Earlier in the week Laurel had prominently displayed page 99 from the September 8 issue of TIME magazine so I couldn’t miss the item called “No Price Tag on Happiness.” To make sure I got the point, she crossed out “Porsche” and wrote in “Mini-Cooper” on the item’s first sentence: “Think that Porsche and boat and beach house you have been dreaming of would make you happy? Think again.” Richard Easterlin, an economist, found that “while healthy people are generally happier than unhealthy ones and married people are happier than unmarrieds, increases in wealth and material possessions improve happiness only briefly.”
Well, since I’m healthy and married, this was good news. But since I’ve been counting on some new material possessions to make me even happier—notably, the aforementioned Mini-Cooper, or an equally appealing car—this was also bad news. So I chucked the TIME magazine issue in the recycling bin and looked forward to forgetting all about the happiness research.
Unfortunately, while I was engaged in my customary solitary pursuit of happiness in front of my computer, I came across another article on the same subject. This New York Times web site article had an even blunter title, “The Futile Pursuit of Happiness.” It went on in this vein for seven pages. After I had finished it I could see my Mini-Cooper fantasies flying out the window of harsh psychological research reality.
The gist of the New York Times article is that people aren’t very accurate in predicting what effect an event will have on their happiness: “On average, bad events proved less intense and more transient than test participants predicted. Good events proved less intense and briefer as well.” Hence, researcher Daniel Gilbert says, “Things that happen to you or that you buy and own—as much as you think they make a difference to your happiness, you’re wrong by a certain amount. You’re overestimating how much of a difference they make. None of them make the difference you think. And that’s true of positive and negative events.”
It seems that each of us has a happiness “set point” that we have a strong tendency to return to no matter what we do, or what happens to us. Like sine waves, we cycle up and we cycle down, but overall we don’t stray too far from the straight line that is our inherent level of happiness. We imagine that this or that will make us much more happy, or much more unhappy, but we aren’t good at predicting our future happiness once this or that happens. Not that it matters much. Because whether our happiness trends up, or trends down, most events in our lives don’t have a lasting effect on our inherent sense of well-being.
And this is where I see some profound philosophical/spiritual implications in all this happiness research—a subject that will have to wait for another posting, given the lateness of the evening and the demands of a garbage can that wants to be taken up to the end of the driveway. The big picture is easy to describe though: if we can’t tell what will make us happy, and if our happiness tends to revert to a base level, then we shouldn’t worry nearly as much as we do about seeking out supposed good things and avoiding supposed bad things. For we can’t predict what is “good” and “bad,” and even if we could, it doesn’t matter a heck of a lot, because we’ll come down from the good and we’ll bounce back from the bad.
What is more important, it seems, is raising our whole happiness set point to a higher level. This is the goal of enlightenment, spiritual illumination, satori, psychological breakthrough, whatever you want to call it. Not relying on outer events or other people to make us happy, or to prevent us from becoming unhappy, that is the true key to happiness. Since happiness is within, that’s where we’ll find it, not outside.
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