it was because they exposed themselves to fewer situations that might evoke craving in the first place. They were, in essence, setting themselves up to happy. “People who have good self-control do a number of things that bring them happiness — namely, they avoid problematic desires and conflict,” says the study’s co-author Kathleen Vohs, professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota.

 Not only does the study confirm the value of discipline, it also supports the Buddhist idea of renunciation. The precepts, or guidelines, laid out by the Buddha for those who aspire to enlightenment, recommend refraining from a number of unwholesome behaviors: Lying, killing, stealing, sexual misconduct, and inebriation.

For monastics, those are rules, and violations can result in dismissal (although different traditions look at them with more or less strictness). For lay people, they are guidelines for measuring whether conduct is beneficial.

They also can be read as promoting the opposite actions: Tell the truth, be sober so that you can stay mindful, don't take advantage of others.

By giving up certain behaviors, we make space for good choices -- or, to quote the study's author, to do the things that bring us happiness.

Get to know your happiness

When Buddhist teachers talk about sitting with intense emotions, they're generally speaking about ones we'd characterize as negative: loneliness, anger, sadness, grief, insecurity. I've never heard a teacher talk about sitting with happiness.

But maybe they should. After all, no matter what we do to avoid our negative emotions, we're very familiar with them. We know how anger feels in our body, its colors and textures, the voices in our head. We know that's different from sadness, which is heavier and has a color and texture all its own.

But we tend to lump positive emotions all together under one heading: happiness.

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Like Tolstoy's happy families, we see happiness as singular -- and not very interesting. But maybe that's because we haven't looked at it. When happiness happens, we're so ... well, happy ... that we're afraid to look too closely or grasp too tightly or like the bluebird, the traditional bringer of happiness, it will fly away.

Matiwos Rumley kicks the ball

“People often use the phrase ‘misery loves company’, and whenever we hear that we reply, ‘happy loves company, too.’ And so it is — that ‘happy’ continues to spread, not just for our family but for the many people Matiwos has touched. We hope you will be watching and smiling along with the Rumleys on Sunday.” Jody Rumley of Hebron, Conn., whose son Matiwos -- adopted from an Ethiopian orphanage in January 2012 -- won his age division in the NFL's Punt, Pass, and Kick competition and will stand at the 50-yard line for the coin toss in Sunday's AFC Championship game.

Here's an idea: The next time you notice that you're not working with a so-called negative emotion, see what's there instead. Is it contentment -- an all's-right-with-the-world feeling? Delight, which for me has gentle bubbling quality, like a low water fountain? Giddy joy -- a 6-year-old spinning just to see her skirt fly out from her body? Bouncy exuberance? How does it express itself: a shy smile, tapping feet, eyes lit up?

What do you do with your happiness?

Naomi Shihab Nye

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records….. Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Poem: "So Much Happiness," by Naomi Shihab Nye from Words under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press).