21 Empirical Findings About Human Happiness

In the American Declaration of Independence it states that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, one of which is the pursuit of happiness. Yet up until very recently, we humans did not have much information about what actually makes us happy. In the US, most people would agree that you shouldn't cheat on your spouse, that you should live within your means, and that it's a good thing to show charity to those less fortunate.

The problem is we don't actually know -- in a scientific sense -- whether these behaviors actually make us happier at the end of the day. It wasn't until the late 1950s  that any serious scientific rigor was applied to measuring happiness, and even then it was a nascent branch of psychology without much public interest.

Researching Happiness

I came to be interested in happiness research as the result of watching "Why are we happy?" For those of you interested in the answer to that question, I highly recommend you take the 20 minutes and view the talk. It got me pumped up enough to read a slew of research papers that have informed my outlook on everyday life and made me a happier person.

In the course of my readings, I decided it would be a good idea to write up my findings in bite-sized chunks so that others can better understand themselves and research the topic more effectively. Think of this blog post as a cliff notes to happiness research. I don't go into detail on any of the points, and if you want further information, I'd recommend reading the resources at the bottom of the page.

Counter-Intuitive Findings

1. It is often easier to overcome very bad events than trivially bad events because of what is called the region-ß paradox. This occurs because events that are more difficult to overcome trigger critical threshold attenuating mechanisms that allow humans to recover much faster than had the bad event been of a lesser degree. This means that in some circumstances, it is actually advantageous to make situations more difficult than necessary because it's the small stuff that gets you.
2. People systematically overestimate the positive and negative effects of future events, this is called impact bias. Example: people consistently rank becoming crippled as negatively affecting lifetime happiness in a large way. People also predict winning the lottery will have a significant positive effect. In fact, after several years,  people that experience either event are about equally happy. When asked to focus on a certain event, we forget that being crippled or winning the lottery does not continue to affect our lives in big ways for long periods of time. The change is sudden, big, and then we adapt.
3. We experience greater happiness from unexplainable positive events than from explainable positive events. Barring any creepy overtones, if someone gives you $5 and tells you it's for a known cause, you will be less happy than if the same person gave you $5 and walked away without explaining why they gave you the money.
4. We think that losing will hurt more than winning will please us, but in reality, losing doesn't hurt as much as we expect. This finding suggests that we should be more adventuresome. The old saying "nothing ventured, nothing gained" isn't a truism for nothing.
5. Try not to make choices based on comparison, but based on values. Ex: don't choose a job because of it's comparative "betterness" to other offers you have received, because the comparison no longer exists when you make your choice and begin working. Instead, choose a job because it fits your values (eg, "close to home," "reasonable hours," etc).
6. We remember state changes most vividly, and the ending state most vividly. For example, even if a marriage is good for 15 years and bad for 2, the ending state has a disproportionate effect on the happiness derived in the future.
7. Typical life events stop effecting your happiness after 3 to 6 months, although in the intervening time period, they can raise your happiness. The implication is that big life-events don't effect us that much (if at all) in the long term.
8. Widowhood and divorce are listed as the two most stressful events in adulthood, marriage was listed as #7. In addition, long term studies of marital satisfaction find that during the first  years of marriage, life satisfaction declines. Later in marriage, however, satisfaction rises. This is small wonder. During the first years of marriage people merge their entire life with someone else. It stands to reason that after a while, the stress of adapting turns to satisfaction with sharing life's journey.
9. Happy people get married more often than sad people. People who get married tend to rank themselves .25 points (on a 0-10 scale) higher on average before marriage than those who do not get married.
10. The heritability of well being is thought to be between 50-80%. Stated another way, 50-80% of your day to day happiness level is thought to be genetically determined. This finding is referred to in the research literature as the "set point theory" (not to be confused with the identically named theory about weight loss). Where we are born, cultural aspects of life, demographics, age, gender,  and ethnicity all account for a mere 8-15% of our total minute-to-minute  happiness. So if you're an optimist, 42% of your happiness is in your hands. If you are a pessimist, you only have 5% to play with.
11. Some of the big attitudinal factors that can positively affect happiness are: general optimism about life circumstances, an inclination to avoid social comparisons, and the tendency to feel a sense of optimism about one's life.
12. Personal projects are worth pursuing. Accomplishing and  continuing to accomplish projects and pursuits of personal importance have lasting effects on day to day happiness. Example: research has found that almost nobody regrets spending time developing skills or hobbies, even when the pursuit is discarded later and never resumed.
13. People regret actions more in the present. People regret innaction more in the long term. Example: you are much more likely to regret going on a disastrous trip to Europe the week after returning, but in the long term you are much more likely to have regretted not going at all. One possible explanation for why this happens is that we over-emphasize the effects of ambiguous happiness  (what could have been if we had gone to Europe) and minimize concrete badness (that train wreck we caused in Germany).
14. We get happier with age, up until around 65, after which happiness tends to stabilize. Only in the very old (some studies suggest 95+) does day to day happiness decline.
15. We don't end up regretting circumstances out of our control. Persons that have experienced polio and other life altering (but unavoidable) mishaps don't tend to list those events as regrets when asked. This should make you worry less: things beyond our control generally don't affect our long term happiness.
16. Self control is a muscle. Presenting people with two tasks that require self control one right after another shows that the successful performance on the second task diminishes significantly. In other words, self control is a muscle that we can exhaust. This explains why alcoholics and dieters more often lapse when they are experiencing bad moods, frustration, and stress. Although theoretically possible, there isn't much empirical evidence that we can increase our self control with practice.
17. It pays to be an extrovert. Extroversion as a personality trait correlates strongly with experiencing more positive interactions as well as achieving higher happiness stability. So for us introverts (myself included), developing your ability to be an extrovert appears to pay off.
18. We sometimes overwhelmingly prefer to be less happy. Even though we may prefer eating a lollipop to eating spinach or broccoli, we tend to choose a mixture if presented the choice. This is strange because we enjoy repeated preferred experiences (the lollipop) more in the moment but less in retrospect. We prefer to sacrifice total happiness for higher retrospective happiness, even though studies show retrospective pleasure is by far less important to lifetime happiness than moment-to-moment enjoyment.
19. Income expectations do not appear to effect happiness, ie, a person who grew up poor with expectations of continued poverty is not significantly more happy if they earn a lot of money. In addition, there is substantial evidence that income that exceeds $60,000/year doesn't make you any happier.
20. People don't always prefer less pain. People care less about total pain (ie, how long a pain is experienced) and more about peak pain level, ending condition, and the time trend of the pain. Example: controlling for peak pain level and the result of the operation, people show no retrospective preference for a 4 minute colonoscopy or a 69 minute colonoscopy!
21. The desire to get discomfort out of the way early and quickly appears to be a universal preference. People also tend to prefer sequences of events that end better than they start, even if the total sequence results in less overall happiness. If you offer someone a salary that increases from $35k-50k over a year as opposed to a salary that goes from $70k-50k, people will widely prefer the first, even though it earns them $35k less. The preference for best thing last changes according to a documented "Magnet Effect" which states that if events/decisions occur close enough in time we treat them like a sequence.

The above studies are just a sample of what I've been reading, and I expect to continue my research slowly in my free time. I will probably post here again when I have another batch of interesting nuggets. What I have learned is that there is growing momentum in the quest to increase human happiness and I am looking forward to learning ever more about how to make my life more enjoyable.

Bibliography

Gilovich, Thomas, and Victoria Husted Medvec. (1995). "The Experience of Regret: What, When, and why," Psychological Review 102(2), 379-395.

Kahneman, D., D.L. Frederickson, C.A. Schreiber, and D.A. Redelemeier. (1993). "When More Pain is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End," Pyschological Science 4, 401-405.

Loewenstein, George, and Drazen prelec. (1993). "Preferences for Sequences of Outcomes," Pyschological Review 100(1), 91-108.

Brunstein, J. (1993). Personal goals and subjective well-being: A longitudinal study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 1061-1070.

Charles, S. T., Reynolds, C.A., & Gatz, M. (2001). Age-related differences and change in positive and negative affect over 23 years. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 136-151.

Diener, E., Sandvik, E., Seidlitz, L., & Diener, M. (1993). The relationship between income and subjective well being: Relative or Absolute? Social Indicators Research, 28, 195-223.

Muraven, M., & Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Self-regulation and depletion of limited resources: Does self-control resemble a muscle? Psychological Bulletin, 126, 247-259

Ratner, R.K., Kahn, B.E., & Kaneman D. (1999). Choosing less-preferred experiences for the sake of variety. Journal of Consumer Research, 26, 1-15.

Hill, C.T., & Peplau, L.A. (1998) Premarital predictors of relationship outcomes: A 15-year follow-up of the Boston Couples Study. IN T. Bradbury (Ed.), The Developmental course of marital dysfunction (pp. 237-278). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Brunstein, C. Joachim (1993) Personal Goals and Subjective Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol 65, No. 5, 1061-1070

The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad, Daniel T. Gilbert, Matthew D. Lieberman, Carey K. Morewedge, and Timothy D. Wilson, 2004, American Psychological Society

Affective Forecasting: Knowing What to Want, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert, 2005 American Psychological Society

Thinking about Values in Prospect and Retrospect: Maximizing Experienced Utility, Joel Huber, John Lynch, Kim Corfman, Jack Feldman, Morris B. Holbrook, Donald Lehmann, Bertrand Mueir, David Schkade, Itamar Simonson

Events and Subjective Well-Being: Only Recent Events Matter, Eunkook Suh and Ed Diener, Frank Fujita, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1996

Reexamining Adaptation and the SEt Point Model of Happiness: Reactions to Changes in Marital Status, Richard E. lucas, Yannis Georgellis, Andrew E. Clark, Ed Diener, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003

Pursuing Happiness: the Architecture of Sustainable Change, Sonja Lyubomirksy, Kennon M. Sheldon, David Schkade, Review of General Psychology, 2005, Vol. 9 No. 2 111-131

This is Why You Don't Want Nice Things

A while back I wrote about how I think renting is a superior form of ownership. As I keep reading and trying new secondary markets, from Uber to Getaround to AirBnb, I am even more convinced that owning things is ill-advised. Right now every internet user can rent cars, tools, bikes, and dozens of other products and services which used to be enjoyable only by the people who ponied up the cash to purchase them [1]. Distributed economies have changed the value of owning things, but most people are still paying too much to own too many things and it makes us unhappy - I call this over-ownership.

A classic example of over-ownership would be buying a home when early in life.

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, 50% of people between the ages of 20 and 24 have been with their current employer for less than 2 years [2]. The only age group in which people have worked for their current employer longer than 8 years is 55+. An 18 year old person can expect to move 9.1 more times in their life. By age 45, people can expect to move another 2.7 times [4]. That's approximately 1 move every 4.2 years for people between the ages of 18 and 45.

Using the New York Time's "Is it better to rent or own?", I calculated that if you live in Raleigh (my previous city of residence), pay less than $1,000 in rent, and want to purchase a $200,000 home [5] on a favorable 2.8% mortgage and 1% property tax rate, it only makes sense to purchase if you expect to stay put for more than 6 years. If you live somewhere like San Francisco (where I currently live), and want to buy the average $1M home, and you currently pay $3,000 per month in rent, it will take 18 years before it makes sense to buy.

So most young people shouldn't buy houses, yet according to Calculated Risk and The Atlantic [6], more than 38% of people between the ages of 25 and 29 do own their houses. This says that me that a fair number of those buyers are going to lose time, money, and sleep on their housing purchases.

Now, think about all the items in your home and think about how much you use them. Think especially of expensive items; KitchenAids, belt sanders, laptops, etc. I would be willing to wager that it would be cheaper for you to rent items you use infrequently instead of owning them. I would go even one step farther: renting would not just be cheaper, it would solve a myriad of other lifestyle problems. If you had 50% fewer objects in your house, think about how much easier it would be to clean, how much less time you would have to spend maintaining possessions, and how much easier it would be to move to the next home/apartment.

There aren't currently enough online services and they are still too inconvenient for my vision of utopian rentals to be practical tomorrow, next month, or perhaps even next year [7]. But in the near future, renting will make our lives universally better by allowing us to own less stuff.

[1] Car rentals, boat rentals, parking space rentals, and especially service rentals like Taskrabbit. And these are just a few examples in each category.

[2] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t01.htm">http://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.t01.htm

[3] Surprisingly, the old adage about 7 career changes in a lifetime is also bunk: Seven Careers in a Lifetime? Think Twice, Researchers Say.

[4] Calculating Migration Expectancy Using ACS Data

[5] Trulia housing demographics for Raleigh puts the median value of a house in Raleigh NC at $200,000.

[6] http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/04/us-homeownership-by-age-group.html, The end of ownership: why aren't young people buying more houses?" 

[7] One comment I received on the original version of this post was that in making my recommendation for renting, I forgot to include time costs. The basic argument is that there is too much friction in renting, which makes renting a $300 Kitchenaid, for instance, a bad deal. Existing services would require you to find a nearby person renting the item, perhaps drive to their home, sign a paper, drive back to your home, use the mixer, and repeat the process when returning it. But I'm not thinking about existing services. When I first wrote this post, Getaround didn't offer instant rentals, but now they do. The same is true for AirBnb and a host of other services. The instant acceptance peer to peer rental markets are already thriving, we just haven't hit saturation with all the stuff we could possibly rent.

Special thanks to my good friend Ben for checking my numbers on this post and keeping me honest.

Why You Shouldn't Follow Your Dreams

Back when I was in 9th grade, I purchased my first desktop computer. I did extra chores, mowed lawns, and shoveled snow to afford my dream machine. It came tricked out with a 900Mhz AMD Athlon Thunderbird CPU, 128MB of RAM, a GeForce 2 GPU, and a Plexdor CD burner. Housed in a bleak grey metal box, it was my pride and joy. Countless hours of Counter Strike, Total Annihilation, and Starcraft were played on that computer.

Despite my fond memories of that first computer, it was never the perfect performance machine. I had made many compromises to meet my meager budget, and the hardware was out of date less than 60 days after it arrived. So around that time, I vowed that someday I would buy myself the most ridiculous performance-intensive machine that could be had.

A while back I realized all of a sudden that I had more than enough cash to buy that no-holds-barred gaming machine. But desktop computers are no longer terribly practical. And I don't play Counter Strike in the evenings anymore. And my middling laptop runs the Adobe Creative Suite just fine. In fact, I spend most of my time in front of productivity and office applications at work, and in the evenings, I try to spend time away from the computer for the sake of variety. I have the cash, but I longer want that beast computer, and it's sad. When I explained my disappointment to a friend over lunch, he shrugged and said, "of course you wanted that computer, but dreams expire."

He was right. Since making my vow to buy an uber gaming machine, the dream had lost meaning for me, and like a mesofact, I had not updated my list of dreams.

This caused me to not only go through that list, but to re-evaluate how I pursue and value dreams. I have kept a bucket list for several years, but I here propose a short list of reasons why you shouldn't have one. Maybe you shouldn't even follow your dreams.

Destinations are boring.

As a society, we praise big dreams and tell kids to aspire to be astronauts. But as a society, we focus our dreams on destinations, not on the journeys that make them meaningful. I fell prey to this exact problem when we were founding my first startup. I wanted to build a successful startup. For three years, we worked hard, we got some lucky breaks, and these days Skritter is pretty darn successful. I have become an astronaut. And you know what? It's an empty victory, because as it turns out, what I really want is not to have a successful startup. What I want is to work hard on difficult problems with people I like. Notice the difference there: the first dream is a state, "success," the second dream is a process "work hard."

For all the glib discussion of life being a journey, not a destination, we overlook that fact when forming our deepest and most personal goals. Maybe you want to be a famous rapper, a skydiving instructor, or a polyglot. All of these are noble ambitions, but thinking about those dreams in terms of continuing actions rather than destinations makes them more meaningful. You don't want to be a rapper, you want to spend most of your time rapping in a studio. You don't want to be a skydiving instructor, you want to teach newbies how to enjoy their first jump. You don't want to be a polyglot, you want to spend time learning the nuances of dozens of languages.

Destinations are boring, and dreams that rely on them are hollow.

The exotic is kinda meh.

You know what sounds cool? Getting out of a Cleveland winter and working from Costa Rica for 2 months. The problem is that if you value a degree of consistency, recurring familial interaction, predictable diets, stable electricity and internet, reliable transportation, and a hundred other factors you probably take for granted, then it's actually not that cool. That was the story of my 2 months in Costa Rica.

Yet despite the disconnect, whenever I tell people about going to Costa Rica, most people said "I wish I could do that."

Daily life constrains choice sets to the degree that most people can't up and move to Costa Rica for 2 months. And for most people, that's a good thing. Dreams often take the form of overcoming the inertial forces that keep us grounded to the status quo. But it is precisely these forces that often make us happy. Many dreams are predicated on circumstances that by their very nature would make us unhappy.

Dreams made in a vacuum are meaningless.

I drive an extremely economical car and I've always dreamed of having a performance sports car. Recently I got the chance to test drive some exceptionally cool sports cars, and coming back to my little Suzuki Aerio was a relief. Why, you might ask, would I prefer my 1600cc putsy hatchback to a Mercedes Benz E55? I won't go into details, but in forming my dream about owning a sports car, I ignored all of my previous preferences. A Porsche looked cool, but in my daily life I prefer gas economy, reliability, and low insurance bills.

Dreamers are encouraged to think big, and that often implies "outside of our experience." This gets back to something Paul Graham suggests about finding what you love to do: if you aren't tinkering with computers in your free time, do you really want to be a programmer? If you didn't sacrifice to buy a sports car when you were 17, are you really invested in performance automobiles?

We often classify our unqualified aspirations as "dreams" and then foolishly work towards them. Daily experience is often a far better judge of what you will enjoy than a groundless idea of you got from society.

Summary

All of this might lead you to conclude that I think dreams are meaningless, but that's not the case. I think dreams are extremely important, but they often grossly misrepresent what people actually want from their life experience. I am still struggling to find a good way to pursue my own aspirations and would be interested to hear if anyone else has had luck better forming and achieving meaningful dreams.

Effort and Reward: Correlation, Not Causation

A few weeks back I was watching The Queen of Versailles, which is an independent documentary about billionaire timeshare mogul David Siegel and his quest to build the largest house in America. At the beginning of the movie, the director interviews Siegel about how Westgate Resorts got it's start. He talked about how he founded the company when he was young and naive, worked like hell, and managed to grow the company to billions in sales. What struck me about his description was how similar it is to the way I describe working on my first startup, with one critical difference: Skritter is a tiny bit less less profitable.

This got me thinking about the nature of effort vs reward. It's a common misconception among entrepreneurs that the harder you work, the more successful you become. This workaholic mentality causes people to sideline important aspects of their lives to maximize a perceived chance to make it big. I believe that effort and reward are correlated. If your goal is to become a millionaire, you are far more likely to reach your goal working very hard on a bunch of ventures than if you stay at a job that allows you to relax and coast. The age old motto "God helps those that help themselves," seems true.

But the the amount of reward you enjoy for your effort is randomly distributed. If it weren't, David Siegel of Westgate fame would have had to work a thousand times harder/longer than someone whose startup makes $1M/yr. Since that clearly isn't possible in a normal human lifespan, I'm forced to conclude that there is a big component of luck involved in the rewards anyone reaps from their efforts.

Having a deep understanding of that fact is important because it helps workaholics like me from over-investing in work. The truth is that I probably stand about the same chance of retiring early from a new venture whether I pace myself or work 100 hour weeks. Effort is important for success, but marginal effort is just that, and it seems a horrible waste to labor under the delusion that another few hours of work will be the difference between a decent living and early retirement.