Happiness
02/04/10
02:24
Would a million pounds
make you happy? Most of us believe in a consequential
relationship between financial success and happiness;
indeed it’s one of the key motivating factors
in getting us out of bed and into work each day. Yet
millionaires aren’t happier than the general
populous. Indeed, millionaires aren’t even
happier than paraplegics. In the late 1970s a study
was conducted in which three groups of people were
interviewed: state lottery winners; serious accident
victims; and a control group randomly selected from
the phone book. The results were - to say the least -
surprising:
“Clearly, the winners realized that they’d been fortunate. But this only made the subsequent results more puzzling. The winners considered themselves no happier at the time of the interviews than the members of the control group did. In the future, the winners expected to become slightly happier, but, once again, no more so than the control-group members. (Even the accident victims expected to be happier than the lottery winners within a few years.) Meanwhile, the winners took significantly less pleasure in daily activities—including clothes-buying—than the members of the other two groups.”
The study concluded - and this is a conclusion backed by further research - that the things we think will make us happy simply don’t:
“A whole range of activities that people tend to think will make them happy—getting a raise, moving to California, having kids—do not, it turns out, have that effect. (Studies have shown that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging and only slightly more satisfying than doing the dishes.) As the happiness researchers Tim Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have put it, “People routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring.”
In many ways, it stikes me, this is a comforting conclusion; we aren’t likely to be vastly more happy or unhappy than those lucky few who win the lottery. We thus have the freedom to think about life as a striving towards something else - something more meaningful, perhaps.
Hat tip: The New Yorker
“Clearly, the winners realized that they’d been fortunate. But this only made the subsequent results more puzzling. The winners considered themselves no happier at the time of the interviews than the members of the control group did. In the future, the winners expected to become slightly happier, but, once again, no more so than the control-group members. (Even the accident victims expected to be happier than the lottery winners within a few years.) Meanwhile, the winners took significantly less pleasure in daily activities—including clothes-buying—than the members of the other two groups.”
The study concluded - and this is a conclusion backed by further research - that the things we think will make us happy simply don’t:
“A whole range of activities that people tend to think will make them happy—getting a raise, moving to California, having kids—do not, it turns out, have that effect. (Studies have shown that women find caring for their children less pleasurable than napping or jogging and only slightly more satisfying than doing the dishes.) As the happiness researchers Tim Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have put it, “People routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring.”
In many ways, it stikes me, this is a comforting conclusion; we aren’t likely to be vastly more happy or unhappy than those lucky few who win the lottery. We thus have the freedom to think about life as a striving towards something else - something more meaningful, perhaps.
Hat tip: The New Yorker