MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 19, 2009
WASHINGTON
Maureen Dowd:
Women are getting unhappier, I told my friend Carl.
“How can you tell?” he deadpanned. “It’s always been whine-whine-whine.”
Why are we sadder? I persisted.
“Because you care,” he replied with a mock sneer. “You have feelings.”
Oh, that.
I feel compassion for Maureen Dowd, but then I feel sorry for squashed pill bugs. All life is sacred in my book--it's my philosophy. (If you want a wordier version, try this: "By having a reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relation with the world. By practicing reverence for life we become good, deep, and alive." Albert Schweitzer) My father's philosophy was pithy like mine "How happy is man meant to be?" Born in 1908, he was understandably old school. He would be surprised to read, courtesy of Ms. Dowd, that men are getting happier. As for the matter of women getting unhappier, there is the old joke that the recipient of an award tells following a glowing introduction "my father would have enjoyed it and my mother would have believed it." I think Ms. Dowd is unhappy all right, and I believe I know why. She is meaner than a seasoned CIA interrogator whose Redskins have just lost a squeaker. Hers is not sorrow, it is karma.
That accounts for Ms. Dowd, a singular woman so to speak, but what about all the other unhappy women, in the plural? Well, something is going on here:
According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier.
Before the ’70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there’s a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives.
The information above and below thanks to Ms. Dowd's Sunday NY Times column.
Marcus Buckingham, a former Gallup researcher who has a new book out called “Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently,” says that men and women passed each other midpoint on the graph of life.
“Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy,” Buckingham writes in his new blog on The Huffington Post, pointing out that this darker view covers feelings about marriage, money and material goods. “Men, in contrast, get happier as they get older.”
Buckingham and other experts dispute the idea that the variance in happiness is caused by women carrying a bigger burden of work at home, the “second shift.” They say that while women still do more cooking, cleaning and child-caring, the trend lines are moving toward more parity, which should make them less stressed.
When women stepped into male- dominated realms, they put more demands — and stress — on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties — and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage.
“Choice is inherently stressful,” Buckingham said in an interview. “And women are being driven to distraction.”
One area of extreme distraction is kids. “Across the happiness data, the one thing in life that will make you less happy is having children,” said Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at Wharton who co-wrote a paper called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” “It’s true whether you’re wealthy or poor, if you have kids late or kids early. Yet I know very few people who would tell me they wish they hadn’t had kids or who would tell me they feel their kids were the destroyer of their happiness.”
The more important things that are crowded into their lives, the less attention women are able to give to each thing.
Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Women are much harder on themselves than men.
They tend to attach to other people more strongly, beat themselves up more when they lose attachments, take things more personally at work and pop far more antidepressants.
“Women have lives that become increasingly empty,” Buckingham said. “They’re doing more and feeling less.”
Another daunting thing: America is more youth and looks obsessed than ever, with an array of expensive cosmetic procedures that allow women to be their own Frankenstein Barbies.
Men can age in an attractive way while women are expected to replicate — and Restylane — their 20s into their 60s.
Buckingham says that greater prosperity has made men happier. And they are also relieved of bearing sole responsibility for their family finances, and no longer have the pressure of having women totally dependent on them.
Men also tend to fare better romantically as time wears on. There are more widows than widowers, and men have an easier time getting younger mates.
Stevenson looks on the bright side of the dark trend, suggesting that happiness is beside the point. We’re happy to have our new found abundance of choices, she said, even if those choices end up making us unhappier.
A paradox, indeed.
Lo and behold, "happiness is beside the point" sounds a lot like my late father's philosophy to me. I should see if the birthday/date of death are synchronized--I may have located a reincarnated parent courtesy of Maureen Dowd. I might have to change my attitude toward Ms. Dowd. At a minimum I might have to renew my subscription to the Sunday NY Times. Mentioning the Times is inviting all kinds of trouble into your day. Here is another lead c/o Ms. Dowd's Sunday column:
As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined “The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling”: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk.”
The human central nervous system: brain and spinal cord. We live here. We flit about among the 100,000,000,000, neurons whose synaptic connections number 100,000,000,000,000.
But enough wallowing in opinion, let's see what hard science tells us about all this. After all, the chemical neurotransmitter of happiness, a sort of blue bird of happiness in the intracranial world, is well known and under study in many centers. A whole field of pharmacology endeavors to manipulate this hormone which cannot be taken by mouth to any good effect. The brain, a kind of pharmaceutical factory in its own right, makes the hormone on site. And while we can slow the loss of the substance from the brain, we lack the means to infuse it into the brain. This neurotransmitter is serotonin. Drugs like Prozac (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, SSRI) work to slow the loss of the substance from the brain. What happens if all the serotonin is lost and no more is made? Here is a study from Berlin:
"A lack of serotonin, commonly known as the "happiness hormone", in the brain slows the growth of mice after birth and is responsible for impaired maternal behavior later in life. This was the result of research conducted by Dr. Natalia Alenina, Dana Kikic, and Professor Michael Bader of the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) Berlin-Buch, Germany. They also discovered that the presence of serotonin in the brain is not crucial for the survival of the animals. Furthermore, they were able to confirm that there are two strictly separate pathways of serotonin production: One gene is responsible for the formation of serotonin in the brain, another gene for the production of the hormone in the body (PNAS)*.
The researchers "switched off" the gene Tph2 in mice to elucidate the function of the gene in the brain. Tph2 produces the enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase (TPH), which is responsible for the formation of serotonin.
After the researchers switched off Tph2, the animals produced almost no serotonin in the brain. Nevertheless, the animals were viable and half of them survived until adulthood. However, they needed more sleep during the day and the regulation of their respiration, body temperature, and blood pressure was altered.
The female mice were able to give birth and produced enough milk to feed their pups, but their impaired maternal behavior led to poor survival of the offspring.
The Tph2 gene was discovered by MDC researchers several years ago together with researchers of the Free University (FU) Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin (HUB)."
Informationsdienst Wissenschaft: http://idw-online.de/pages/en/news322087.
Press release
Lack of "Happiness Hormone" Serotonin in the Brain Causes Impaired Maternal Behavior in Mice
Barbara Bachtler, Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit
Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin (MDC) Berlin-Buch
06/23/2009 12:03
Science will no doubt elucidate the pathways, products, and effects of impaired production and so forth and so on. But is happiness a product of brain chemistry? And if yes, is brain chemistry the only factor to consider? There are a lot of problems associated with the SSRI drugs, as well as with older drugs aiming also at "anti depression." Are there ways beside drug therapy to enhance serotonin production, or retard its loss from the brain? Where does the Dalai Lama fit into all this? How happy is man meant to be?
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