Happiness
What do we know about happiness?
Countless self-help books have tried to pin down the concept of happiness: what it is and how to achieve it. Unlike those works, this post doesn’t seek to motivate or push any way of thinking or perceiving things onto you. Rather, I aim to present the scientific study of happiness and its findings. You be the judge of if and how this applies to your life.
What is happiness? The answer is far simpler than we may assume – it is our judgment of feeling satisfied with our lives, frequently experiencing positive emotions, and infrequently experiencing negative emotions (Myers, 2000).
Who is happy? Most people, both in the U.S. and other countries. These findings may come as a shock and go against what many of us believe. When asked how happy they are, 3/10 Americans say “very happy”, 6/10 say “pretty happy”, and only 1/10 say “not too happy”; further, 8/10 Americans report being more satisfied than dissatisfied with their lives (Myers, 2000).
Why should we believe that people are generally happy? The world is continually improving in terms of quality of life. Disease rates are at their lowest, as are war casualties, and violent crimes (Pinker, 2018). There are some exceptions, of course – climate change and increasing economic disparity, to name a couple. The latter means that “the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer” generally holds true across the globe (Stiglitz, 2002).
Why is there a persistent, widespread belief that people are generally unhappy? There are many reasons, but I will name just a few that I suspect may contribute to this: globalization and subsequent increase in media (including social media) exposure, and cognitive and evolutionary influences.
Finally, there is a factor that I believe might also be a cause of this pervasive belief in people’s unhappiness: increased awareness of mental illness. I was unable to find research that looks into this, so take this with a grain of salt – it’s simply me beginning a conversation about this and pointing out a possibility. This is due to issues in collecting such research – as awareness of mental illness has increased, the world has rapidly changed in other areas. Let’s say we were to conduct a research study and find that, as mental illness awareness has increased, the belief that people are unhappy has decreased. We cannot confidently make the claim that one is causing the other, as that would be neglecting all of the other major world changes. In research methods, this is called a potential confound, which is when a third variable actually causes the relationship between two variables.
Myers, D. G. (2000). The funds, friends, and faith of happy people. American Psychologist, 55(1), 56.
Price, M. (2017, December 19). Why human society isn't more-or less-violent than in the past. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/why-human-society-isn-t-more-or-less-violent-past
Snowden, L. R. (1998). Racial differences in informal help seeking for mental health problems. Journal of Community Psychology, 26(5), 429-438.
Stiglitz, J. E. (2012). The price of inequality: How today's divided society endangers our future. WW Norton & Company.
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