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A central component of long-term happiness
Friday, 21 July 2006
What makes us happy? Many people would look at material thing - a good car, a big house, nice holidays. Others would say friends and family. These are all extremely important.
But at the core of long-term happiness lies one fundamental component: A sense that we're making progress.
A couple of simple examples should be enough to show that it's not so much what we have today, but rather how our situation compares to how it was that determines our happiness. Let's take a snapshot of two people over a period of three years.
Person A
Year 1: Single but wanting a long-term relationship - mostly happy, but a little lonely.
Year 2: Meets someone and gets involved in a fantastic love affair - absoultely over the moon with happiness.
Year 3: Splits up with the special someone and finds herself alone again - completely miserable.
Person B
Year 1: Renting a small flat in an okay part of town - quite content with things.
Year 2: Inherits a huge water-front mansion from a distant relative he didn't know about - ecstatic with how things have turned out.
Year 3: Mansion seized by government after investigation finds distant relative owed a huge amount of tax. Back to living in a small flat - completely miserable.
All the reactions to the events over the years are perfectly understandable, and pretty typical of how most people would feel. But the key point is that in Year 1 and 3 they're essentially in the same situation. Person A had no idea they would fall in love in Year 2, Person B had no idea they'd be inheriting a big mansion. Yet once they'd improved their situation, moving backwards made them much more miserable, even though they ended up in essentially the same position they began with.
The reason is simple: once we get above having our subsistence needs being taken care of, it's thechanges in our situation rather than the situation itself that makes us most happy. If we sense things are improving, we'll feel good. If we perceive we're going backward, we'll feel terrible. If things are stagnant, we'll get depressed and feel empty.
These things will happen regardless of the actual level of our situation. A billionaire who increases his income by 10% will feel great just as a minimum wage person in the same situation will. A billionaire who loses 10% will feel terrible just like the minimum wage person - even though the difference in outcomes is huge. The billionaire is still extremely rich, the minimum wage person quite poor.
Losing something very important to us - such as a loved one dying, our house burning down, or our health being adversely affected - is one of the most miserable experiences in life. This is the ultimate feeling of moving backwards.
If you're feeling low or depressed, despite your state of affairs being acceptable, this is most likely the reason. If you are surprised that, once time passes and you become used to it, that improvement you achieved in your living standards isn't actually making you any happier, look here for the explanation.
It's the feeling of moving forward that makes us happy. If we sense we're solving our problems that can often bring more satisfaction than actually having the problem solved.
Remember this is you want to do in order achieve long-term contentment.
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