Happiness

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness lately. It’s resulted in a lot of talk, and since my friends actually read, that results and being referred to books and articles. Tam’s been going thru back issues of the New Yorker, and she passed along to me one with a dual book review on happiness (2/27/06, John Lanchester, “Pursuiting Happiness”). Well, it’s presented as book reviews, but really it’s an article.

It said 7 mention-worthy things:
1) Happiness is the result of 3 components: your set point (S), the conditions of you life (C), and your voluntary activities (V). So, here’s the equation:
H=S+C+V
You don’t have any control over S and only a little over C, but you have a lot of control over V.

2) Unhappiness is biological. The article gave the example to 2 pre-historic hunter-gatherers, one cautious and the other carefree. The carefree one is happier, but he’s also likely eat poison berries, be eaten by a bear or wild cat. The other is more likely to survive and reproduce. So, from a Darwinian point of view, we are breed to be unhappy. As a result, we have a stronger reaction to the negative things in life than to the positive.

3) Emotion is what makes it possible for us to make decisions. People who suffer damage to their frontal cortex and are left with rational thought but no emotional experience are paralyzed when confronted with a simple choice.

4) Some people are unhappy bc they are poor. But rich people aren’t any happier than people who have just enough. A British economist (Layard) found that the threshold is $15K. I wonder if this should be adjusted for local economic conditions; 15K doesn’t go very far in SF.

5) Winning the lottery is better than breaking your neck, but a year afterwards, these people have gone back to their baseline happiness level (S). So, winning the lottery is not as much better than breaking your neck as you might think (Haidt).

6) Top 4 favorite activities: sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing;
Top 4 least favorite activities: commuting, work, childcare, and housework (Kahneman)
Along the same lines, when examining data on people who have committed suicide, no matter how you examine the data, people with fewer social “constraints, bonds, and obligations” (all remarkably negative words) are more likely to kill themselves. In other words, Friends = Happiness; big surprise!

7) I mentioned in an earlier blog a radio show I heard on NPR talking about the concept of “flow”, “the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities”. Flow makes people happy. Happiness is a “by-product of absorption” (Haidt).

I can’t help but apply this to relationships. Maybe people who make us happy are both challenging and like us. So, from a biological stand point, in its simplest terms, this means that smart people would be programmed to produce smart children and stupid people, stupid children. But maybe that’s oversimplifying. Perhaps musical, or mathematical, or linguistic people will each mate and produce children with those talents resulting in the polarization of social groups and increasing difficulty communicating between groups. I think this is what's happening in National American politics or something along these lines.