The Science Of Satisfaction

We are animals who seem to want ever more. Or at least I am. Comparing myself to others, I find room for improvement. Phenomenal homes are displayed on my television screen. Walking through the book store, stunning beauties look out from magazine covers. Later I pass a smiling couple holding hands, and I bemoan my being single. Yet I have also sensed that there are limits to the ability of the external to bring contentment. My eyes may sing one tune, but my logic centres play another. With divorce and depression common amongst my peers, I have asked whether media images and personal longings bear any relation to reality.

Fortunately there is now a good deal of scientific evidence emerging on the relationship between factors like beauty, money, and happiness. And it turns out that the ancient philosophers were correct. Once you have enough, you won't be happier with more.

Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman has done excellent research on the links, or lack thereof, between external situations and internal well-being. His team had hundreds of people in Ohio and Texas fill out daily journals noting their activities and their levels of happiness. He also asked them for a series of social and economic questions. What he has found was two fold. First of all, despite all the gloom we may see on the nightly news, most people in North America live in relative satisfaction. Second, most of the ways we seek to increase that satisfaction appear to have no effect on mood.

Although as a culture we make great efforts to achieve scholarships and big salaries and better bodies, the effect of such commodities on happiness is, for all intents and purposes, absolutely zero.

In Kahneman's Ohio study, for example, the correlations between happiness over the course of the day and certain measures were as follows.

Household Income .06
Married .03
Education .02
Employed .01
Body Mass Index -.06

A correlation of 0.10 would mean that one factor (eg. income) can explain about 1% of the difference in people's levels of happiness. The correlations above are all below 0.10. The implication is that having a life partner, being wealthy or low-income, well-proportioned or obese, can explain only a fraction of 1% of a person's actual happiness.

So whatever our goals, it is valuable to remember that while desire may be in our nature, it may not be in our self-interest.

http://www.princeton.edu/~ceps/workingpapers/125krueger.pdf