On Nov. 27, the Michigan Wolverines football team defeated the Ohio State Buckeyes, 42-27. I went to Michigan. I fell in love with the place. It is the proudest association I have. And for the first time in 10 years, we beat our biggest rival in the biggest and most-watched college football game of the season. This made me happy.
No, it made me ebullient. Euphoric. This win forced me to look up new words for “happiness,” but nothing can capture it. This was an event that had no real impact on my life, and yet it has lifted me to new heights of joy like a hot-air balloon. What’s the word for that? I have never felt anything like it before.
Obviously, as I am not a member of the Michigan football team, I did not play a single snap of that game. And I watched it from my warm and cozy apartment, rather than in the snowy stands of Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor. But I was so invested in the action that my heart-rate tracker thought I was working out. When the game ended, and Michigan had won, I felt as if I had won, too, from hundreds of miles away.
I am, of course, not the only one who felt this way. A fellow Michigan graduate and current N.F.L. Network host Rich Eisen told me that during the game he felt so personally involved that he turned to his wife and asked, “Why does this mean so much to me?” He said that during previous games, when Michigan was losing to Ohio State, he would have to force himself to take stock of what was good in his life. “I would often sit there and think to myself, ‘I’ve got a beautiful family, and I’ve got three healthy children.’”
After Saturday’s win, Eisen was at a loss to describe this particular brand of joy, just as I have been. “Obviously, childbirth and marriages are your best days of your life,” he told me, not all that convincingly. “But this win over Ohio State, I can’t even really put it into words, and it’s my job to do that sort of stuff.”
I wonder, though: Is this happiness — the happiness of any fan after a sports victory of such magnitude — is it real? After all, I didn’t actually do anything to help Michigan win. And technically, my life has not materially changed as a result of it.
I put the question to Robert Waldinger, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School. He directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a longitudinal study that has tracked the physical and mental health of a group of American men for more than 80 years. Dr. Waldinger has thought a lot about the subject of human happiness and gave a TEDx Talk on the subject in 2015 that has been viewed more than 41 million times.
He told me that what I was feeling wasn’t an illusion. He said that following sports can be as emotionally and physically engaging as watching a thriller or horror movie. Both can induce a state called “flow,” which is when you’re fully absorbed and not thinking about anything else.
“Some people describe it when they’re playing a musical instrument. Some people describe it when they’re skiing down a ski slope where you just have to be totally into going down that slope or you’ll crash, right? And there’s something about that flow that’s very satisfying.”
He’s right. During the football game, my mind never left the scene. In fact, during particularly tense sporting events I find it difficult to eat or drink, as my body is also entirely devoted to the task of the game.
But let’s be clear: The joy of a college football game is not the same as the joy of getting married or having a child. (Or is it?) Dr. Waldinger told me that there were three basic types of happiness. The first is hedonic, which is exactly what it sounds like. “It’s like, ‘I’m happy right now because I’m drinking a great cup of coffee or I’m at a good party and I’m having an interesting conversation.’” Or, say, winning a football game after ten years of suffering through losses that have been absolute heartbreak.
Then there’s eudaimonic well-being. That is the happiness that results from doing something meaningful. Dr. Waldinger said that you could be putting your 2-year-old child to bed, and she wants you to read her “Good Night Moon” for the 10th time, and you are exhausted. “It’s the last thing you want to do, but you can’t think of anything more meaningful than reading to your 2-year-old to help her go to sleep.”
Finally, there’s what he called “psychological richness,” a form of happiness in which people value interesting experiences — going parasailing, traveling to exotic locations. We all like to have some of each of the three forms of happiness, Dr. Waldinger says, but some of us prioritize some more than others. I think I know where I stand.
I also wanted to know: Could I possibly take my hedonic happiness from Michigan’s winning a very important football game and make it last?
Unfortunately, the answer is no. No matter how many times I watch replays of the game and bother people who likely do not care with meaningless statistics from the game, i.e., that Hassan Haskins ran for 169 yards and scored five touchdowns.
“Happiness is a transient phenomenon,” Dr. Waldinger told me. We all know this to be true, of course, despite my hope that it might not always be. And we don’t even know sometimes why we feel good one minute and terrible the next.
Then Dr. Waldinger tosses me a bone. “There are ways to prolong that feeling,” he says. He suggests surrounding yourself with good people and environments that you like to be in. But that’s the best he can do. There are limits to our control. “There are no ways to say, ‘I’m going to make this happiness last for two hours longer,’” he says. “I don’t think we can do that.”
I told him, “I wish we could,” and he laughed, saying, “Don’t we all.”
But perhaps there is a form of happiness I can hold onto — one focused on the happiness of other people. Dr. Waldinger didn’t mention it, but there is a Hebrew word, firgun, that basically means experiencing genuine joy at someone else’s accomplishment. And that’s a feeling I’ve been having a lot this week — pure delight for the Michigan team. For the players who got a lot of attention and accolades afterward, and the players who didn’t but still took part in every workout, every game, every play, every effort to do something that hadn’t been done by a Michigan football team since 2011.
After the victory, as students and fans rushed onto the field at Michigan Stadium, the players joined in the celebration, posing for photographs and hugging each other as snow swirled around them. I might as well have been right there with them. And a week later, the skies still seem bluer, the annoying people in life less annoying, and life is just … better.
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