Many of us aspire to be happier, yet few dedicate time to developing a scientific understanding of what happiness is and how they can attain more of it.
Of course, philosophical debates about the nature of happiness have abounded for millennia, and we won’t get too stuck in those weeds here! But we will present some interesting insights from psychology and social science, that may push back against some of your assumptions and intuitions.
Key points:
Moment-to-moment happiness is distinct from overall life satisfaction
Money can buy happiness – but returns will eventually start to diminish
How happy you are is (partially) within your control
Here are three things people get wrong about happiness:
1) Happiness is more than the sum of its parts
One might think of happiness as the cumulative effect of many positive experiences. The more moment-to-moment pleasure a person benefits from, the happier they are. But psychologists draw an important distinction between being happy in and being happy with one’s life (efforts to collect data on happiness, such as Gallup’s World Happiness Report, are increasingly attempting to measure these two things separately). A person could experience high amounts of hedonic joy from day to day, but report low satisfaction when asked to evaluate their life as a whole – or vice versa.
These two forms of wellbeing often trade off against each other. A distance runner might spend several hours of each day in significant physical discomfort, while the sense of achievement and purpose that running brings them contributes to very high life satisfaction. On the flipside, for some people, a life of short-term hedonic pleasures (such as food, sex, and drugs) will not bring as much overall satisfaction.
Another problem with using moment-to-moment pleasure as the sole measure of a person’s overall wellbeing is that people are often bad at recollecting what it was like to be them in a given moment. Renowned psychologist Daniel Kahneman distinguishes between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self’, and points out the inevitable discrepancies between the two. While it is the former that is experiencing pleasure or pain as they occur in real time, it is the latter that generates and evaluates memories of these experiences, in order to maintain the wider story of our lives. One could still make the philosophical argument that the ‘true’ measure of happiness is the sum of our hedonic experiences (as some have), but under Kahneman’s model, attempting to use such a measure practically will always yield inaccuracies.
What does all this tell you about how you can increase your happiness? Received wisdom often dictates that you prioritize the experiencing self by attempting to live more fully ‘in the moment’. But if your moment-to-moment experiences are ephemeral (and impossible to recollect accurately) - and the story you tell yourself about them is the more durable artifact that survives through time - it’s perhaps possible to argue that the way you frame your experiences may be more powerful than the experiences themselves.
Not only this, but the fact that the narrative your remembering self constructs can be quite different from your actual experiences makes it surprisingly pliable. This grants you the ability to frame particular events in the way that is most conducive to your wellbeing. You can do this both retroactively (receiving negative feedback on that job application allowed me to improve my skills and get a different job that I’m even better suited for) and preemptively (I may be nervous about delivering this presentation – but how likely is it that my co-workers will remember it in detail a month from now?).
This isn’t to say that you should neglect the experiencing self! Seeking out hedonic joy and attempting to be as present as possible during positive experiences can still be an important part of what it means to live a happy life for many people. But it’s worth considering the possibility that achieving happiness might require paying attention to both selves, and being deliberate about how you cater to each.
2) Money can buy you (some) happiness
Two common tropes about the relationship between money and happiness are that (1) with more wealth comes more contentment, and (2) the opposite – that ‘true’ happiness can never be bought. But the evidence points to a far more complex interplay than is captured by either of these narratives.
A well-known 2010 study concluded that life satisfaction rises with income up to a threshold of $75,000 per year, which marks a point of diminishing returns. A later one contradicted this, finding a positive correlation between wealth and happiness that continues even for incomes well in excess of $120,000. In 2023, researchers on both papers teamed up for an adversarial collaboration, to try and reconcile these conflicting results. Their conclusions generally supported the idea that happiness rises with income without hitting a plateau. For a minority of the unhappiest participants, however, this plateau did exist - perhaps because their capacity for wellbeing was constrained by other factors such as bereavement, illness or depression.
Do these results suggest that you should prioritize making money in an effort to be happier? Not necessarily. For one, the fact that wealth is a factor contributing to better wellbeing does not mean it is among the most important factors in your particular circumstances (or, indeed, anyone’s). Research has identified many other important predictors of happiness, such as frequency of social interaction. So, a single-minded focus on working extra hours at the expense of seeing friends, for example, could end up being net-negative for your wellbeing.
Secondly, the existence of a wealth-happiness correlation doesn’t necessarily imply that most people would be happier if they pursued higher-paying jobs. Different roles will obviously be fulfilling for different people. A clarinetist-turned-hedge-fund-manager who abandons their passion for the sake of a chunkier paycheck may find less satisfaction in a six figure salary than someone naturally attracted to the world of corporate finance.
Finally, the relationship between wealth and happiness identified in the study is logarithmic rather than linear. This means that while happiness does increase with earnings, the effect diminishes as income rises. An extra $10,000 per year will have far more of an impact for a person earning $30,000 than one earning $100,000. This logarithmic correlation means that above a certain income threshold, wellbeing gains become small enough to be almost meaningless – and so the case for earning more money as a means of increasing happiness becomes more tenuous as a person's income climbs.
3) To an extent, you can decide to become happier
While people are often resigned to less-than-satisfying lives, chalking them up to luck, circumstance or even genetics, research suggests that it is possible to adopt practices that will increase our happiness. While there is considerable disagreement about precisely how much variation in happiness is due to factors within our control, researchers have generally converged on the idea that it is at least a meaningful proportion.
This isn’t to say that, of course, that people ought to be blamed for their unhappiness. Firstly, studies point to happiness being partially – not wholly, nor even primarily – within our control (the most well-known attempt to quantify this estimates that a person’s wellbeing level is around 40% due to intentional activity, and others put this number much lower). Secondly, research suggests that factors such as bereavement, mental illness or trauma can place serious constraints on a person’s ability to improve their own wellbeing – for example, recall that the unhappiest participants in the income study we discussed earlier did not experience meaningful happiness gains above a certain wealth threshold. But it's still worth considering the idea that our wellbeing may be more malleable than we assume, and at least attempting interventions that may boost it.
The idea that people can change their behavior in order to influence their wellbeing might seem at odds with the well-known phenomenon of hedonic adaptation, whereby people tend to eventually return to a stable happiness ‘set point’ after positive or negative experiences. However, some psychologists have suggested that though hedonic adaptation is a powerful force, it is still possible to achieve sustained happiness gains from positive life changes. For example, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky’s Hedonic Adaptation Prevention Model posits that an individual’s hedonic set point is actually a range, and that particular behaviors can help them to reach (and stay in) the upper limit of that range. The particular interventions they suggest are increasing the variety of experiences associated with a positive life change (not just buying a membership for a new gym, but regularly changing up the exercise routine you do there, for example) and frequently taking the time to appreciate how the change has benefited them.
If the benefits we yield from positive life changes can continue to deliver novelty, stimulation and cause for gratitude, this should help stifle the ever-present yearning for more that so often keeps us on the hedonic treadmill.
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