Bored & Confused: What determines happiness?

Happiness sounds pretty simple: “a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life." That doesn’t sound too hard to accomplish, right? And there are so many comprehensive guides explaining how to do it too! This October, Albert Einstein’s “Theory of Happiness,” a tip written on hotel stationery detailing how to live a happy life, sold for a whopping $1.56 million. His “Theory of Happiness” had two pieces of advice: “A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness,” and “When there’s a will, there’s a way.” All this hoo-ha sounds pretty easy.

Unfortunately, it clearly isn’t when 350 million people -- 5 percent of the world population -- suffer from depression according to healthline.com. This all goes to show how happiness is elusive. Happiness is in fact so elusive that people devote their entire lives and vast sums of their money to find out how to achieve it. The question is, then, what exactly determines happiness?

There is now a quantitative and theoretical methodology to happiness: “happynomics.” Happynomics seemed a little obvious in its studies. More wealth and more education meant more happiness. More corruption and more unemployment meant more unhappiness. The classic theory of happynomics was the Easterlin paradox, the idea that rich people are much happier than poor people. However, rich societies are not much happier than poor societies, and an increased accumulation of wealth does not necessarily lead to happiness. Basically, the Easterlin paradox hypothesized that you just had to feel richer than your next-door neighbor to be happier.

Contrasting the Easterlin paradox’s focus on relative income, a recent mass collection of Gallup polls across various countries actually suggests that life satisfaction is significantly higher in richer countries than in poorer ones, and absolute income is more influential to life satisfaction than relative income. Money seems to pave an easier way to happiness, but not necessarily guarantee it. So I guess money can buy happiness, at least a little.

What’s actually key to happiness is low expectations. University of Southern Denmark Professor Kaare Christensen explains this through the lens of the legend David and Goliath. When someone acts as a “Goliath,” and has higher expectations of their perceived happiness, then they’re most likely to be disappointed and unhappy. Conversely, when someone acts as a “David,” they never expect much to happen and are pleasantly surprised, thus happier, when good things happen occasionally. For example, the country Denmark acts as a “David,” exhibiting cloudy, dark weather, diets of fatty foods and alcohol, and increasingly lower reported expectations every year. However, as their expectations get lower and lower every year, they get more and more pleasantly surprised.

Happynomics is able to expand the analysis of happiness from mere percolation to actual data-collective and quantitative measurement. So, to answer the question “What determines happiness?” there are many factors, from low expectations to relative income, in happiness, and happynomics hopefully takes steps closer to us learning about and achieving a better state of mind.