science | For a state of happiness

How will you buy your happiness

14 July 2014 12:15 , Jasper Bergink

Money can’t buy happiness, or so goes the common wisdom.

money can't buy happiness

Some say that despite this, it is more comfortable crying in a Porsche than on a bicycle. Others say that even if money can’t buy you happiness, it can buy a jet ski, which is pretty close.

TEDx speaker Michael Norton offers his own take on the matter. His research illustrates that if you think that money can’t buy happiness, you’re just not spending it right.

Norton is an associate professor in Business Administration at Harvard University and the co-author of ‘Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.’ Of their five principles on happy money, I would like to focus on two: buying experiences and investing in others.

Buying experiences
One of the best ways to get the most bang for your happiness buck is to spend money on experiences. It’s not material goods, but rather, the special moments in our lives that we cherish. No matter what we buy, we adapt to material goods quickly. A new pair of shoes or amazing coffee machine will only retain its magic for a short period of time. Memories of special moments spent with fun people, however, don’t fade. Therefore, Norton’s advice is to go see a friend that you haven’t seen for a long time when the opportunity arises, and accept a monetary loss to book that great trip to Latin America. The fulfillment you’ll get will be a lot higher than for any luxury good purchase.

Spending money on others
A second way to ‘invest’ money in happiness is to spend it on others. In Norton’s talk, he explains the experiment that lead to this conclusion. And to test it, they gave money away. The setup of the experiment was simple: they gave Canadian students small amounts of money, around $5 or $20. Half were instructed to use it to buy something for themselves; the other half were asked to get a little gift for someone else. At the end of the day, the students answered a short survey about their happiness.

The conclusions were clear: for the students who bought something for themselves – say, a coffee or makeup – there were no major differences in happiness. But those who had bought something for others reported higher happiness levels. Further studies confirmed that the effect does not apply only to this particular demographic (Canadian students), but that the patterns were strikingly similar in Uganda and nearly everywhere else.

How will you buy your happiness?

An earlier version of this post was published on the blog of TEDxAmsterdam, as part of my series ‘TED & Happiness’, exploring some of the fifty plus talks related to happiness in TED’s library. Earlier posts covered flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and ‘happiness advantage‘ (Shawn Achor).

Thanks to Tori Egherman for editing and for the illustration below.

SPENDING-ON

Posted in: science, TED talk, video , Tagged: buy, consumption, economics, experience, happiness, Michael Norton, money, other people, TED, TEDxAmsterdam

Football & happiness: the feelgood factor of Van Persie

16 June 2014 21:57 , Jasper Bergink

Whether you are a football lover or football hater, you will have noticed that the World Cup has started. Time for me to ask the question: do good performances make countries happier?

Let me take a – randomly selected – example. As a Dutchman, my expectations ahead of last Friday’s match against Spain were very low. We had lost the World Cup final against them in 2010. Spain’s selection contains a list of stars that rivals any team. Their team is experienced, having won three tournaments in a row: no match for our defense on young and unexperienced players.

How wrong we were!

The match turned out to be one of the best stories of Dutch football ever written. In the first half, the Orange Clockwork started slow. After an undeserved penalty, Spain led 1 to 0.

But just before half time, when we already had given up on our chances, something majestic happened. Daley Blind, at the left side of the field, gave a long pass, and the new Flying Dutchman Robin van Persie scored a goal that will go into history as one of the most beautiful ones ever: 1-1.

And this was just a start. The Dutch team – and fans everywhere – went crazy. Arjen Robben: 2-1, revenge for the lost final 2010. Defender Stefan de Vrij, after a scrimmage in front of the goal: 3-1. And Van Persie and Robben went on to score an improbable 4-1 and 5-1. The feeling was amazing. The beer was good. The girls in orange dresses were pretty. Even Dutch music of poor quality was good enough to sing along to. Viva Hollandia! And the good feeling persists. Waking up the next day – with a collective hangover – the result was still the same. 5-1. We beat three time champions Spain 5 to 1!

I guess one can safely say: yes, football results affect the collective well-being of a country. But beyond strong anecdotal evidence, let’s see what academics say about it. Indeed, there are several academic and popular-scientific studies about this question of life and death.

The host advantage

In their book Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski show that hosting a World Cup increases happiness levels in a country until several years after the event. National pride increases when visitors from all around the world are received in the home country. However, this effect does not appear in Brazil, where many people strongly oppose the World Cup. Street art protests dot the walls of their cities, and even the 3-1 win against Croatia, courtesy of the referee, on the opening night seems to have done little to increase the mood.

Suicide and strokes

Kuper and Szymanski also show that stories about increasing numbers of suicide after dramatic losses are a myth. To the contrary, World Cups are social events involving the entire community, including depressed people. But football does carry a health risk: matches can create stress and thus contribute to heart attacks. A study, in a scientific article with the improbable title “A matter of life and death: population mortality and football results”, found a correlation between heart attacks and home defeats: male supporters of the English teams of Newcastle United, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, and Leeds United are more likely to die from a stroke when their team loses in its own field! For instance, in Sunderland, stroke deaths increased by 66% in men when Sunderland AFC lost at home.

Today it matters, tomorrow it doesn’t

Another study by Kavetsos and Szymanski finds that the impact of sports success on happiness is mainly short term, and not statistically significant in the longer term. Beyond the home nation advantage, a second positive effect appears when a team, like the Netherlands on Friday, beats the expectations. But rather than a long-standing legacy effect, football results only are a positive feel-good factor for a short time. This also confirms the finding of a seminal study concluding that whether you win the lottery or end up in a wheelchair today, your happiness level is the same in one year time.

Whether you win or lose, in three months it doesn’t matter anymore, claims psychologist Dan Glibert. But I live today, and not in three months from now. And today, I am happy.

Today, Robin van Persie and Daley Blind provide sheer happiness.

Posted in: personal, science , Tagged: Arjen Robben, Brazil, Daley Blind, football, happiness, Robin van Persie, Spain, Stefan de Vrij, The Netherlands, World Cup

Shawn Achor and the happiness advantage

11 June 2014 08:25 , Jasper Bergink

This post was first published on the blog of TEDxAmsterdam. TED’s library contains about fifty talks on happiness. After the post about the flow of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this is the second article in my series of articles under the title TED & Happiness. In this talk, I want to introduce Shawn Achor, positive psychologist and happiness researcher. His message is simple: happiness works. With humor and self-mockery, he reveals how our mental well-being is linked to a positive outlook on life.

A positive outlook

Shawn Achor, source: Good Think inc.

Shawn Achor begins his twelve minute happy rollercoaster ride with a simple anecdote illustrating how fundamental optimism is for our happiness. Seven-year-old Shawn was a reckless little boy. Playing war, he happened to throw his five-year-old sister Amy from her bed. Tears began to fill her eyes. But he managed to turn the situation around with: “Amy, you landed on all fours. That means… you must be a unicorn!” he said, keeping her calm and avoiding being punished by his parents.

The mechanism is simple, but it works! Changing our lens changes our happiness. Positive psychologists have shown that the way we experience our lives is a factor that explains some of the variation in our happiness (a scientifically important nuance – it does not directly predict our happiness, though some people, even scholars, believe that optimism always creates happiness). And a happy, positive outlook in turn has a ripple effect, making experiences of life more pleasant: the happiness advantage, as Achor calls it.

See his short pitch of the idea in this video.

Reverse the formula for happiness

Nowadays, our assumption simply is that we need to do. If we do things well, we are successful. And when we become successful, we should be happy. But there is a problem: we are never satisfied. When we reach the finish line, we move the goalposts of success, and start all over again.

Let’s take a look at an example. When we graduate, what we want is a job. When we have a job, we want a better salary. Then we want more responsibility, etc. When we have achieved a goal, we repeat this cycle and look at the next goal, thus continuously pushing success towards a horizon we can never reach.

Achor asks us to reverse the formula. What if we reach success when we are happy? What if we work well, because we are happy? And what if it is happiness that inspires productivity instead of the other way around?

The happiness advantage: accomplishment & gratitude

Happiness starts with simple things. A feeling of accomplishment. Learning, creativity and developments. But above all: gratitude with the achievements of every little day.

Achor has a simple recipe for that. Spend two minutes a day for three weeks thinking about optimism and success. Everyday, write down three new things you are grateful for. If you do that for three weeks, it will have a lasting effect.

That’s the happiness advantage.

Thanks to Tori Egherman for editing.

Posted in: science, TED talk, video , Tagged: goals, happiness, happiness advantage, happiness at work, positive, positive psychology, psychology, Shawn Achor, TED, TED & Happiness, TEDxAmsterdam, work

Csikszentmihalyi, for a flow of happiness

31 March 2014 08:33 , Leave a Comment , Jasper Bergink

This post was first published on the blog of TEDxAmsterdam. TED’s library contains about fifty talks on happiness. In a new monthly series under the title TED & Happiness, I’ll be sharing the insights of TED speakers about happiness.

When are we happy? TED speaker Csikszentmihalyi has a surprising answer. According to his research, maybe we do better to find pleasure in difficulties activities, even hard work, than those activities that seem relaxing in themselves.

Of all the TED and TEDx talks on happiness, my favourite is the one by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on flow. His talk is not spectacular. Do not expect flying robots, emotive music or a call for revolution here. But behind his old-fashioned slides (a no fear for using a graph), Csikszentmihalyi shows his passion for passions. In his talk, the psychologist explores where our moments of happiness lie. His examples show that we experiences happiness when we are fully absorbed by an activity that challenges all our skills.

Mountain climbing

According to Csikszentmihalyi, the challenges we face and the skills we can use are the key to flow. Think of a mountain climber that is using all his forces to get around a challenging rock in a difficult climb. He is high on a mountain, fully concentrated and using all his energy to get grip. This is clearly not a relaxing or pleasing activity. The climber does not enjoy the cold wind or the difficulty of the situation he is facing.

Yet, when the climb is going well, it’s likely that he’ll experience flow. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow, or ‘optimal experience’, as an intense moment of concentration where you are fully focused on your present activity. Your self-consciousness disappears. Sense of time becomes distorted. Your hands and feet automatically find their path over the cold rocks. And when you make it to the top, there is a great sense of achievement. All these experiences are so gratifying that you want to climb the rock even if it’s difficult, dangerous, or without a real purpose.

The flow of music, sex… and work!

Thus it is moments of flow, or optimal experience, where happiness lies. The pretext is that if we want to be happy, it is not about being relaxed, but bored, for instance when we are watching TV. Instead, flow-inducing activities are those that require us to be active and to use our skills. Flow can be achieved by sports, by creative activities like music or writing, by sex… and even by work!

The interesting thing is that flow is something different for everybody. Even if I can’t climb mountains or compose music, I can experience it in another way. For me writing is such an area. Sometimes writing my blog articles is a pain. At times, I don’t know exactly what I want to say about the topic I choose. I might be anxious that my ideas aren’t original. But when I get in a good flow, my hands fly over the keyboard. Sentences appear magically on the screen, as if they wrote themselves. And I have the gratifying feeling of having created something that didn’t exist before.

The model of flow – and all other emotions experienced at various combinations of challenge and skill. Image: Wikipedia.

Challenge your skills

The lesson from Csikszentmihalyi is simple. Be active. Work on your passion. Keep discovering and developing your talents. Challenge your skills. That is how you create the conditions that foster your flow.

Posted in: also published elsewhere, science, TED talk, video , Tagged: activity, challenge, experience, flow, happiness, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, mountain climbing, psychology, skill, TED, TEDxAmsterdam

The lottery of happiness

6 January 2014 21:27 , Leave a Comment , Jasper Bergink

Who hasn’t dreamt of it? Spending a couple of euros on a lottery ticket to win an amazing prize. Probably you, like everybody else, have fantasised what you’d do with a million euros. Maybe you would buy a nice villa, buy a Porsche and a Bentley, or make a big trip to Brazil. Or donate some money to charity, of course.

Most of us are aware that the chance of winning a lottery is minimal. That’s why lotteries are also called a tax on stupidity. But still, speak to the villagers of Leganes who won a combined €360 million in ‘El Gordo’, the fat one, Spain’s annual Christmas lottery. Or to the inhabitants in Vrouwenpolder, a village of barely 1000 people who won €42,9 million in a Dutch lottery just before Christmas.

Source: www.someecards.com

But let’s ask another question: would winning the lottery make you happier? Large sums of money definitely make your life easier. But that big house and Porsche don’t make you happy. There are plenty of newspaper stories around of lottery winners who get completely crazy and change their lives for the worse. Take Keith Gough, who started with the purchase of a new home and a box in the stadium of his favourite football team after a 9 million pounds win in 2005. But then he started drinking, ended up losing his wife, and met a bandit in rehab tricking him into ‘deals’ that lost him his wealth. The story ends in 2010, when Gough dies of a heart attack caused by stress and drinking. And he’s just one – Time even has made a full gallery of them.

This is not just anecdotal evidence. Scientific studies confirm that large sums of money generally do not suddenly change our lives for the better. A seminal study, undertaken in 1978 by Brickman et al. surveyed the happiness level of lottery winners and people who had ended up in a wheel chair one year after the event. Their surprising conclusion was that there was no measurable effect on happiness level

A 2008 study of the Dutch postcode lottery – the same one in which Vrouwenpolder’s millions were won – found a similar result. Though families had changed some of their life patterns (building a car or rebuilding their house, going to restaurants more often), this had no effect on their happiness.

This is due to a very simple psychological phenomenon: adaptation. Once our situation changes, we very easily adapt to the new reality of our lives. Suppose you are always dreaming of a big house with a pool. Once you have it, at a certain point in time it becomes normal – and it fails to make you happy. Somewhat fortunately, this process of adaptation also applies to negative events, such as losing the ability to walk.

So if you unfortunately win the lottery, what should you do? Their are various recipes for happiness. The most important though is to spend your money on experiences, rather than on material things. Spend your money on a vacation, go visit your friends in far away cities. Even if the experience is short, a good memory can live for a long time.

So what would I do if I won a lottery? I probably wouldn’t change my life that much. I’d keep working, I’d probably wouldn’t move houses and I’d keep this blog. I’d spend some money traveling – seeing Costa Rica and Bhutan. But most likely, you don’t give a damn!

Posted in: science , Tagged: El Gordo, happiness, lottery, money, post code lottery

Happiness. Curated by you.

18 December 2013 23:00 , Leave a Comment , Jasper Bergink

Nowadays, when you have a blog, you don’t call yourself a blogger. No way. Your title at least is editor, or, to take it a step further, curator. A long time ago, only museums had curators. Then, theatre groups followed. Nowadays, the organisor of a conference is called a curator, and the catering manager curates food.

Anyway. One of the good things of this blog, apart from the fact that it makes me happy, is that friends are regularly sending me great articles about happiness. There are so many great stories of happiness that deserve to be shared, and I can’t always keep up with weekly posts… Therefore, this post brings some of those together: happiness. Curated by you.

Happiness and education – curated by Kasia.

Logan LaPlante is not your typical 13-year-old. He has long hair and a hat, loves skiing, and confidently says profound things on the TEDx stage. His argument is very simple: real learning comes from a radically different approach, far beyond the traditional education system. By creating a lot more space for discovery – ‘hackschooling’, as he calls it – we can learn how to make ourselves happy. Why doesn’t our education system teach us that?

Material mass unhappiness – curated by Maria.

Materialism promises satisfaction. It delivers despair.

That is the main message of a great piece by Guardian writer George Monbiot under the title ‘One Rolex Short of Contentment‘. The sarcastic remarks are illustrated with unintendedly hilarious pictures from the Tumblr ‘Rich Kids of Instragram‘. Customised car seats, tiny dogs, ridiculously expensive watches, that kind of stuff.

Citing several studies, Monbiot also has a serious message: research demonstrates that there is a causal link between materialism and lower levels of happiness. One example are the developments in Iceland after the crisis researched by Tim Kasser. After the financial crisis, some people focused on material goods to recover lost incomes; others dedicated themselves to family and community values. The well-being of the second group increased. Monbiot’s conclusion is simple: material aspiration is a formula for mass unhappiness.

Image found in Monbiot’s article; original source Rick Kids of Instagram.

How to build a happy city – curated by Eva.

Some time ago, I already stumbled upon a piece by Charles Montgomery, author of Happy City. Very comforting to a Dutchman, his article seemed to back my claim that cycling to work brings happiness. Montgomery stated that for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

On the BBC Future blog, Daniele Quercia takes it a step further. Architects are trying to build smart and efficient cities. But they are functional people and interested in how people use space. What would their design look like if instead, they’d wonder how their work makes people feel? Quercia cites the case of Bogota, where residents felt more optimistic on the day the mayor decided to ban cars from the streets for 24 hours. She also mentions work by Yahoo Labs, concluding that cars are associated with sadness. But smart cities are not just walkable. It’s about identifying the happiest places in a city, and creating routes to connect them.

Time for some well-deserved Christmas holidays! I’ll be back on the first Monday of the New Year.

Posted in: personal, science, TED talk, video , Tagged: architecture, bike, Charles Montgomery, cities, curated happiness, Daniele Quercia, education, George Monbiot, hackschooling, happy city, Logan LaPlante, materialism, transport

The optimal income for happiness

9 December 2013 22:18 , Leave a Comment , Jasper Bergink

What is the optimal income for happiness? How much happier are people with a large bank account than those who suffer through the last days of each month? Scientists have done a lot of effort to investigate the relation between money and happiness.

The conventional wisdom in happiness economics states that, indeed, happiness levels rise with income, to a certain point. After this point, the impact on happiness of an additional euro, pound are dollar is virtually zero: more money does not mean more happiness. But is it possible to exactly measure the cut-off point? That is, can we measure what the ideal income is, generating the best happiness bang for the buck?

Eugenio Proto of Warwick University and Aldo Rustichini of the University of Minnesota claim to have the answer. Their research attests that life satisfactions reaches its maximum level at an income level of $30,000, or about the level of Equatorial Guinea using World Bank data (though French people aren’t necessarily the happiest ones).

But Proto and Rustichini’s research reveals there is even more: after this point, people even become less happy. They explain that this effect arises due to changes in what they label the ‘aspiration level’ of people with a below average income in rich countries.

Simply speaking, when incomes rise, the gap between the have-lots and have-less become bigger. When surrounded by wealthier people, people have higher aspirations for their own life, often irrationally> as the gap between reality and dreams increase, life satisfaction diminishes.

Their data set out the income level versus the likeliness of reporting the highest level of happiness. People in a country with an income per head of $5,600 are 12% less likely to report the maximum number than in a country with an income of $15,000. As incomes rise, the effect disappears. And after $30,000, the link even becomes negative.

What does this mean? Of course, you may consider moving to Equatorial Guinea if you live in a richer country but make less than the holy number of $30,000. Jokes aside, there is more at stake here. Higher incomes aren’t necessarily a sign of progress. They might be caused by longer working hours, more overtime and less time for leisure, all factors that bring down happiness.

But maybe the real effect displayed by the study is the cost of inequality. Earlier studies have shown that it is not only the absolute figure of income that determines your happiness. It is also about your income relative to what you could make. If you make less than your friends, your colleagues, or than your did in a previous job, this might cause total misery. The moral of the story is simple: if countries care about our quality of life, they should seek to control income inequality. Equal countries, like Denmark, Norway and Sweden are all in the top-five of happiest nations. At least, their high government spending seem to be good for something. Money can’t buy you happiness, the adagium goes, but maybe their high taxes do?

Posted in: science , Tagged: Aldo Rustichini, Denmark, Equatorial Guinea, Eugenio Proto, happiness, income, life satisfaction, money, Norway, Sweden

Teaching my smartphone empathy – Matt Dobson at TEDxBrussels

4 November 2013 21:23 , Leave a Comment , Jasper Bergink

Once again, I had the chance to experience the magic of TED during TEDxBrussels this year. I’ve already written about the scrub for the brain I got for the blog of TEDxAmsterdam. For me, some of the highlights were Diana Reiss‘ research on the intelligence of dolphins, TEDx regular Mikko Hypponen on the protection of a free internet and Antony Evans, who creates glowing plants just for the heck of it and to replace street lamps by fluorescent trees (and still manages not to sound completely ridiculous).

As a happiness blogger, though, here I’d like to focus on the talk by Matt Dobson. Dobson is the co-founder of the UK tech startup EI Technologies, which aims to ‘teach smartphones empathy’. That is, he has created an app that based on a speech sample of half a second to a couple of seconds long can recognise emotions. The 7 second video below from Dobson’s blog gives a feel of how it works:

In his TEDx talk, he explains how the app that he and his co-founder Duncan Barclay have conceived works. Human beings – and dogs alike – are able to recognise emotions in people’s voices, even if they don’t understand what is being said. These skills can even be ‘taught’ to smartphones! Whilst human beings can distinguish between emotions intuitively, the story becomes a question of physics and maths for your phone. In physics, spoken text moves in sound waves, and wave lengths vary with emotion. All these acoustic features – loudness, pitch, patterns can be measured, analysed and interpreted, allowing the app to recognise how you feel. Dobson explains it in full in his talk:

And than the million dollar (or Pounds, for a Brit) question: what can you do with this? Is the next step a smartphone also be taught to tell us jokes, make us read feelgood articles or send us a funny cat video whenever we are down? Well, even when the smartphone is invading our lives, our happiness does not depend on it.

But the smartphone may come to the rescue. Around 50% of the population in Western countries suffers distress, or has stress levels that reduce their life expectancy. 15 to 20% has anxiety or depressions. Despite these large numbers, other, more visible, diseases and therapies get way more investment than mental health problems.

A fundamental problem in psychotherapy is that therapists rely on the feelings that depressed people report. Often, people are asked to report their feelings through a mood diary with their feelings. But as depressed people are not the most motivated ones, data in these diaries is often not very reliable. Based on very short samples and data points at several moments in the data, Dobson’s Xpression app can help. Even if the app can’t directly respond itself, it can help you, or your therapist, to understand your feelings during different moments in the day. When the data is there, human empathy does the rest.

I do like Mondays

14 October 2013 20:07 , Jasper Bergink

When I launched this blog, fourteen long days ago, I got many positive reactions. I’ve received many stories about happiness. They really make me happy, so please keep on sending them.

I was also requested to provide the option to subscribe to new posts. I’ll certainly do that with the rebranding in a couple of months. This is just the beta version. It’s like washing powder: you’ll get a new and improved version every couple of months. But to make it easier: my main blog posts will be published on Mondays.

Why Mondays? Well, I decided I do like Mondays. In principle, I attempt to leave my office at six and dedicate some part of my evening to cook a decent meal and write some lines on happiness. Having this set writing day disciplines and hopefully provides some clarity to my reader when it’s best to check this page.

Thinking about it, there is also a case to write about happiness on Mondays. With the weekend past and a long full working week ahead, you would think that a little of spark of happiness would be very welcome on Monday, right?

Mondays are generally seen as the most depressing day of the week. Hate of Monday’s is everywhere, and was even at the origin of the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in 1979. In court, the perpetrator shockingly claimed “I don’t like Mondays. This lives up the day”. This is also how we got the Boomtown Rats song.

Pseudo scientists hired by a travel agency even have created a formula to determine ‘Blue Monday’, or the most depressing day of the year. As post-holiday season chubby thighs and bellies remain as the promising New Year resolutions on the new and improved version of yourself starts fading away, 21 January is sold as the best day to book a trip to the sun.

Whilst Blue Monday is a marketing stunt, there is some serious research on this topic. Somewhat disappointingly, studies contradict each other. With the exception of higher happiness levels on Fridays, this study by Ryan et al. does not find significant differences between Monday and other weekdays. The conclusion of Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth’s amazing ‘Hedonometer’ however is different. In their research, they assess the emotional state of people as expressed in tweets and conclude that it is Wednesday, not Monday, that is the saddest day of the week.

Anyway. Less depressing or not, I am sticking with Mondays. But of course it’s up to you when to read this post. Whether you prefer a gloomy Monday, a depressing Wednesday or a happy Saturday, you’re always welcome.

Posted in: about For A State of Happiness, personal, science , Tagged: blue Monday, Boomtown Rats, depression, happiness, Hedonometer, I don't like Mondays, Monday, Peter Dodds and Christopher Danforth, Saturday, Wednesday

The manufacture of happiness

12 October 2013 11:42 , Jasper Bergink

This article was written by Jasper Bergink and Maroussia Klep and was first published in the fifth issue of Ionic Magazine (www.ionicmagazine.co.uk), a wonderful magazine that aims to bridge the gap between two seemingly distant disciplines: art and science. The artwork is by Maroussia Klep.

The manufacture of happiness

Have you ever desired to be in the place of this happy family on the cover of magazines, or to live the same passionate love story as that couple on a TV show? Our society – probably more than any other before – makes you feel the urge to “be happy”. At the same time, the trick of consumerism is to make happiness a never ending and unattainable quest.

How would you react if we told you that you actually have the capacity to manufacture your own happiness?

As Abraham Lincoln reportedly put it some 150 years ago, “people are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Since then, behavioural researchers have worked hard to put scientific terms on this observation. Dan Gilbert, a professor in psychology at Harvard University, distinguishes two terms to describe this phenomenon: natural and synthetic happiness. The first refers to happiness as we usually tend to picture it: the deep feeling of joy you experience when you finally get the job you wanted or date the person you are in love with. Synthetic happiness however is a feeling of happiness that you can unconsciously create, even when you do not get what you wanted. Remarkably, Gilbert claims that synthesised happiness makes you feel as good and is as long-lasting as the natural ‘version’.

Adaptation

This is all very appealing but it opens a new question: how can one attain or ‘manufacture’ this alternative state of happiness? As a matter of fact, it does not require any special trick. It lies actually at the heart of human nature and relies on the amazing capacity of every person to adapt to his environment. This holds both for changes in the physical world around us as in psychological terms. A famous study by Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman compared the happiness levels of three groups: lottery winners, paraplegics (as a result of an accident), and people who hadn’t won a lottery nor were disabled. Common sense would make one inclined to think that the lottery winners would have a higher level of happiness than the disabled. On the short term, this must be true. Brickman and his team realised however that this initial effect had completely gone within a year. As time passed, participants adapted to their new situation, with no measurable difference in their respective happiness levels one year after the win of the lottery or the accident.

Human nature is of course more complex. One of the main obstacles in today’s society, which hampers our ability to manufacture happiness through adaptation, is the abundance of choice to which one is confronted. Excessive freedom, and the availability of multiple alternatives, can act as a paralysing factor. The study of Barry Schwartz is enlightening in this regard to understand the ‘paradox of choice’. During his observations, participants in a supermarket were offered the opportunity to taste and purchase six jams. In another setup, the number of jams was 24. Unexpectedly, Schwartz realised that when the number of jams increased, the level of interest and of purchase decreased rather than increased.

Limit your options

From these observations it can be concluded that too much freedom can actually be detrimental to one’s level of happiness. When faced with a limited number of options, a person can more easily adapt to his or her limits and make the most out of what is available. In other words, it makes ‘synthesizing’ easier. This observation is certainly not an argument to set ambitions aside and be complacent. On the contrary, it is by identifying your own ambitions and striving to attain your personal objectives that you will attain the highest levels of satisfaction. There is no point in considering fifteen different careers that are not fit to you. This will only make you unhappy. Instead, the lesson learned here is to focus on what you want and to restrict your panel of possibilities to what could give you most satisfaction – then, whatever the result, synthetic happiness will do the rest!

Posted in: also published elsewhere, science , Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, art, Barry Schartz, Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman, Dan Gilbert, disabled, happiness, Ionic Magazine, lottery, natural happiness, paradox of choice, science, synthetic happiness

Newer Posts →

Category Archives: Science