I haven’t read/written much about happiness lately; I just read this article and decided I would revisit.
So what did I learn reading that article? Nothing that I didn’t already know. Let’s recap some happiness facts in no particular order:
1) Money makes you happier until you can pay for the basics of food, clothing, shelter. After that you’re “Keeping up with Joneses“. (On a side note I would love to meet the Jones family. They are obviously doing very well if everyone is trying to keep up with them.) Other countries are happier than the US, and happiness doesn’t correlate strongly to GDP.
2) Genetics tell most of the story of your happiness. Whether you win the lottery or lose an arm in a lawnmower accident….you stay basically as happy as you were before. (there is some debate on whether you can inch aggregate happiness up in a Bentham-style “greatest happiness of the greatest number”…we’ll see.)
3) Happiness is generally composed of 1) moment to moment pleasure, 2) engagement with your life (how much you’re into your job, friends, garden, car-club, etc), and 3) a sense of meaning (how much you think what you do matters). I personally think 2 and 3 are very similar.
4) IQ, good looks, youth, athleticism, other natural talents, etc…..don’t affect your happiness much. I’ve seen research that people with high IQs are actually less happy (don’t feel like digging that up). Also, older people tend to be happier in industrialized nations.
5) Your relative position in society makes you happier than your absolute position (unless you’re dirt poor). Better to have 100 bucks when your friend has 50 than have 1000 when your neighbor has 2000. This makes a pretty good case for government wealth re-distribution.
6) So what does make you happy? Spending time with friends/family, marriage (in general), being grateful for stuff and telling others you are grateful for them (gratitude actually has a pretty large effect), doing nice things for others, contributing to something you believe in larger than yourself, getting lost in the moment (even if it is gardening…or drinking).
7) What doesn’t make you happy? Spending time alone, buying stuff/anything, chores, crap at work, loss of a loved one, loss of a job, financial troubles.
8) What are we unsure about with regards to happiness? It boils down to cause and effect….we don’t know what causes which in many cases (or maybe they’re just correlated). Happy people do make more money, but does the happiness cause the money or does the money cause the happiness. Happy people are healthier, but if you are unhealthy and convince yourself to be happy, will your health improve? Married people are happier. Does that mean marriage makes you happy or happy people stay married? Don’t know.
9) Experiences make you happier than things. Oddly, a new car will not make you as happy as if you blew the money on a trip through Europe (on a side note I’m not sure experiences have made me any happier…I don’t have the things to compare it to, so I can’t really say.).
10) The freedom of choice does not make you happier. Choices can cripple (its called the Tyranny of Choice). Freedom to do whatever you want causes anxiety. It increases opportunity costs….so that everything you choose presents an internal analysis of the endless choices you did not make….all that you gave up. You only get 1 thing…but you gave up hundreds to make that choice. How do you know you made the best choice? The more choices there are, the more comparisons you make….the unhappier you are (I call it the Cortez Solution, after Hernando Cortez: Legend has it when he arrived in the New World he burned the ships that sailed him there to prevent any possibility of retreat…eliminating the possibility of mutiny…of his crew turning around and going home.).
11) Happiness is not easy to achieve. Apparently you have to work at it; but if you have to work too hard, then that will make you unhappy in itself, especially if you don’t get there….which brings me to my last point:
12) The harder you seek “true happiness”, the more you will frustrate yourself by not being able to get there. Happiness seems to be a by-product, not an end result. If that is the case….why worry about it at all?
Can I sum any of that up into something that might help people be happy? Sure: Spend all your time with friends and family, volunteer for your favorite cause, be grateful everyday and tell others about it, get hobbies that engross you, do a job you like and uses the things that you are best at (not that pays lots of money). Stop spending money on stuff. Don’t watch the news or read pop magazines (which constantly compare you to others).
I think its such an interesting question (obviously), because underlying much of what we do in Western society is this notion of “do what makes you happy”. My parents said that to me a million times, “I just want you to be happy,” or “You need to do what makes you happy,” or even “Do what’s best for you,” but underlying the idea of “best” is “what makes you happy”….but we really have little idea of how to achieve that, or even if its possible. Its nonsensical advice if no one knows how to follow it.
In the end, after all these years of trying to learn about how to get to happiness, I don’t think I can affect it much. I still brood and I’m prone to nostalgia….I think the state of things is sad and that we could scarcely make it better if we tried (which we are and this is what we get).
I do think you can increase general happiness some amount, but what have you achieved? We still live and die. What does it matter to the universe if we passed our blip in time slightly happier than if otherwise? It doesn’t.
Burn your ships and be thankful for it.
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