Why is happiness so elusive in today's world?

The best way to examine the issue is through a long-term historical analysis

Michael Shermer, Scientific American

Imagine having a choice between a $50,000 annual salary when everyone else is only getting $25,000, and a $100,000 salary when everyone else is getting $250,000. In both cases the prices of the products and services are the same. What will you choose? Surprisingly, studies show that most people will choose the first option. Or as the journalist H. L. Menken is said to have pointedly said: "A rich man is someone who earns $100 a year more than his wife's sister's husband."

This seemingly illogical preference is just one of the puzzles that science is trying to solve regarding the question of why happiness is so elusive in today's world. Several books on the subject have been published recently, but my skeptical eye has found long-term historical analysis to be ultimately the most instructive of all.

Let us examine the paradox raised by economist Richard Layard from the London School of Economics in his book "Happiness" (Penguin Publishing, 2005). He shows that today we are not happier, even though average salaries have doubled, and even more, since the 50s and "we have more food, more clothes, more cars, bigger houses, more central heating, more vacations abroad , a shorter work week, more pleasant work and above all, better health." Once the average annual salary rises above $20,000 per year per person, higher salaries do not lead to greater happiness. why? First, our genes are responsible for about half of our natural tendency to be happy or unhappy, and second, our desires are relative to what other people have and not some absolute learning.

It is more correct to compare happiness to satisfaction than to compare it to pleasure, says psychiatrist Gregory Burns from Emory University in his book "Satisfaction" (Henry Holt Publishing, 2005), because the pursuit of pleasure tends to lead us to a march instead, an endless hedonistic march that paradoxically causes unhappiness. "Satisfaction is an emotion that captures within it the unique human need to give meaning to the actions we do," Burns concludes. "You can find pleasure in a random event such as winning the lottery, or you may have genes that give you a cheerful character or luck for a comfortable life, and in contrast, satisfaction can only come from a conscious decision to do something. And that's what makes the difference in the world, because it's only about our own actions, for which we are entitled to accept responsibility and attribute them to ourselves."

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert from Harvard University goes even deeper into our souls in his book "Encountering Happiness" (Knopf Publishing, 2006), in which he claims that "humans are the only animals that think about the future." Most of the feeling of happiness depends on the assumption of what will make us happy (instead of what really makes us happy). And Gilbert shows that we are not so good at foresight. Most of us imagine for example that variety gives life its flavor. But in an experiment where the subjects predicted in advance that they would prefer a selection of snacks, it was found that when the stage of eating the snacks came, week after week, the subjects in the group that did not get variety said they were more satisfied than the subjects in the group that got variety. "Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen," explains Gilbert, "but their wonderfulness fades when they happen again."

Economists call this habituation, even to a host of wonderful things, as "diminishing marginal utility" and married couples as "life". But if you think that a whole set of sexual partners adds to the flavor of life, you are wrong: according to a comprehensive study published in the book "The Social Structure of Sexuality" (University of Chicago Press, 1994), married people have more sex than single people - and they also reach more orgasms .

Historian Jennifer Michelle Hecht emphasizes this matter in her book "The Myth of Happiness" (Harper Press, 2007). Her deep and thoughtful historical perspective demonstrates how time- and culture-dependent this whole happiness research thing is. And so she writes: "The basic modern assumptions about how to be happy are stupid." Take for example the subject of sex. "A hundred years ago, the average man who had not had sex for three years could feel proud of his health and fitness, and a woman could extol the health benefits and happiness inherent in ten years of abstinence."

Most happiness studies are based on data from self-testimony, and according to Hecht, a hundred years ago people would have answered, most likely, questions related to happiness in a very different way than how people answer them today. To understand happiness, we therefore need both history and science.

Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) His new book is "Why Darwin is important".