One of my gap year projects is to do write a book on the theme of happiness from the point of view of a software engineer. I admit that I’m not quite sure I’ll be able to write the book during this break, however. Most books take a few years to write, and authors spend a lot of time and effort researching their subjects. I don’t think things will be very different for me, and I’d like to spend some of my time off investigating what has been written about happiness already.
I’m obviously not the first person who wants to write something about happiness. So, when I started looking for a material to read on the subject, a book, aptly named Happiness by Daniel Nettle, came up in my search, which I quickly read.
In this excellent book, Daniel brings up two important points of view. First, that the psychology of aspiration is not that of satisfaction. That is, what we want is not what we like. Second, that humans are not wired for happiness or unhappiness. Instead, we are meant to strive for the goals that evolution has built into us. Whatever we think happiness is, it is a tool that we evolved to maximize, well, our fitness and ability to pass on our genes.
What is happiness?
Happiness is somewhat hard to pin down. We don’t really know how to express what it is, but we certainly know when we feel it. Nonetheless, psychologists have defined three levels of happiness:
- Level 1: the momentary feelings of joy, pleasure or pain
- Level 2: satisfaction and well-being
- Level 3: quality of life, fulfilling your potential
The book focuses almost entirely on level 2 happiness, which I thought was a bit disappointing because I would’ve like to know more about level 3 happiness. While quality of life can be out of our control – it is based on external factors like politics, the weather, and the size of your neighbor’s sound system – I would have liked to read more about how to fulfill my potential. Oh well, maybe I’ll find another book about that topic specifically.
Much has been written already on how to achieve happiness. You have probably read something on how to get into a state of “flow” at work or reducing your desires until you reach the point where you have no more needs. But people who have flow or are in the zone, and people with no needs don’t score any higher on questions about how happy they are, surprisingly.
Joy and pain, on the other hand, affect your level 1 happiness. And when most people are asked if they are generally happy, they perform a quick mental check to see if they’ve experienced more joy or pain recently and answer accordingly. Is this it? Happy people simply experience more joy than pain? There must be more to it than that.
Who is happier?
Generally, psychological surveys are very good answering this question and there have been many research studies done that spanned decades and measured the happiness of their participants over many years. But what makes or doesn’t make people happier can be surprising.
A toast: to success and good health!
A key finding explained in the book has been that changes in life circumstances don’t change someone’s happiness that much. There may be sudden and large changes in the short term, for example after winning a hundred million dollars at the lottery. As you can imagine, someone in this situation will feel much happier than before. But research shows that people adapt to new circumstances and eventually revert back to their base level of happiness, and our newly minted multi-millionaire will not escape this phenomenon.
According to studies, healthy people are happier than unhealthy people, unsurprisingly. But are we healthy because we are happy, or is it the other way around? After all, being happy lowers stress, which improves our health. In the same vein, married people are happier than unmarried people. But wouldn’t you agree that happy people tend to attract more attention and are more likely to get married? So, is it marriage that makes one happy, or was that person happy already?
Does money bring happiness? According to Daniel, there is no relationship between income and happiness within a social class. It’s the comparison between yourself and those within a different social class that can bring about feelings of happiness or unhappiness. Studies show that while there is a relationship between money and happiness, if everyone’s income rises, happiness does not seem to increase.
Good predictors of happiness
But there are some useful correlations out there that can help predict if someone is happy. Where money and health fail to make you happier, having control over your life seems to be the best predictor of happiness. A rich person that lacks control over their life will feel unhappier than the poor person who does have control.
Also, being married, after a few years, will start showing increased correlation to happiness. In the same way, being widowed or divorced will tend to lower one’s happiness.
Interestingly, while we adapt to most life changing events, like loss of social status, and revert back to our base levels of happiness after some time, we don’t seem to completely adapt to some annoyances, like a noisy neighbor for example. In those cases, we don’t always revert back completely to our previous happiness score. This might be tied to a feeling of loss of control.
Finally, the best predictor for how someone is happy at the end of a certain time period is how happy they were at the beginning of the same time period. The author spends a whole chapter on explaining why this is true in great details. This is a bit of a bummer, however, because it doesn’t help us learn how to be happier! While it sounds great for people who are already feeling happy, if you are generally unhappy, don’t worry! There are ways to tweak your happiness levels upwards. But don’t expect big changes.
A few tips to improve your happiness
People’s happiness levels tend to remain the same. What’s more, some people are wired to be less happy than others. It may seem like that’s all she wrote and there’s nothing else to discuss, but Daniel dedicates a chapter to a few things that you can do to improve your happiness, if only modestly.
The self-help market alone is proof that there are many people who think they can improve their happiness levels. We, as humans, also think that it’s a worthwhile endeavor to pursue. However, what we want and what we like are two different things. For example, most people want to keep up with the Joneses. They think it’ll make them happy. But in reality, nobody enjoys doing so. The bigger car or the greener grass only provides fleeting increases in personal happiness before reverting back to normal, while the effort of acquiring those things might have caused stress, lack of family time, or other downsides.
Instead, the author argues that to increase our happiness we might want to try reducing how we perceive negative emotions, increase our positive emotions, and sometimes just change the subject.
Reducing negative emotions
A lot of our negative emotions evolved in order to make us more fit for survival in the paleolithic era, when fitting in with our tribe was extremely important. Back then, it was important to see what other tribes were doing for survival. Did they have a better cave to sleep in? Was food more abundant over there? Comparing ourselves to others was necessary to improve our chances of survival. Today, it doesn’t matter as much, but still cause so much angst. The fear of rejection by your peers is less problematic today since there are hundreds of communities you can join. And there is no saber tooth tiger hiding in your boss’ office.
Mindfulness has been written about quite a lot in the past decade. One of its major benefits is that it helps dissociate someone from the pain they may be feeling. By meditating, or by keeping a journal, someone can learn to separate themselves from negative feelings and neutrally observe them as some sort of phenomenon that, unfortunately, is plaguing them. However, that separation is one way to reduce the severity of the feeling.
Also, comparing ourselves to others is such a source of discontent that we should avoid doing so. Take a break from social networks. We weren’t made to compare ourselves to seven billion other people!
Do more of what you enjoy doing
Another tip by the author is to make a list of things that bring you joy and to do more of that, something that he calls Pleasant Activity Training. Apparently, very few people do pleasurable activities on purpose. Pleasant Activity Training has been shown to help relieve depression, but also help increase happiness levels in people that do it regularly.
Change the subject
Finally, what does it mean to change the subject? Well, stop looking for happiness. Devote yourself to some other cause and happiness will find you along the way. Thinking about happiness makes you think about the lack of it in your life. Forget about it! Pursue something else. Change the subject.
Find ways to complexify your own self-image. If you only identify yourself as a successful lawyer, for example, you are more likely to become unhappy if that sole element of your identity comes under attack. However, if you also happen to be a book author, a great father, someone who loves building bird towers and a great cook, the same bad event will not affect you as much.
As mentioned higher, mindfulness can help reduce how we perceive negative feelings. But it can also be used to help reduce our desire for things that we are programmed to want through evolution. We are hardwired to improve our social status and to want to accumulate possessions. However, we don’t really enjoy them and the effort we spend might not be worth the prize. What’s more, once we get those things, we are usually not satisfied and want more. Working to let go of these desires will yield a bit more freedom to be happy. Change your desires!
Strive to work on what makes up a good human life. Find a purpose, be part of a community, find solidarity. You could try to care more about truth and justice or admire and seek beauty.
People who work part-time, control their own lives, join community organizations, or get involved in active leisure are happier than those who do not. Yet the vast majority of people do not make these choices.
– Daniel Nettle
What did I think of the book?
I think this was a great read with a ton of useful information that makes it easy to understand ourselves a little more and also equips us to make better choices for ourselves. The book is well written and has a lot of supporting evidence and studies are often referenced. The author might be rehashing a lot of existing knowledge, but he does bring in the novel point of view that evolution is a key player in how our brains want us to do things that may not make us any happier.
While the book is well written, its language is a bit more complex than what I’m used to. I sometimes had a bit more trouble reading the book if I was a bit tired. But honestly, this wasn’t much of a problem.
I plan to keep this book as a reference for my work in the future and I enjoyed re-reading parts of it to prepare this book review. In the end, I highlighted quite a few passages in the book that I found very interesting and I’m already looking forward to re-reading it.
I would rate this book a 9 out of 10.