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THERE'S ONE RESEARCH paper in the field of happiness science that is particularly unhappy. Its authors set out to measure how long the positive mental effects of a good experience, such as earning a promotion, lasted. Three months, they found. Ninety measly days. Your happiness, as brief as a moth's life.
On Nov. 2, the Cubs won the seventh game of the World Series and finally had everything they ever wanted. On Feb. 12, the first pitchers and catchers will report to major league spring training. November to December to January to February: three months. This ticking clock seems a perverse repurposing of those four words Cubs fans have clung to for generations. Wait 'til next year, indeed.
Yes, the premise of this story is a cheap trope. "Something is lost or not quite the same," USA Today worried on behalf of Red Sox fans after 2004, and writers and fans have managed to stay unsettled by the fallout of that victory ever since. The decade after 2004 -- two more championships, the astoundingly pleasurable career of David Ortiz, waves of young talent, Fenway's sellout streak -- were fretted over. "True" fans created barriers to late entry, dismissing bandwagoners with the sexist "pink hats" slur. The subsequent victories didn't seem as sweet, and even defeats left fans emptier than they used to. The franchise got bogged down by bad contracts and drama, the story goes, and like the pigs in Animal Farm, it began to resemble the Yankees after all.
But if the point of baseball is to bring us as much happiness as possible (and what else could it possibly be?), this is at least a cheap trope worth engaging. Over the past 50 years, research into well-being has revealed the unsettling fact that we are awful at predicting what will make us happier. Marriage doesn't, kids don't, higher income doesn't, BMWs don't. Winning the lottery does ... for a few weeks. Then the winners of particularly large sums actually end up ... unhappier.
We can accept this science while rejecting its bleakness. Being born into Cubs fandom was a miracle for which every Wrigleyville streetlight climber should be justifiably grateful. But the hard work to lasting happiness is just beginning in Chicago.
THERE'S A CUBS fan named Stuart Shea. In 1969, he moved to Chicago and, at age 7, became an everyday fan. Answering the question of whether it has been a happy experience is complicated.
Happiness is an ambiguous word. Some psychologists actually shy away from it, referring to "hedonic well-being" -- a jargony synonym that describes attaining pleasure and avoiding pain, eating cotton candy and kissing your prom date and so on.
But research has shown we quickly get complacent after any positive event and return to our baselines: the "hedonic treadmill" theory. An example from the stands: A study that asked football fans to predict how they would feel if their team won the next game found they overestimated, by a lot.
The optimistic spin on this research is that we adapt to bad stuff too. Long and painful slogs are rarely as long or painful as we imagine. Further, research has shown that adversity really does make us stronger. People who had gone through significant negative life events -- bereavement, illness, a fire -- later reported better mental health than those who hadn't.
In many ways, then, the brain's capacity to withstand sorrow benefited Cubs fans. The championship drought bred in them an adaptive resilience to the day-in, day-out disappointment that afflicts almost all baseball fans, 97 percent of whose teams won't win any given World Series. It allowed them to savor for decades the imaginative pleasure of a future title. It prompted them to reframe the franchise's struggles as a source of pride, a rallying point for a community of tested partisans. It was, one might even say, pretty good, even if hedonically unfulfilling.
Stu Shea, our Cubs fan since '69, lived through the unfulfilled promise of rosters studded with Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Fergie Jenkins and Ron Santo. He trudged into and out of Wrigley Field for hundreds of losses that brought heartache and for hundreds of wins that led only to dead ends. He saw Kerry Wood strike out 20 on a May afternoon, and then he saw Kerry Wood's career break into fragments. He joined a cult that self-identified as "losers." He went to Game 6 of the 2003 NLCS and, after watching Moises Alou erupt when a fan named Steve Bartman attempted to catch a foul ball, Shea walked outside with a Cubs fan base that, he recalls, "felt that something had gone bad in the universe."
The next day, he made the decision not to seek the hedonic sort of well-being from the team anymore, and he mostly ignored Game 7. "I went through a total change; 2003 was the last year I would say I was a fan in the traditional way."
But there's another approach that psychologists take to studying happiness, one that strikes to the core of Shea's fandom: eudaimonic well-being, which describes a sense of meaning, self-realization, purpose. It's what Aristotle meant when he said, "Happiness turns out to be an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue."
Any observer would call Shea's Cubs fandom cursed. In his recollection, it was blessed beyond reason -- by the dignified greatness of Banks and Santo, by the peak of Wood, by season tickets bought with hope each time, by the familiar walkways and sight lines of Wrigley Field (about which he published a book in 2014) and by the community of Cubs fans who went through it with him. He was blessed by the metronome of baseball, a sport so fascinating to him still that he went to 40 Cubs games even in 2004, the year after he tried to quit.
For Stu, the experience of watching the game itself produces eudaimonic well-being. It's the feeling of identifying with a team's resilience. It's the feeling of gratitude and the knowledge that the players are grateful for you. It's not contingent on the outcome. It's jumping off the treadmill.
So when Kris Bryant made that final throw to Anthony Rizzo, Shea didn't feel a hedonic spike of dopamine so much as relief for every Cubs fan he knew. "They can put all this to rest and go through life not worrying that they've been left out by God. They can enjoy baseball for what it is."
IN THE DAYS after Nov. 2, we all smiled as we watched the videos of ancient Cubs fans celebrating -- the man opening the 32-year-old can of beer, or 108-year-old Hazel Nilson wearing an inside-out rally cap. Were we happiest for these fans because we knew the limitless suffering they'd endured? Or because we knew that they alone won't be so burdened by the long task of living that follows the final out?
For the Cubs, as with their fans, the challenge starts anew, and it's worth asking what that challenge is. For Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer, the goal is to win another World Series, and another, and another. But for the franchise, the goals aren't as narrow. A team doesn't exist to win the World Series but to make its fans happy.
A few years ago, at Baseball Prospectus, I looked at what differentiated World Series winners and losers after the series ended and found two things: World Series winners over the past 25 years have averaged five fewer wins the following season than the losers did. Perhaps relatedly, World Series winners tend to bring almost all their players back, while World Series losers continue to upgrade.
There's an evolutionary reason for this: Our brains' job is not to be happy but to make progress. But when we are happy -- as, for three months at least, World Series winners are -- we simply enjoy; we remain sated.
From this perspective, the GM who stands pat is falling for the delusion of his own happiness; he's expecting the happiness of that World Series to last forever, when in fact it never will. This, clearly, is what Epstein feared back in 2004. When The Boston Globe named Epstein its Bostonian of the year, it also considered whether the man who assembled the "lovable, series-grabbing squad" would next dismantle it. Epstein rejected the happiness delusion: "There's no room for sentiment," he said.
Then again, from another perspective, the GM that embraces his championship squad has jumped off the treadmill, just like Stu. He has recognized that the World Series is only one measure of success, and by bringing the team back intact, the club's fans get to continue to feel the glowing significance of what they accomplished together.
Rick Hanson, a senior fellow at the University of Berkeley and author of Hardwiring Happiness, considers this. The key to extending the window of a happy event, he says, "is unbelievably simple: Have it, enjoy it. Neurons that fire together wire together. The longer you stay with it, the more intensely you feel it. Every single time a Cubs fan replays the World Series, it's going to be a happy moment."
Epstein and the Cubs' front office must decide how far to carry this sentiment. What Cubs fans need now has changed. Winning more championships would be nice, to be sure. But Cubs fans were happy before 2016. They were happy during 2016. The best way to make sure they're happy in 2017 and beyond is to make sure that being a Cubs fan never stops feeling special.
I ask Stu whether the World Series finally relieved him of the worry that he'd been left out by God. "For me, that's not the kind of spiritual path I would endorse," he says. "My feeling would be to develop a sort of Eastern thing: The outcome is not really in some ways the important thing."
But if the Cubs do keep winning -- well, that'd be OK with him too. "Just because we're not lovable losers anymore doesn't mean we can't be lovable winners."