Happiness

• 1. Introduction

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  Happiness is a word people use every day, yet philosophers and psychologists have argued over its meaning for centuries. Daniel Kahneman defined it as "what I experience here and now." Ruut Veenhoven defined it instead as the "overall appreciation of one's life as-a-whole." Those two definitions point in opposite directions. One is a fleeting feeling. The other is a verdict on an entire life.

  The gap between them is not just academic hairsplitting. Whereas Nordic countries often score highest on subjective well-being surveys, South American countries score higher on affect-based surveys of current positive life experiencing. The same world produces two different winners depending on which question you ask.

  This is a concept that resists a single, universally accepted definition, qualifying happiness as a polyseme and a fuzzy concept. So how do you measure something this slippery? Can it be tied to a number a government tracks? What does a 19th-century Chassidic rabbi share with a Greek philosopher writing in 350 BCE? And why did Friedrich Nietzsche find the whole pursuit contemptible?

• 2. Counting A Feeling

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  In 1780, the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed that happiness, being the primary goal of humans, should be measured as a way of determining how well the government was performing. The instinct to put a number on joy is older than it looks.

  Self-report surveys carry the burden today, and they are fragile instruments. Self-reporting is prone to cognitive biases such as the peak-end rule, studies show memories of felt emotions can be inaccurate, and affective forecasting research shows people are poor predictors of how happy they will be. A further issue is timing. Appraisal at the moment of an experience may differ from appraisal via memory later.

  The Subjective Happiness Scale, a four-item measure from 1999, asks people to rate themselves as happy or unhappy individuals. The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule from 1988 uses a twenty-item questionnaire and a five-point Likert scale running from very slightly or not at all up to extremely. The Satisfaction with Life Scale, developed by Ed Diener, asks people to agree or disagree with five statements about their lives.

  The Cantril ladder method, used in the World Happiness Report, asks respondents to imagine a ladder where the best possible life is a 10 and the worst is a 0. The Gallup positive experience survey takes a different angle, asking whether the day before brought enjoyment, laughter, rest, respect, or learning something interesting. In 2018, nine of the top ten countries on that survey were South American, led by Paraguay and Panama, with country scores ranging from 85 down to 43.

  Governments followed. Since 2012 a World Happiness Report has been published, and the UK began measuring national well-being that same year, following Bhutan, which had already been measuring gross national happiness.

• 3. The Genetic Lottery

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  Sonja Lyubomirsky has estimated that 50 percent of a person's happiness level could be genetically determined, 10 percent is shaped by life circumstances, and the remaining 40 percent is subject to self-control. That last figure is the hopeful one. It suggests a large slice of happiness is yours to influence.

  Genetics, importantly, do not predict behavior. Genes can raise the likelihood of someone being happier than others, but they do not determine it completely. The science here is unsettled. In a 2016 study, Michael Minkov and Michael Harris Bond found that a gene called SLC6A4 was not a good predictor of happiness level in humans.

  The numbers swing wildly depending on how happiness is measured. When subjective well-being is treated as a trait, heritability has been found as high as 70 to 90 percent. In another study of 11,500 unrelated genotypes, heritability came out at only 12 to 18 percent. A review of many such studies put the common figure for heredity at about 20 to 50 percent.

  The body offers a few physical clues. A positive relationship has been suggested between the volume of gray matter in the brain's right precuneus area and a person's subjective happiness score. As yet, no evidence has been found of happiness causing improved physical health, a question being researched at the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

• 4. Meaning Over Pleasure

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  Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps during World War II, noticed something stark. Those who lost hope soon died, while those who held to meaning and purpose tended to live on. He concluded that joy and misery had more to do with a person's perspective and choice than with their surroundings. He highlighted three sources of meaning: the creation of an important work or deed, love as found in truly encountering another person, and finding meaning in unavoidable suffering.

  George Vaillant and Robert J. Waldinger, who directed the longitudinal Study of Adult Development at Harvard University, found that those who were happiest and healthiest reported strong interpersonal relationships. Good mental health and good relationships, the research showed, contribute more to happiness than income does. Adequate sleep contributes too.

  Psychologist Robert Emmons identified goals as central to pursuing happiness. He found that when people pursue meaningful projects without primarily focusing on happiness, happiness often results as a by-product. He grouped the categories of meaning into a single label, WIST, standing for work, intimacy, spirituality, and transcendence.

  Kahneman pushed against the word itself. "When you look at what people want for themselves, how they pursue their goals, they seem more driven by the search for satisfaction than the search for happiness." That distinction separates the hedonistic tradition of seeking pleasant experiences from the eudaimonic tradition of living life in a full and deeply satisfying way.

  Laurie R. Santos turned this research into a classroom phenomenon. In 2018, her course titled "Psychology and the Good Life" became the most popular in the history of Yale University. Made free online to non-Yale students, by 2020 it had 1,153,744 people enroll and 10.5 million visit the site, many seeking evidence-based ways to protect their mental health during the COVID-19 crisis.

• 5. Theories Of Flourishing

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  Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a pyramid of human needs, and at its summit sits self-actualization. Maslow envisioned moments of extraordinary experience beyond routine needs, which he called peak experiences, profound moments of love, understanding, or rapture during which a person feels more whole, alive, and yet part of the world.

  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow runs parallel. The idea is that once basic needs are met, greater happiness comes from becoming so engaged in a task that we lose our sense of time. The intense focus crowds out other issues and promotes positive emotions.

  Erich Fromm framed happiness as an answer to existence itself. "Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities," he wrote, describing a person who "burns without being consumed." Self-determination theory ties intrinsic motivation to three needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

  Ronald Inglehart traced cross-national differences using data from the World Values Survey. He found that the extent to which a society allows free choice has a major impact on happiness. Once basic needs are satisfied, the degree of happiness depends on economic and cultural factors that enable free choice in how people live.

  Sigmund Freud was more pessimistic. He said all humans strive after happiness, but the possibilities are restricted because we "are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from the state of things." Against that skepticism, the field of positive psychology took flight.

• 6. The Science Of Thriving

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  Martin Seligman introduced positive psychology in 1998, arguing that the discipline had long focused on bringing people from "minus five to zero," but should also study how people move from "zero to plus five." Since 2000 the field expanded drastically in scientific publications. It organizes its findings around six key virtues: wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.

  Those virtues are not chosen loosely. For something to count as a key strength, it must meet twelve criteria, including ubiquity across cultures, being morally valued, having a clearly negative opposite, being measurable, showing up in youth as prodigies, and being supported by some institutions. In 2011 Seligman formalized the field further with the PERMA model: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment.

  Emma Seppala, a Yale researcher, emphasized compassion for others balanced with self-compassion, whether through service, volunteering, or simply reaching out to show gratitude. The Framingham Heart Study found that happiness spreads through social networks. Friends three degrees of separation away can affect a person, and a happy friend who lives within a mile, about 1.6 km, increases the probability that a person is happy by 25 percent.

  Yet the most popular advice may rest on thin ground. A 2023 meta analysis identified the five most commonly recommended strategies in media articles: expressing gratitude, enhancing sociability, exercising, practicing mindfulness or meditation, and increasing exposure to nature. Only 10 percent of the initially retrieved studies met rigorous criteria. The findings revealed reasonably solid evidence for gratitude and sociability, but no convincing evidence that sports, mindfulness training, or walks in the countryside make people happier.

• 7. When Happiness Backfires

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  June Gruber argued that happiness has a shadow side, suggesting it may make a person more sensitive, more gullible, less successful, and more likely to undertake high-risk behaviours. The pursuit itself can sabotage the goal. Iris Mauss has shown that the more people strive for happiness, the more likely they set standards too high and feel disappointed.

  Various writers, including Camus and Tolle, have written that the act of searching for happiness is incompatible with being happy. John Stuart Mill believed that for the great majority of people happiness is best achieved en passant, without self-consciousness or scrutiny, so that one might "inhale happiness with the air you breathe." William Inge observed that the happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.

  Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," coined the term synthetic happiness, the happiness we make for ourselves. In his TED Talk on the surprising science of happiness, he explained that everyone possesses a "psychological immune system" that regulates emotional reactions, and that personal happiness is largely based on personal perception.

  Culture shapes the whole equation. Hedonism appears more strongly related to happiness in individualistic cultures, and some cultures are averse to happiness altogether. People in Eastern Asian cultures focus more on happiness within relationships with others, and may even find personal happiness harmful to fulfilling happy social relationships. Western concern about childhood being a time of happiness has existed only since the 19th century.

• 8. Philosophers At Odds

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  Aristotle, writing in the Nicomachean Ethics in 350 BCE, stated that happiness is the only thing humans desire for its own sake, unlike riches, honour, health, or friendship. He used the word eudaimonia, built from "eu," meaning good, and "daimon," meaning spirit or one's lot. For Aristotle this was an activity, not an emotion or a state, and through his "Function Argument" he concluded that the happy life is the life of excellent rational activity, since reasoning is what humans uniquely do.

  Thomas Aquinas, the 13th-century philosopher-theologian, carried the idea into Christianity. He described man's last end as a beatific vision of God's essence in the next life, writing that "all men agree in desiring the last end, which is happiness." For Aquinas, perfect happiness, or beatitudo, is to be attained not in this life but the next, consisting entirely in the contemplation of Divine things.

  Religious traditions echo and diverge. In Buddhism, ultimate happiness is achieved only by overcoming craving in all forms, with the Noble Eightfold Path leading toward Nirvana, a state of everlasting peace. In Judaism, happiness or simcha is central to serving God, captured in the teaching of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov that "Mitzvah Gedolah Le'hiyot Besimcha Tamid," it is a great commandment to always be in a state of happiness. Al-Ghazali, the Sufi thinker, wrote "The Alchemy of Happiness," a manual still used throughout the Muslim world.

  Friedrich Nietzsche refused the entire project. He critiqued the English Utilitarians, declaring that "Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does." Making happiness one's ultimate goal, he said, "makes one contemptible." He created the figure of the "last man," a small creature seeking only pleasure and safety while avoiding all danger and struggle, meant to seem contemptible to the reader. Against that, Nietzsche valued what can only be earned through difficulty and pain, the affirmative role suffering plays in creating everything of great worth, not least philosophy itself.