Counting Happiness

In recent decades, psychologists and biologists have taken up the challenge of studying scientifically what really makes people happy. Is it money, family, genetics or perhaps virtue? The first step is to define what is to be measured. The generally accepted definition of happiness is ‘subjective well-being’. Happiness, according to this view is something I feel inside myself, a sense of either immediate pleasure or long-term contentment with the way my life is going.

Many questionnaires are used in order to correlate happiness with various objective factors. One study might compare a thousand people who earn $100,000 a year with a thousand people who earn $50,000. If the study discovers that the first group has an average subjective well-being level of 8.7, while the latter has an average of only 7.3, the researcher may reasonably conclude that there is a positive correlation between wealth and subjective well-being. To put in simple English, money brings happiness.

One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point and beyond that point it has little significance. For people stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder, more money means greater happiness. If you are an American single mother earning $12,000 a year cleaning houses and you suddenly win $500,000 on the lottery, you will probably experience a significant and long-term surge in your subjective well-being. However, if you are a top executive earning $250,000 a year and you win $1 Million on the lottery, or your company board suddenly decides to double your salary, your surge is likely to last only a few weeks.

Family and community seem to have more impact on your happiness than money and health. People with strong families who live in tight-knit and supportive communities are significantly happier than people whose families are dysfunctional and who have never found a community to be part of.

Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations. If you want an iPhone and get an iPhone, you are content. If you want a brand-new Mercedes and get only a second-hand Fiat you feel deprived. This is why winning the lottery has, over time, the same impact on people’s happiness as a debilitating car accident. When things improve, expectations balloon and consequently even dramatic improvements in objective conditions can leave us dissatisfied. When things deteriorate, expectations shrink, and consequently, even a severe illness might leave you pretty much as happy as you were before.

The crucial importance of human expectations has far-reaching implications for understanding the history of happiness. If happiness depended only on objective conditions such as wealth, health and social relations, it would have been relatively easy to investigate its history. The finding that it depends on subjective expectations makes the task of historians far harder. We moderns have an arsenal of tranquillizers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did.

Source - Sapiens