Happiness

I've been thinking a lot about happiness lately. Which makes sense, because I'm American and Americans in general are obsessed with happiness. Fairly early on, Americans decided that we want to be the happiest people on the planet. Not the most pious, not the hardest working, not even the richest, except in the belief that money actually can buy happiness. It's written in our "Screw You" letter to King George ("Life, Libery, and the Pursuit of Happiness", and all that) More recenlty, we've decided that being happy is the default state of existence, and anything else is abnormal.

But I've also been thinking a lot also happiness because there's this a new blog that's about happiness, happiness research, and what, if anything, we ought to do with this research.

Anyway, after reading this guy, and after thinking about it a bit myself, here's my personal belief on how to be happy. I have no numbers to back most of this stuff up, so take it all with a grain of salt. Seriously. If you're expecting to find out how to be happy reading a blog, you've got issues.

• First off, your grandmother was right. Money can't buy happiness. There are plenty of really happy poor people and plenty of utterly miserable rich people. It's the person, not the amount of money. If you're unhappy and poor, and you work hard and invest your money, you'll retire unhappy and wealthy. If you're unhappy and poor and you win the lottery, you'll become unhappy and rich overnight.

  The things that do have to do with money are obvious things like not getting enough to eat, persistent health problems, living in a war zone. The research suggests that once you get to a certain level of income, the relationship to income and happiness drops to insignificance. That income? $10,000 a year.

  And then there's all the things that have nothing to do with money. If you make $500,000 a year and you think your wife's cheating on you, you might well be better off making $20,000 a year in a happy marriage. Just the random events in life -- your son dying in a car accident, getting cancer, being born a Texan and having to face yourself in the mirror -- all these things that have nothing to do with how much money can utterly swamp whatever positive effects you might get from being loaded.

• Well, as much as more money can't make you happy, I think there's something to be said for the contrapositive: less money can make you less happy. My personal experience is the quickest way to become unhappy is to spend more money than you make.

  So, quite simply, just make sure you don't spend more than you make. If you make $1000 a week, don't spend more than $1000 a week. If you make $100 a week, don't spend more than $100. Granted, it's easier to not spend $1000 a week than to not spend $100 a week. But then, what percentage of the earth's population gets by on less than $100 a year? It can be done! And if it can't, get a second job!

• One way to be happy (or happier, in any case) is to go to church. Starting to attend church gives you a happiness boost equivalent to moving from the bottom quartile of income to the top quartile. As pointed out above, that doesn't mean as much as you think it does, but it's greater than zero.
• I suspect that your grandmother never told you to dream as big as you can, and if you do, all your dreams can come true. Well, if she did, she was full of crap. Not only was she full of crap, that's the quick route to misery.

  The real secret to being happy is to dream small. The research backs this up, too. Constant disappointment is the quick route to unhappiness. Way quicker than being broke. And constant success is the quick route to happiness.

  So don't set yourself up to fail. This isn't exactly the same as Famous J's Rule to Life #2*. But it's in the ballpark. Don't set your sights on dating a supermodel. Set your sights on getting a date with anyone, and then work your way up, maybe. Or set your sights on getting a date and learning to live with who you ended up with. Don't decide you're going to be the company president. Decide you're going to get a promotion and see how things look from there. Break your dreams into manageable chunks.

  Bill Watterson put it very well here.

• In the end, though, I believe that happiness is just something you have to be born with. Take me for instance. I'm one of the happiest guys I know. But I know that most of that is just my outlook. I find things I like about whatever situation I'm in to be pleased with. Furthermore, I don't really need too much out of life. A job, a place of my own, ideally with nobody else there but a dog. I take disappointment easily. I've been blessed, to be sure, but I've also been satisfied with less than I have now.

  But even outlook isn't everything. Some people have a good outlook but something in their id seems to bring misfortune and ruin upon themselves at every turn. Some people have a fatal character flaw, like the women who go from one abusive relationship to the next, but then find the non-abusive relationships too "boring".

I guess, in the end, unless you're younger than, say, 25, you're probably about as happy as you're ever going to be. Once you're done with teen angst and the early 20's doldrums, that's it. That's about who you are, and you're stuck with it.

Which, depending on how things look now is either good news or bad news.

* Famous J's Rules to Life #2: "If you ignore your problems, most of the time, they'll either go away or solve themselves."