Your life goes well when you are happy. But what exactly is happiness? I’m not asking what happiness is affected by, but what it actually is. The different ways in which we define happiness affects what we can do to improve it. So a clear definition should be, but rarely is, a fundamental concern for any book on happiness. Having worked at the interface of economics, psychology, philosophy, and policy for two decades, I am well placed to make a strong case for the following definition: happiness is experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. This definition is novel, it’s coherent, and it resonates with people in my research and in my life; and I hope it will with you, too. It is also measurable, which is vital if we are to advance our understanding of happiness. Now let’s take a step back.
Happiness has not typically been measured in this experience-based way; rather, it has been assessed using evaluations of how well life is going overall. A personal anecdote illustrates the difference nicely. A few weeks ago, I went out for dinner with one of my best friends, whom I have known for a long time. She works for a prestigious media company and basically spent the whole evening describing how miserable she was at work; she variously moaned about her boss, her colleagues, and her commute. At the end of dinner, and without a hint of irony, she said, “Of course, I love working at MediaLand.” There is actually no real contradiction here: she is experiencing her work in one way and evaluating it in another way. The distinction between experience and evaluation is rather like the difference between being filmed and having your photograph taken. My friend was describing the daily “film” of her job as miserable and the overall “snapshot” as quite satisfying in comparison.
We shall see that this is not only a common thing to do but it’s also a common mistake to make about our happiness. Many of the assumptions we make about happiness and about ourselves have a lot to do with the fact that we generally pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focusing on what actually does. Satisfaction with particular aspects of life, such as work, health, and relationships, will often predict what we do — just as my friend’s relatively positive evaluation of working at MediaLand means that she might stay put — but measures of job satisfaction are still not very well placed to capture how we feel. My friend is pretty miserable at work, and we should be taking that into account when we measure her happiness.
Most happiness surveys ask rather vague and abstract questions like “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life?” as well as about satisfaction with particular aspects of life. Of course, one question can never really get at all the complex aspects of happiness, but single questions can help us to approximate what makes most people happy or unhappy. The real problem with this question, however, is that overall life satisfaction is rarely considered in our daily lives; perhaps it is only ever really triggered in studies that measure it. The word “satisfaction” is also problematic since it is open to many different interpretations, including “having just about enough,” which does not really measure happiness at all. As such, the results tell us much more about what pops into your head when you answer these questions than they do about your experiences of happiness on a day-to-day basis. And it literally must be what “pops” in, because the time taken to answer what to me feels like a cognitively demanding question is around five seconds.
This helps to explain why responses to life satisfaction questions seem to be affected by apparently irrelevant factors, such as whether or not you are asked about your political views before being asked a life satisfaction question, where the effect is nearly as large as becoming unemployed. The order of the questions you’re asked matters a lot, too. Your satisfaction with life is much more highly correlated with your marital satisfaction if the marriage question comes before the life satisfaction question instead of after it: being reminded about your relationship first makes it more important in determining your life satisfaction. You “pose” in a particular way when you have your photograph taken. Think of all the times you have posed for the camera in ways that do not reflect your current feelings. A camcorder is much better at showing how happy you are over time. So we need to move away from global snapshots of overall life satisfaction and instead focus more directly on our day-to-day feelings.
Your life therefore goes well when you feel happy. You experience a rich array of feelings in any one day, let alone over a lifetime. Psychologists often categorise feelings according to a two-by-two model – “positive and negative” as one category and “aroused and non-aroused” as the other. Positive and “negative” speak for themselves; though I put negative in quotation marks because, as I shall discuss shortly, what we consider a negative feeling can sometimes be entirely appropriate with good consequences. You can think of aroused and non-aroused as feelings that are “awakened” or “sleepy,” respectively. So joy is positive and aroused; contentment is positive and non-aroused; anxiety is negative and aroused; and sadness is negative and non-aroused.
We would expect the distinction between positive and negative to affect happiness, and the distinction between aroused and non-aroused matters, too. In contrast to life satisfaction data, data from the Gallup World Poll (a survey of the happiness of adults in 132 countries around the world) show that richer people in any country do not always feel happier than poorer ones. And beyond about $75,000 a year in the United States, more money does not buy any more pleasureat all for the average US citizen earning above this amount. Being richer might make you think you are happier but it does not necessarily make you feel any happier.
The idea that your feelings are what matter to your life originated with the work of Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century philosopher and radical who believed in the decriminalisation of homosexuality and equal rights for women. Bentham said that it was the view that women should be in a legally inferior position to men that made him choose, at the age of eleven, the career of a reformist. He is well known to visitors of University College London, where he sits embalmed at the entrance to the university. As requested in his will, Bentham’s body was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture and the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet with the skeleton dressed in Bentham’s clothes. His head is actually a wax head, because the mummification process left him looking a little odd. It does have his real hair, though.
Bentham argued that pleasure is the only thing that is good for you, and pain the only bad. Some scholars have moved away from using pleasure and pain because of the association with bodily pleasures and pains, preferring instead terms such as enjoyment and suffering. According to my broader interpretation, pleasure and pain can also refer to the many other adjectives that describe positive and negative feelings: joy, excitement, and fun on the one hand and anger, anxiety, stress, and worry on the other. So when I use the words “pleasure” and “pain” in this book, I do so as umbrella terms or shorthand for a whole raft of feelings, recognising also that we can simultaneously feel and display a complex mix of emotions.
What you feel is determined by what happens to you but also by the kind of person you are. I am nearly always in an aroused emotional state, most of the time feeling happy but sometimes feeling anxious. I rarely feel content or sad. I quite like it this way and my wife, Les, and my friends tell me they do, too (though I guess they would have left me by now if not). You might be similar to me, or you might be different; calmer, perhaps. Overall, each of us can be categorised according to the preponderance of different types of feelings. The happy ones among us have more positive feelings than negative ones. Using Bentham’s language, they generally feel pleasure and not that much pain. So, the more frequent and more intense are your various feelings of pleasure, the happier you are. But are there other feelings that might matter besides categories of pleasure and pain?
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.
Readers might also be interested in this discussion of Bentham's philosophy of utilitarianism (see the 2nd podcast in the list): https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/history-of-ideas-series-two
And perhaps this discussion, which suggests it's not straightforward to live your life as a utilitarian once you bring emotion into the equation: https://nigelwarburton.typepad.com/philosophy_bites/2008/10/anthony-appiah.html