A Data Scientist’s guide to happiness
So what makes us happy ? Here,i looked at the data.
Ideally i would like to ratchet up all the weird characters in me— a wanderlust,a materialist,a philosopher,a rationalist … send each one of them to go on their lives,come back and report me what it was like.It would be nice know what gives the best bang for my buck.The closest i could get to such an experiment is track a bunch of college grads through their lives — see what their priorities were before and how they affected their well being later.
Here’s a cool longitudinal study.Nobel Laureate Daniel kahneman and his colleagues tracked freshman from 21 academically selective institutes across U.S well into their late 30's.They were grouped according to their Financial goals.(on a scale of 1–4.1 not important, 2 somewhat important, 3 very important, and 4 essential based on an elaborate questionnaire.). They basically concluded that if you spend 20 years getting all things that you thought were important you would end up less happy with an added bonus of some mental disorders.
Our brains are not wired to optimize for happiness.our brains,senses,bodies are all geared towards survival.But,we seem to be longing for happiness.Even our intuition of what makes up for a joyful,satisfactory life seems to be so far off.
But,Why our intuition about what makes us happy is often wrong.Ok,let’s test our intuition once: Which one of the two tables is longer ?
Whether you have seen it before or not,you would still see the one on the left longest.(even after measuring them up).This is not a mere glitch in our visual system.Scientist have found systemic biases in our thinking.(!Holy Cow)
But,don’t you think some or all of the following make your life better:
a.More money
b.Social recognition
c.Awesome stuff,good body,etc.
Yes,you are not chasing them like jordan Belfort but most of us would be better off if we know what they really add up to.In a recent linkedin survey money really seems to stand off.
So does more money really make us more happy ?
When subjective well being is tracked across the world interestingly with increase in wealth individual’s assessment of their financial satisfaction showed some correlation though there is hardly any in their well-being.(look at the average values in the last row.)
Nobel laurate Daniel kahenman provided another study that illustrates this more clearly.When Over 4.5lakh americans are tracked on their Emotional Well being(EWB)(measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril’s SelfAnchoring Scale), show different correlates.While individual’s assessment of life-satisfaction seems to increase with wealth their daily emotional states show little improvement after a threshold.This seems to be quite an oddity.Why do we think we are better off with more money even though there is no improvement in our quality of life.
The ladder shows their own evaluation of life.It keeps on increasing even though our happiness doesn’t seem to improve.
Wait ,But what about true love ?
Atleast,that’s what they show in hollywood.Married with your childhood sweet heart and happy everafter.Again,data to the rescue.
Researchers surveyed about 25000 people for about 15 years.Around 1700 of them got married.So did they got happier ? This is by far the funniest plot.
According to Lucas et al. (2003), average life satisfaction tends to increase in the years leading up to a person getting married, and then drop down to “baseline” within two years following the wedding.
Data also suggests some other bad goals if you are looking for happiness and life-satisfaction.
a.Perfect body.
Around 2000 obese individuals are followed for 4yrs after their diet program.I will save you some screen time..the folks who lost weight were found to be more depressed.According to Jackson et al. (2014), people tend to be less happy when they are in a weight loss program and those who successfully lose weight by the end of the program tend to be even less happy.
Even more dramatic measures like complete makeovers and plastic surgeries doesn’t seem to improve the mental health of the participants instead seems to worsen.
b.Cool Toys.
Wanting “awesome stuff” and striving to get them tends to negatively impact one’s happiness.
According to Nickerson et al. (2003), those who reported materialist attitudes have lower life satisfaction than those who reported non-materialist attitudes.
But,why are we so consistently wrong about what makes us happy ? We will explore that in part — 2.
References:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208.4409&rep=rep1&type=pdf
