If You're Happy and You Know It...

“If I have a dollar, and you have a dollar and you give me your dollar and I give you my dollar, we each have one dollar. If I have an idea and you have an idea and you give me your idea and I give you my idea, we each have two ideas.” - Buckminster Fuller, Comprehensive Design Scientist

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” – Mahatma Gandhi 

If you were to consider all the things in your life (relationships, work, socioeconomics, et cetera) as a whole, how happy would you say you are on a scale of one to ten, with one being the least happy and ten being the most?

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to participate in discussion with Tom Ulen, the Swanlund Chair and Director of Illinois Program in Law and Economics at the UIUC. Tom was utterly captivating, covering a range of concepts ranging from rational or enlightened self-interest, to hedonic psychology and happiness economics. Please excuse the links to non-scholarly sources on Wikipedia, but they give you the gist of things.

I was pondering what to write this week and remembered this lecture and how much it interested me, so I pulled out my notes and did a little more reading.

As it turns out, most people are happy, above at least a five on the one to ten scale a couple paragraphs up. Actually, according to Ulen, the average in the United States is 7.8. You may be as surprised as I was to know that there is quite a bit of work that has gone into the study of happiness and the factors that appear to have influence. As a result, we've learned that human beings have a distinct inability to predict or understand the things that will make us happy (or not).

We are inclined to underestimate how fast recovery from traumatic events will take and overestimate how “bad things are”. In addition, we tend to focus on what happened to us most recently as well as the best and worst parts of our experiences and “forget” the long periods of equilibrium in between.

Psychological hedonism consists of the idea that all human choice is motivated by a desire for pleasure, or at least an aversion to pain. With respect to how we deal with others, the theory claims that when sane people choose to help others, it is because of the pleasure they themselves obtain, directly or indirectly, from doing so. Psychological hedonism is a special case of psychological egoism, in which the concept of enlightened self-interest is equated with pleasure.

So what has all this study told us about happiness? Well, Psychologists say it is possible to measure your happiness. Another Professor and psychologist, Ed Diener from the University of Illinois, designed a little test that takes just a minute to complete.

To find out how happy you are just look at the five statements below and decide whether you agree or disagree using a 1-7 scale.

1. Strongly disagree
2. Disagree
3. Slightly disagree
4. Neither agree nor disagree
5. Slightly agree
6. Agree
7. Strongly agree

Answer these questions as honestly as you can.

1. In most ways my life is ideal.

2. The conditions of my life are excellent.

3. I am satisfied with my life.

4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.

5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.

Add up your scores.

31-35 - You are extremely satisfied with your life.

26-30 - Very satisfied.
21-25 - Reasonably satisfied.
20 - Neutral
15-19 - Slightly unsatisfied
10-14 - Unsatisfied
5-9 - Extremely unsatisfied

Did your result surprise you?
Don’t feel bad if you were/are. Studies have shown you aren’t really the best judge of your own happiness for a number of very interesting reasons, such as optimism bias and the Law of Self Contradiction, and the availability heuristic to name a few.

This idea of availability heuristic is especially interesting. In a nutshell, when contemplating a decision in which information is important, people tend to rely on readily available information in favor of objectively verifiable data. In other words, if a person has no information on which to base a decision, they tend to base response on whatever information floats by.

In other, other words, people tend not to gather objective information and do whatever is “vivid” or makes sense in their frame of reference. Mix in a little optimism bias and we find that even with right and objective information, people tend to be overly optimistic about life circumstances and ignore the data.
“It won’t apply to me.”

Our relationship to happiness can be maddening. The wanting of it and the having of it can seem like two quite different things. We wish for what we don’t have because our minds tell us that if only we had x or y, life would be complete. This leads us to become too convinced of our pleasures, too certain that we know what we want, and the belief that we can arrange our happiness as though happiness were a commodity may cause us to misrecognize the very thing that concerns us. What?

The upshot of the research shows that we tend to mis-predict what will make us happy because our brains aren’t really equipped to make such a prediction accurately. It’s sort of this fight against our brain’s natural reasoning capacity, and we always lose.

My proof:

According to several Ph.D’s and one noted endocrinologist, happiness is terribly elusive, requiring solutions, guides, prescriptions, and even a year-long focused project. Is it really this difficult? Really?

Apparently, happiness has little to do with money past a certain point. More evidence:

     The Price Of Happiness: $75,000 – Huffington Post

Above that and there is little change in the levels of daily joy or happiness. Two major studies show that money matters until “Enough” is reached, then other things, like the support of family and friends, bring increases in daily good feelings. 

In the US, you can buy happiness for $75,000. So says a new study of 450,000 Americans. As previous research has suggested, more money increases happiness up to a point, then it levels off. Here is the summary from the Huffington Post. We provide a link to a PDF of the full article from the National Academy of Sciences and to an article published July 1st in the Washington Post on related research by Ed Diener, one of the founders of happiness research with 136,000 people from 132 Countries with key findings that differentiate the satisfaction that money can buy and the positive feelings that come from other non-money things, like the support of family and friends. The results suggest a high degree of universality in what constitutes a good life.

According to Professor Ulen, the Huffington Post article above is a shining example of something called the Easterlin Paradox. Simply put, happiness does not increase with per capita income. Relative income matters, however if there is too big a difference between two employees of the same status, the prospects for unhappiness are nearly 100%.
I also learned that there is this very interesting notion of gross national happiness (GNH). The concept of GNH was developed “in an attempt to define an indicator that measures quality of life or social progress in more holistic and psychological terms than gross domestic product (GDP).”

The term was coined in 1972 by Bhutan's former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. He used the phrase to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Allegedly, the idea of GNH was a casual reference designed to paint a picture of the relative happiness of the people in the realm. Today, we call it opinion polling.

Then the Canadians got a hold of it. Canadian health epidemiologist Michael Pennock developed a "de-Bhutanized" version of a survey in his work in Victoria, British Columbia.

Here are the factors that are considered:

• Psychological well-being - Assesses the degree of satisfaction and optimism in individual life. The indicators analyze self-esteem, sense of competence, stress, spiritual activities, and the prevalence of positive and negative emotions.
• Health - Measures the effectiveness of health policies, with criteria such as self-rated health, disability, patterns of risk behavior, exercise, sleep, nutrition, etc.
• Use of time - The use of time is one of the most significant factors in quality of life, especially time for recreation and socializing with family and friends. A balanced management of time is evaluated, including time spent in traffic jams, at work, in educational activities, etc.
• Community vitality - Focuses on relationships and interactions in communities. Examines the level of confidence, the sense of belonging, the vitality of affectionate relationships, safety at home and in the community, and the practice of giving and volunteering.
• Education - Takes into account several factors such as participation in formal and informal education, development of skills and capabilities, involvement in children’s education, values education, environmental education, etc.
• Culture - Evaluates local traditions, festivals, core values, participation in cultural events, opportunities to develop artistic skills, and discrimination due to religion, race or gender.
• Environment - Measures the perception of citizens about the quality of their water, air, soil, forest cover, biodiversity, etc. The indicators include access to green areas, system of waste management, etc.
• Governance - Assesses how the population views the government, the media, the judiciary, the electoral system, and the police, in terms of responsibility, honesty and transparency. It also measures involvement of citizens in community decisions and political processes.
• Standard of living - Evaluates individual and family income, financial security, the level of debt, employment security, the quality of housing, etc.

 Take a look their website at grossnationalhappiness.com.

Let’s get back to what is most important, you and me. It appears that there are really only four things that are associated with individual happiness and the list is fairly predictable:

1. You are married
2. You have lots of friends
3. You have a job
4. You have some spiritual connection

Of course, this list doesn’t work for everyone. Many aspects that you and I might feel are important don’t appear at all -- like integrity, love, creativity, etc., and I know plenty of people that were not particularly happy being married.
This list is also silent on the notion that the things that tend to make us happy not only change over time, but change as we get older. According to the experts, age-related happiness is sort of an inverted bell curve – we are happiest as youngsters and senior citizens. Between the ages of about 20 and 60, our relative happiness bottoms out. The stresses of life and worry tend to bring us down. Meh…

The good news in all this happiness talk is that we human beings have a superpower. It is something called adaptation. We quickly adapt to both good and bad things in our lives relatively quickly. Most of us have a “set point” of happiness that we return to after a spike (good or bad) in about a year on average. This theory has been tested on people that have experiences the loss of a loved one, paraplegics, and lottery winners.

It seems that evolution has weeded out the pessimists. Clap your hands.

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