The Pursuit of Happines.

The pursuit of happiness is on! What do we know about happiness? We know that people’s reports of immediate joy and misery fluctuate from activity to activity—sex is an upper; commuting is a downer—and often diverge notably from the summary answers they give to questions about their happiness “these days.” We also know that subjective well-being can be complex. People can be happy about work and sad about love; the latter usually matters more. The opposite of happiness, research suggests, is not necessarily despair, but rather apathy; some people just don’t feel much of anything. Nonetheless, people who say they are generally happy tend to be economically secure, married, healthy, religious, and busy with friends; they tend to live in affluent, democratic, individualistic societies with activist, welfare-state governments. The connection between reporting happiness and personal traits often runs both ways. For example, being healthy adds to happiness, and happy people also stay healthier. For decades, researchers have been obsessed with—whether money makes people happy. We know that being poor makes people less happy. Making more money may be fruitless because people adapt psychologically to their levels of wealth and, like addicts and drugs, need ever more money to get the same level of pleasure. People chase money to feel superior to the folks next door. That, of course, becomes a vicious and pointless cycle. but they nevertheless insist that more money—unlike the futile experience with drugs—does bring more happiness, just at a slower pace among the well-to-do. what gives us most meaning in life and suggests it is more often found in painful striving than in achievement. Whatever the philosophical issues around happiness (Whatever the philosophical issues around happiness (Paradox, aside from adaptation and competition, is that increasing materialism ruined the pleasure Americans might have gotten from becoming wealthier. -Claude S. Fische