The truth about happiness
We are designed to long for it, not to get it
If you stop by a bookshop, you will notice the popularity of self-help books on happiness. Many of them claim to reveal the secrets to long-lasting happiness.
But if you read some of these books, you may, surprisingly, find that they do not have consistent definitions of what happiness is. You may also end up confused about the secrets of happiness: Should you meditate and appreciate the moment or strive for a better future? Should you build social connections or learn not to care about others' opinions? Should you find meaning in life or accept that nothing matters?
If you are puzzled, you should be. The literature on happiness often lacks solid foundations in human cognition, which are necessary for understanding the mechanisms underlying happiness.1 Save yourself some money; you don't need to buy these books. By blending insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive neuroscience, I'll unveil the secrets of happiness in a series of posts on the topic.
Happiness as a guide to action
In 1973, biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This statement is obviously true; biological life is a product of evolution. From cellular chemistry to human brain cognition, everything is shaped by an incredibly long process of evolutionary selection
Dobzhansky’s statement should be complemented with “nothing in human psychology makes sense except in the light of decision-making.” Life is about making decisions: going right or left, fleeing or fighting, eating or avoiding something. An organism's success or failure at surviving and reproducing depends on its decisions.
When an organism chooses between two options, it must be able to identify the best one. When it chooses to take some risk to obtain a possible outcome, it must assess whether the value of this outcome is worth the risk. In short, an organism making decisions benefits from having an internal system of valuation of the options it faces.2
From this perspective, notions like pleasure, subjective satisfaction and well-being are easy to understand. They reflect a system of subjective valuation designed to help us make decisions that are, on average, good for our fitness. This system assigns negative values to harmful things, like touching a hot frying pan, and positive values to beneficial things, like eating energy-rich food.3
We can define happiness from that perspective. I’ll re-use here a definition proposed by
:Happiness is an affective state that motivates us to engage in actions that are likely to lead to outcomes that would, on average, lead to increases in the likelihood of survival and/or reproduction. - Glenn Geher
Once understood as such, some intriguing features of happiness make sense. Let’s start with a key aspect of happiness that is slightly problematic for self-help books on happiness: long-lasting happiness is unachievable.
Habituation and the treadmill effect
In Die Hard, the evil Gruber states that Alexander the Great wept when he saw that there were no more worlds to conquer.4 The fact that Alexander could be unhappy due to the lack of prospects for further expansion after conquering one of the largest empires in history, strikes us as a tragic aspect of our human condition: habituation.
The idea of habitation is not new. For instance, Hobbes described it in the Leviathan. Happiness (felicity) cannot be reached in a state of rest, only in a perpetual motion towards greater success:
Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call felicity; I mean the felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. - Hobbes (1651)
Why is this the case? Simply because we were not designed to be happy. We were designed to strive to be successful. Happiness is not the goal aimed at by evolution. Instead, happiness is just evolution’s trick to guide us towards success in life.
If we were to reach long-lasting happiness we would not feel the need to aim for even higher achievements. For that reason, the prospect of long-lasting happiness moves away from us as we move forward. This has been called the hedonic treadmill.
One way to think about happiness as a system of incentive is to picture a stick and a carrot used to guide a donkey forward. The carrot and the stick work to motivate the donkey, but they move forward with him. And they have to keep moving forward to work. If the donkey could grab the carrot, it would not be motivated anymore to keep moving.
But you may ask: why does it have to be that way? Why didn’t evolution design us with the ability to simply feel greater and greater happiness when we do better? Why do we habituate to our successes? The answer is that a system of valuation based on variations in success rather than on total success is more efficient in processing information.
A good illustration is how our visual system is designed. It does not encode the absolute level of luminosity it faces, but adapts to the average level of luminosity in a given context and identifies variations in that range. In his book Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis, Paul Glimcher explains that it happens right away at the level of the perception in our eyes.
Information about the objective intensity of incident light is irretrievably lost at the transducer - Glimcher 2011
This is why we get blinded when moving to a context with a very different range of luminosity: we are unable to perceive differences in luminosity in this new range. Then, as our eyes adapt to the new context, our ability to perceive differences progressively increases.
The same logic applies to our subjective perception of value.5
All sensory encoding that we know of is reference-dependent. Nowhere in the nervous system are the objective values of consumable rewards encoded. - Glimcher 2011
As an illustration, let’s consider Jordan Belfort’s experience in the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. At the start, Jordan (Leonardo DiCaprio) has relatively modest means. Whenever he makes financial decisions, he must be able to discriminate between good and bad decisions involving small monetary amounts. His subjective perception of variations in wealth (the slope of the blue curve) is then maximal for changes around what he has now (a low level of wealth).
After he becomes rich, the range of monetary amounts he faces becomes much higher. Around his new level of wealth, many other levels of wealth feel equally satisfying. It is good for his feelings but not great for his decision-making as he may not care about losing money (e.g. by paying for lavish parties). For Jordan’s decision-making to improve, his subjective satisfaction needs to adapt (habituate) to his new context. Once he habituates, he becomes sensitive to gains or losses around his new wealth level.
As a result, wealthy people do not seem to enjoy the level of happiness we tend to assume we would experience if we had their level of wealth. In a Guardian article, a psychologist for super-wealthy individuals stated:
I’m a therapist to the super-rich: they are as miserable as Succession makes out. Cockrell (2021)
The mismatch between the expectations of the experience of success is not restricted to wealth. People's magazines are replete with stories of celebrities having depression and anxiety. While they typically do not speak candidly about their feelings, when they do it often does not fit our expectations of what we would experience if we had their success. As a final illustration of this point, take this statement from former number 1 tennis player Andre Agassi:
I’M SUPPOSED TO BE A DIFFERENT PERSON now that I’ve won a slam. Everyone says so. […] But I don’t feel that Wimbledon has changed me. I feel, in fact, as if I’ve been let in on a dirty little secret: winning changes nothing. - Agassi (2009)
Habituation is a key result of the empirical research on subjective well-being and life satisfaction. People adapt to their changing circumstances—even to life-changing events—and tend to return to a fairly constant level of well-being (Diener, Lucas, and Scollon, 2009).6
It is common to think of happiness as something we could reach if we could get some of the things we want in our lives. This intuition is misleading. Happiness is designed to move away from us as we progressively achieve the things we thought would make us happy. Psychologist David Nettle puts it well in his book Happiness:
We are designed not for happiness or unhappiness, but to strive for the goals that evolution has built into us. Happiness is a handmaiden to evolution’s purposes here, functioning not so much as an actual reward but as an imaginary goal that gives us direction and purpose. - Nettle (2005)
This reality of happiness is a real challenge for the idea often implied in self-help books that there are secret recipes to achieve life-long happiness.
This post is part of a series on the psychology of happiness. The first post in this series featured the work Greg Kubitz and I are doing to explain loss aversion. In future posts, I will explain how the features of happiness make sense once we understand it along the lines described in this post.
References
Agassi, A. (2009). Open: An Autobiography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Diener, E., Lucas, R.E. and Scollon, C.N., 2009. Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. The science of well-being: The collected works of Ed Diener, pp.103-118.
Frederick, S. and Loewenstein, G., 1999. 16 Hedonic adaptation. D. Kahneman ED, N. Schwarz., Editors. Well-Being the Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, pp.302-329.
Glimcher, P.W., 2011. Foundations of neuroeconomic analysis. OUP USA.
Hobbes, T., 1651. Leviathan.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A., 1979. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica.
Laughlin, S., 1981. A simple coding procedure enhances a neuron's information capacity. Zeitschrift für Naturforschung c, 36(9-10), pp.910-912.
Muthukrishna, M. and Henrich, J., 2019. A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(3), pp.221-229.
Nettle, D., 2005. Happiness: The science behind your smile. OUP Oxford.
Seligman, M.E., 2002. Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. Simon and Schuster.
Seligman, M.E., 2011. Flourish: A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being. Simon and Schuster.
Seligman, M.E. and Csikszentmihalyi, M., 2000. Positive psychology: An introduction (Vol. 55, No. 1, p. 5). American Psychological Association.
van Zyl, L.E., Gaffaney, J., van der Vaart, L., Dik, B.J. and Donaldson, S.I., 2024. The critiques and criticisms of positive psychology: A systematic review. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 19(2), pp.206-235.
Long footnote for the psychologist readers.
Some psychologists have proposed to help find ways to make people happy. Heralded by Martin Seligman who was at a time the President of the American Psychological Association, this approach led to many bestsellers. His 2002 Authentic Happiness is cited 14,726 times on Google Scholar, and his 2011 Flourish 13,454 times. Seligman defined Positive Psychology as a discipline about subjective experiences such as subjective well-being and happiness (2000).
It would be reasonable to expect that it is grounded in a solid understanding and definition of what happiness is and builds insights from that understanding. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman avoids defining happiness in the bulk of the book and only proposes a definition in the Appendix:
I use happiness and well-being interchangeably as overarching terms to describe the goals of the whole Positive Psychology enterprise, embracing both positive feelings (such as ecstasy and comfort) and positive activities that have no feeling component at all (such as absorption and engagement).
You read correctly, he somewhat defines happiness as… the topic of his area of research on happiness. While Seligman does not offer a clear definition, he suggests that happiness is composed of three elements: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. However, in his 2011 book Flourish he informs the reader that, confronted with the question of a student who said he forgot an important aspect of happiness, he realised, after thinking about it, that she was right and that a “new positive psychology” needs to integrate two more elements: accomplishment and positive relationships.
We can appreciate that clearly defining psychological concepts can be difficult. However, the foundations of Seligman’s Positive Psychology seem to rely too much on his educated guesswork and intuitions instead of rigorous ideas compatible with results in behavioural and cognitive sciences.
This lack of clear foundations in this field has been raised by several authors. In a review of the criticisms leveraged at positive psychology, van Zyl et al. (2024) stated: “Several authors contend that positive psychology fails to provide a clear set of fundamental ideas on what constitutes a ‘positive’ psychology and how positive psychological phenomena should be thought about […] there are no clear definitions of ‘positive’ in positive psychology. The majority of the records highlighted that positive psychology had no clear or shared definition of what constituted ‘positive’ and that ‘positivity’ was defined merely by the absence of negative experiences”.
How a field that receives so much attention can be so fuzzy about its conceptual foundations? I think it reflects the lack of a unifying theoretical framework in psychology, as discussed by Muthukrishna and Henrich (2019) and in this recent post. It also reflects the superficial and sometimes non-existent interest of a large part of psychology in evolutionary and functional explanations. This disinterest allows for intuitive ideas to be considered without necessarily asking whether they are compatible with the evolutionary dynamics that shaped our psychology.
The attentive economist reader may have noticed that the classical ordinal vs cardinal interpretations of utility were hiding behind the first two sentences of the paragraph. The ability to rank options calls for a system of subjective valuation able to deliver ordinal comparisons (e.g. “A’s value is larger than B’s value”). The ability to assess the value of risky options calls for a system of subjective value going beyond this and—following von Neuman and Morgenstern—able to deliver cardinal comparisons (e.g. “A’s value is twice B’s value”).
Our system was selected to make good decisions in an ancestral environment that differs in several aspects from our current environment, leading to evolutionary mismatches. The preference for energy-rich food is a classic example. It made sense in our past when energy-rich food was scarce. It makes less sense now that energy-rich food is easily and widely accessible.
The source of this quote is actually not Alexander, but a 17th-century poem by Robert Hayman. “Great Alexander wept, and made sad mone, because there was but one world to be wonne.” (1628, Quodlibets)
The connection between the perceptual and hedonic adaptation was noted by Kahneman and Tversky in their 1979 paper.
Our perceptual apparatus is attuned to the evaluation of changes or differences rather than to the evaluation of absolute magnitudes. When we respond to attributes such as brightness, loudness, or temperature, the past and present context of experience defines an adaptation level, or reference point, and stimuli are perceived in relation to this reference point. Thus, an object at a given temperature may be experienced as hot or cold to the touch depending on the temperature to which one has adapted. The same principle applies to non-sensory attributes such as health, prestige, and wealth. - Kahneman and Tversky 1979]
It was further stressed by Frederick and Loewenstein (1999) who specifically pointed to the efficiency of adaptive processes that “enhance perception by heightening the signal value of changes from the baseline level.” They discuss the efficiency of the process in an insightful footnote:
Our eyes (just one of our five senses) can transmit between 1.6 and 3 million bits of information per second, thousands of times more information than our brains can process (Scitovsky 1976, 52). Thus, some mechanism must act as an informational filter to select which perceptual information is processed adaptation serves this role by relegating constant stimuli to the perceptual background and focusing attention on rapid changes in stimulus levels-perceptual signals most likely to require a behavioral response.
Unconnected to this literature, the notion of efficient coding was proposed by Laughlin (1981) in neuroscience to characterise the firing pattern of neurons.
The good news is that this default level of well-being is somewhat positive. The literature on life satisfaction has found that “most people are happy most of the time.” (Diener, Lucas, and Scollon, 2009). The previous post on loss aversion provides a possible explanation for that pattern: we may be rewarded for setting our aspirations at the level of our expectations.
100% agree. Habituation means happiness fades quickly. But then how do we explain Golden Retrievers?
It's a great post, and I wholeheartedly agree with the general point. However, I believe it would be even more beneficial to explore the impact that external factors and circumstances have on happiness. For me, it's clear that their effect is significant.
There is compelling research indicating that increasing income can indeed boost happiness to some extent. Additionally, certain factors, such as unemployment, seem to decrease happiness in ways that we cannot adapt to easily. I would also assume that aspects like physical safety and the absence of pain have a profound impact on our well-being.
The real challenge, I think, lies in identifying which elements of the external world are more resistant to the hedonic treadmill and focusing on them. Viewing the situation as purely determined and doomed is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.