MOYERS: Have our expectations (of happiness) changed over the century?

Particularly living in this constant siege of advertising that accelerates, accentuates and exacerbates our longing for everything we see, wanting all of it that's out there. What about that? Have expectations changed?

BOK: It does seem that peoples expectations especially when it has to do with income or with objects such as houses, for instance, or automobiles or something like that. Yes, that they change depending on what other people have. And again many philosophers, many religious theorists... other people have argued, yeah, but you don't have to go that way, there are other ways of being happy.

MOYERS: Someone has said that the unhappiness a person feels is often directly in relationship to his imagined or his exaggerated understanding of other people's happiness. That you're so happy, something must be wrong with me.

BOK: There must be something wrong with me.

MOYERS: Yeah.

BOK: People say that. On the other hand, people also say that especially in America there is this attitude, "Oh, yes, we're all so happy. We all have to be so happy." People use the word "happy" in different ways in America.

Even, for instance, when they say, "I'll be happy to do such-and-such." You wouldn't use the word "happy" in French or German or some other language if you just say, "Yeah, I'd be glad to do whatever it is you ask me." So, that's the notion in America that it is so important to be happy and for everybody else to notice that you are so happy can, indeed, then make a number of people say, "Well, what's the matter with me if I am not that happy?"

[...]

MOYERS: It is so hard to weigh our own desire to achieve happiness against the misery, the contrast between misery and opulence. That is so evident today.

BOK: Yes. And opulence of course many psychologists are now finding, Economists as well. And I think you could read about it in the Bible. Opulence was never the thing that actually makes people happy. And if you go back to the Declaration of Independence the pursuit of happiness was never about dying with the most toys for instance as the expression goes. Meaning accumulating, accumulating.

MOYERS: What do you think the founders meant when they talked about the pursuit of happiness?

BOK: From what I understand, what they meant was something very different from the very individual pursuit that people now often talk about. They really had in mind... the society that they were shaping, of course, the society pursuing happiness for the entire community. And I think that they might come back to us and say, "Look, this is what still is so important."