Kanye West’s 2007 hit “Good Life” is really just a more catchy version of a lot of bad hip hop songs. In the track, which has a very entertaining video that can be found here, West simply lists off all of the possessions and sexual conquests that he believes will make him happy. He raps about a continual stream of flashy cars and flashier women before eventually concluding that “having money’s not everything, not having it is.”
It’s clear that material (and corporal) goods are all that matters to Yeezy, as he poignantly admits, “I always had a passion for flashin.” In the middle of the song, he even rhetorically asks his listeners:
Have you ever popped champagne on a plane,
While getting' some brain?
Whipped it out, she said "I never seen snakes on a plane."
It’s clear what makes Kanye happy, or at least it’s clear what Kanye thinks makes him happy. However, a new field of research called Positive Psychology, which focuses on just what brings people the most joy in their life, is directly challenging many of Kanye’s lyrical assumptions. In the past decade, psychologists have found some interesting and perhaps even counter-intuitive findings regarding human happiness.
For example, consider this 2008 paper led by Colorado State University psychologist Michael Steger regarding the differing effects of eudaimonic and hedonic behaviors on levels of life satisfaction. Eudaimonic behaviors consist of those activities that either fulfill personal goals (like training for a marathon) or directly contribute to the lives of others (like volunteering for a local charity). Hedonic behaviors, on the other hand, are those activities that simply maximize pleasure and minimize pain (like buying a nice steak dinner or watching the entire first season of Gossip Girl). Put simply, hedonic behavior is “feeling good” whereas eudaimonic behavior is “doing good.”
While most people seem to believe that hedonic activities are the most reliable source of happiness, Steger and his colleagues nicely illustrate that it is our eudaimonic behaviors that become our lives’ most fulfilling and pleasurable. In the paper, Steger details how he asked 65 undergraduates to keep a daily diary for three weeks. During this same time period, each student also completed surveys designed to assess his or her individual levels of happiness as well as how much meaning a given participant could find in their lives.
As predicted, the researchers found that eudaimonic behaviors were positively correlated with feelings of well-being while “hedonic behaviors were generally unrelated to well-being, but inversely related to meaning of life.” In other words, not only did indulging not making anyone really feel any better or worse, it also was associated with finding less meaning in one’s life. Steger’s research illustrates that the happiness brought on by hedonic pleasures is incredibly fleeting and ultimately unfulfilling. Although eudaimonic behaviors may not feel great while you do them, it seems as if they bring a sense of accomplishment and meaning that is hard to find anywhere else.
However, as Kanye himself admits, the closest thing he has to a PhD is a pretty huge… nevermind. With the help of T-Pain, “Good Life” reads like a laundry list of pitfalls into a false and fruitless happiness. Mr. West, and pretty much all rappers for that matter, should take a lesson from Dr. Steger’s research and begin to understand that doing good is the most efficient means of feeling good.
A lot of people today complain about how rappers only talk about two things; money and women. And, for the most part, these people are correct. But I think this recent research into human meaning illustrates that a lot of people falsely lust after similar materialistic goods, albeit probably less explicitly. For some reason, we keep on returning to the same unrewarding sources of happiness (but then again, who wants to hear Lil Wayne rap about volunteering at a soup kitchen?). To be fair, there is one line in “Good Life” that would make Steger proud. Near the beginning of the track, Kanye nicely rhymes the underlying meaning of all this happiness research:
The good life, let's go on a living' spree
S-- they say the best things in life are free.
So I guess all is not lost in terms of Kanye’s spiritual enlightenment. But if this is any indication, things might get worse before they get better.
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