happier than people below the poverty line, but the truly wealthy aren’t that much happier than the merely rich. One recent study, for example, showed that people making over $90,000 a year were no happier than those in the $50,000–$89,999 bracket. A recent New York Times article described a support group for multimillionaires. Another study reported that although average family income in Japan increased by a factor of five from 1958 to 1987, people’s self-reports of happiness didn’t change at all; all that extra income, but no extra happiness. Similar increases in the standard of living have occurred in the United States, again, with little effect on overall happiness. Study after study has shown that wealth predicts happiness only to a small degree. New material goods often bring tremendous initial pleasure, but we soon get used to them; that new Audi may be a blast to drive at first, but like any other vehicle, eventually it’s just transportation.
Ironically, what really seems to matter is not absolute wealth, but relative income. Most people would rather make $70,000 at a job where their co-workers average $60,000 than $80,000 at a job where co-workers average $90,000. As a community’s overall wealth increases, individual expectations expand; we don’t just want to be rich, we want to be richer (than our neighbors). The net result is that many of us seem to be on a happiness treadmill, working harder and harder to maintain essentially the same level of happiness.
One of the most surprising things about happiness is just how poor we are at measuring it. It’s not just that no brain scanner or dopamine counter can do a good job, but that we often just don’t know — yet another hint of how klugey the whole apparatus of happiness really is.
Are you happy right now, at this very moment, reading this very book? Seriously, how would you rate the experience, on a scale of 1 (“I’d rather being doing the dishes”) to 7 (“If this were any more fun, it would be illegal!”)? You probably feel that you just “know” or can “intuit” the answer — that you can directly assess how happy you are, in the same way that you can determine whether you’re too hot or too cold. But a number of studies suggest that our impression of direct intuition is an illusion.
Think back to that study of undergraduates who answered the question “How happy are you?” after first recounting their recent dating history. We’re no different from them. Asking people about their overall happiness just after inquiring into the state of their marriage or their health has a similar effect. These studies tell us that people often don’t really know how happy they are. Our subjective sense of happiness is, like so many of our beliefs, fluid, and greatly dependent on context.
Perhaps for that reason, the more we think about how we happy we are, the less happy we become. People who ruminate less upon their own circumstances tend to be happier than those who think about them more, just as Woody Allen implied in Annie Hall. When two attractive yet vacant-looking pedestrians walk by, Allen’s character asks them to reveal the secret of their happiness. The woman answers first: “I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say,” to which her handsome boyfriend adds, “And I’m exactly the same way.” The two stride gaily away. In other words, to paraphrase Mark Twain, dissecting our own happiness may be like dissecting frogs: both tend to die in the process.
Our lack of self-understanding may seem startling at first, but in hindsight it should scarcely seem surprising. Evolution doesn’t “care” whether we understand our own internal operations, or even whether we are happy. Happiness, or more properly, the opportunity to pursue it, is little more than a motor that moves us. The happiness treadmill keeps us going: alive, reproducing, taking care of children, surviving for another day. Evolution didn’t evolve us to be happy, it evolved us to pursue happiness.
In the battle between us and our genes, the kicker is this: to the extent that we see pleasure as a compass (albeit a flawed one) that tells us where we should be headed, and to the extent that we see happiness as a thermometer that tells us how we are doing, those instruments should, by rights, be instruments we cant fool with. Had our brains been built from scratch, the instruments that evaluated our mental state would no doubt behave a little like the meters electric companies use, which are instruments that we can inspect but not tinker with. No sensible person would buy a thermometer that displayed only the temperature that its owner wanted, rather than the actual temperature. But humans routinely try to outwit their instruments. Not just by seeking new ways of getting pleasure, but by lying to ourselves when we don’t like what our happy-o-meter tells us. We “acquire” tastes (in an effort to override our pleasure compass), and, more significantly, when things aren’t going well, we try to persuade ourselves that everything is fine. (We do the same thing with pain, every time we pop an Advil or an aspirin.)
Take, for example, your average undergraduate around the time I hand out grades. Students who get As are thrilled, they’re happy, and they accept their grades with pleasure, even glee. People with C’s are, as you might imagine, less enthusiastic, dwelling for the most part not on what they did wrong, but what / did wrong. (Question 27 on the exam wasn’t fair, we never talked about that in class, and how could Professor Marcus have taken off three points for my answer to question 42?) Meanwhile, it never occurs to the keeners in the front that I might have mistakenly been too generous to them. This asymmetry reeks, of course, of motivated reasoning, but I don’t mean to complain; I do the same thing, ranting and raving at reviewers who reject my papers, blessing (rather than questioning) the wisdom of those who accept them. Similarly, car accidents are never our fault — it’s always the other guy.
Freud would have seen all this self-deception as an illustration of what he called “defense mechanisms”; I see it as motivated reasoning. Either way, examples like these exemplify our habit of trying to fool the thermometer. Why feel bad that we’ve done something wrong when we can so easily jiggle the thermometer? As Jeff Goldblum’s character put it in The Big Chill “Rationalizations are more important than sex.” “Ever go a week without a rationalization?” he asked.
We do our best to succeed, but if at first we don’t succeed, we can always lie, dissemble, or rationalize. In keeping with this idea, most Westerners believe themselves to be smarter, fairer, more considerate, more dependable, and more creative than average. And — shades of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where “the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average” — we also convince ourselves that we are better-than-average drivers and have better-than-average health prospects. But you do the math: we can’t all be above average. When Muhammad Ali said “I’m the greatest,” he spoke the truth; the rest of us are probably just kidding ourselves (or at least our happy-o-meters).
Classic studies of a phenomenon called “cognitive dissonance” make the point in a different way.[47] Back in the late 1950s, Leon Festinger did a famous series of experiments in which he asked subjects (undergraduate students) to do tedious menial tasks (such as sticking a set of plain pegs into an plain board). Here’s the rub: some subjects were paid well ($20, a lot of money in 1959), but others, poorly ($1). Afterward, all were asked how much they liked the task. People who were paid well typically confessed to being bored, but people who were paid only a dollar tended to delude themselves into thinking that putting all those pegs into little holes was fun. Evidently they didn’t want to admit to themselves that they’d wasted their time. Once again, who’s directing whom? Is happiness guiding us, or are we micromanaging our own guide? It’s as if we paid a sherpa to guide us up a mountain — only to ignore him whenever he told us we were going in the wrong direction. In short, we do everything in our power to make ourselves happy and comfortable with the world, but we stand perfectly ready to lie to ourselves if the truth doesn’t cooperate.
47
The term