The Happiness Myth

In my first article, I talked about simplicity beyond complexity and made the claim that we will only be able to evolve if we can understand the widest range of nuanced factors that contribute to our social challenges. In this series of articles, I’m going to make my own attempts at this, starting with the complex subject of happiness.

The study of happiness has always intrigued me, so when the opportunity arose to do my minor in happiness economics, I was excited. However, after sitting through hours upon hours of lectures on the associations between happiness and social factors such as health and income, I felt the course was missing some key pieces of the story. First, the lectures never even touched on what I believe to be the most fundamental limitation of the concept of happiness: it is subjective. Unfortunately, surveying people on how happy they feel is the only way to measure happiness levels. As Daniel Gilbert puts it in his book Stumbling on Happiness, “real-time report is an imperfect approximation of…subjective experience, but it is the only game in town.”

Second, as a person of both Asian and European descent, I also found it problematic to ignore the various cultural factors that contribute to the subjective experience of happiness. Does it make sense, for example, that western countries, particularly Scandinavian ones, are revered as the “happiest countries in the world,” even though they are the leading consumers of antidepressants?

In his book Sapiens, author Yuval Noah Harari explains that we suffer from a “fallacy of reasoning” which means that “when we try to guess or imagine how other people are now, or how people in the past were, we inevitably imagine ourselves in their shoes. But that won’t work because it pastes our experiences on to the material conditions of others.”

Many “developing” countries have lower “standards of living,” but the quotations in both those cases are critical. All of those terms come from the perspective of the “developed” world, where expectations of comfort — and aversion to pain or inconvenience — are such that we may well suffer more than our neighbors in countries with less technological advancement and lower GDPs.

As daily threats and dangers decrease, we can devote more energy to building easy, comfortable lives. In doing so, we’ve begun associating comfort with happiness, leaving us complacent and entitled in a way that people in less industrialized countries, and our ancestors all over, could never be.

Research on happiness backs up the idea that people do not report happiness levels based on overall feelings of positivity in their lives, but on momentary and short-lived feelings of pleasure. In one study, researchers called people in different parts of the United States and asked them how satisfied they were with their lives. Controlling for other factors, across the board, people who lived in cities where the sun was out that day reported higher levels of happiness than those who lived in cities that happened to be experiencing bad weather.

Blindly seeking “happiness” — in the form of comfort or pleasure — can cause us to avoid taking risks, tackling new challenges, making big changes, and absorbing ourselves in difficult work, all of which require sometimes significant discomfort. This can be particularly problematic in organizations. It isn’t surprising that “happiness” has become a main goal for companies: studies have shown that “happier” employees are more productive, as well as less stressed and therefore, less likely to burn out. However, if we don’t have an objective working definition of happiness, it’s unclear what this really means or how to address it.

For example, companies now boast state-of-the-art espresso machines and ergonomic furniture to attract talent. If organizations aren’t investing in meeting the multidimensional needs of their employees, these are often empty gestures, making them more comfortable, but not connecting to their deep sense of satisfaction or fulfilment. In my own experience, these come from the highs and the lows of real, meaningful relationships, learning and developing myself, and trying to add value in the world.

Of course, comfort allows us the freedom to grow and build connections, but just like any other value, we can over-rely on it. Along with adding creature comforts, companies need to clarify a clear purpose that inspires employees, foster deep, authentic relationships in their workforce, and encourage people to step outside of their comfort zones and take risks.

Photo credit: Ariel Lustre