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Happiness is highly overrated and I doubt it even exists as a constant state of being. People thrive on different amounts of stress and many people need a certa

Happiness is highly overrated and I doubt it even exists as a constant state of being. People thrive on different amounts of stress and many people need a certain amount of stress to remain sane.

edmundsauto 6y ago
My understanding is that people have a pretty consistent "set point" of happiness that may vary, but generally returns to the set point. See research on lotto winners.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Yeah, that research didn’t hold up. * Long-run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-being http://www.nber.org/papers/w24667 http://www.nber.org/papers/w24667 We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being and analyzed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating with time. The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller, suggesting that wealth has greater long-run effects on evaluative measures of well-being than on affective ones. Follow-up analyses of domain-specific aspects of life satisfaction clearly implicate financial life satisfaction as an important mediator for the long-run increase in overall life satisfaction. Does Money Buy Happiness? A Longitudinal Study Using Data on Windfalls https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/ajoswald/marchwindfallsgo.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/ajoswald/march... The most fundamental idea in economics is that money makes people happy. This paper constructs a test. It studies longitudinal information on the psychological health and reported happiness of approximately 9,000 randomly chosen people. In the spirit of a natural experiment, the paper shows that those in the panel who receive windfalls -- by winning lottery money or receiving an inheritance -- have higher mental wellbeing in the following year. A windfall of 50,000 pounds (approximately 75,000 US dollars) is associated with a rise in wellbeing of between 0.1 and 0.3 standard deviations. Approximately one million pounds (1.5 million dollars), therefore, would be needed to move someone from close to the bottom of a happiness frequency distribution to close to the top. Whether these happiness gains wear off over time remains an open question
  - edmundsauto 6y ago
    The first link is super interesting, thanks for sharing! We are at a weird point in the social research space where we can't run any double blinded studies, so end up with a lot of conflicting information. Worth pointing out that the second link addresses year 0-1, which most proponents of the happiness set-point agree is changed. IIRC, the original research looked at satisfaction and happiness around the 2 year mark. There is also the concept of the hedonistic treadmill, which may not be provably true, but has certainly been present in my own life (and a useful lens to examine my life through).

Happiness is highly overrated and I doubt it even exists as a constant state of being. People thrive on different amounts of stress and many people need a certain amount of stress to remain sane.

edmundsauto 6y ago

My understanding is that people have a pretty consistent "set point" of happiness that may vary, but generally returns to the set point. See research on lotto winners.

barry-cotter 6y ago
Yeah, that research didn’t hold up. * Long-run Effects of Lottery Wealth on Psychological Well-being http://www.nber.org/papers/w24667 http://www.nber.org/papers/w24667 We surveyed a large sample of Swedish lottery players about their psychological well-being and analyzed the data following pre-registered procedures. Relative to matched controls, large-prize winners experience sustained increases in overall life satisfaction that persist for over a decade and show no evidence of dissipating with time. The estimated treatment effects on happiness and mental health are significantly smaller, suggesting that wealth has greater long-run effects on evaluative measures of well-being than on affective ones. Follow-up analyses of domain-specific aspects of life satisfaction clearly implicate financial life satisfaction as an important mediator for the long-run increase in overall life satisfaction. Does Money Buy Happiness? A Longitudinal Study Using Data on Windfalls https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/ajoswald/marchwindfallsgo.pdf https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/ajoswald/march... The most fundamental idea in economics is that money makes people happy. This paper constructs a test. It studies longitudinal information on the psychological health and reported happiness of approximately 9,000 randomly chosen people. In the spirit of a natural experiment, the paper shows that those in the panel who receive windfalls -- by winning lottery money or receiving an inheritance -- have higher mental wellbeing in the following year. A windfall of 50,000 pounds (approximately 75,000 US dollars) is associated with a rise in wellbeing of between 0.1 and 0.3 standard deviations. Approximately one million pounds (1.5 million dollars), therefore, would be needed to move someone from close to the bottom of a happiness frequency distribution to close to the top. Whether these happiness gains wear off over time remains an open question
- edmundsauto 6y ago
  The first link is super interesting, thanks for sharing! We are at a weird point in the social research space where we can't run any double blinded studies, so end up with a lot of conflicting information. Worth pointing out that the second link addresses year 0-1, which most proponents of the happiness set-point agree is changed. IIRC, the original research looked at satisfaction and happiness around the 2 year mark. There is also the concept of the hedonistic treadmill, which may not be provably true, but has certainly been present in my own life (and a useful lens to examine my life through).