When people think about what they want, it often has to do with improving their circumstances. People assume they’ll be happier if they could have a situation that includes things like the ones listed above.

I’m pretty sure Ed Diener ( “Dr. Happiness” ) has done more scientific research on happiness than anyone, and is considered by many the world’s foremost authority. Recently he wrote a book on the subject with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener ( “The Indiana Jones of Positive Psychology” ), who has also done some interesting research on happiness all over the world. If you want to be happier, it might make sense to listen to what they have to say.

The book is called Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth.

Part 1 (of 4 parts), “Understanding True Wealth,” includes Chapter 2: “Two Principles of Psychological Wealth.” The excerpts below are from their discussion of the first principle.

Caveat Emptor: Bad Stuff Happens … Even to Princesses

Take a moment and recall the classic story of Cinderella. Remember how she was cruelly mistreated by her stepsisters and their wicked mother? Do you recall how they made her slave away at the daily household chores? Remember how the dress she labored so hard over was torn to shreds in a fit of jealousy, and her hopes of going to the royal ball lay in tatters? Of course, you probably best remember the happy ending of the fairy tale: Cinderella’s magical godmother arrives in the nick of time, whisks her away to the dance, and engineers a quick infatuation, with the result that the beloved protagonist marries the charming prince. But is that the end of the story, or just the beginning?

It is interesting to consider what happened to Cinderella next, after she was betrothed and took up residence in Charming Castle. For people who believe that happiness is a matter of favorable circumstances, the story of Cinderella turns out to be a slam dunk. With a Hollywood-handsome husband, a royal title, all the riches she could want, and soldiers to guard her from the paparazzi, how could our belle of the ball not be happy? But for folks who are inclined to think of happiness as a process, the matter of Cinderella’s emotional fate is far from clear. Did Cinderella’s husband treat her well, or was he a philanderer in later life? Did she find some meaningful pastime to keep her occupied on the palace grounds? Were her children spoiled brats? Did she harbor resentment about her upbringing, or try to get revenge on her stepsisters? Did she grow bored with royal balls and court intrigue, or did she organize a dance program for the poor kids in her kingdom? Happiness, as we have said, is a process, not a destination. Just as Cinderella’s life did not end with her royal wedding, your emotional bliss is not complete once you have obtained some important goal. Life goes on, and even those great circumstances you achieve will not ensure you lasting happiness. For one thing, bad things can happen even to beautiful young princesses. But even if Cinderella’s life encountered few bumps on the fairyland road, she might have grown bored with the wonderful circumstances surrounding her, and needed new aims and activities to add zest to her life.

In the end, Cinderella’s quality of life was probably dictated less by her favorable circumstances and more by how she construed them. Hardships are an inevitable part of life, and having psychological wealth does not mean there are never any risks or losses. Of course there are. Happiness is not the complete absence of tough times, because that would be unrealistic. But, as we shall see later in this chapter and later in this book, negative emotions have a place in psychological wealth, and subjective interpretation plays an important role in happiness.

-Diener and Biswas-Diener, Happiness, pp. 16-17
(Chapter 2: Two Principles of Psychological Wealth)

Cinderella seemed to end up with a lot of the things we want (and don’t we spend a lot of time trying to get them?): money, prestige, a good-looking romantic partner, security. She was “successful”; she had “arrived.” But research on happiness is showing that good circumstances (even those of storybook quality) don’t necessarily have a lot to do with how happy people are. Of course, goals are important, but happiness is more about the process than it is about where you end up.

The next section in the book, a kind of thought experiment, illustrates this nicely.

Needing the Rigors of the Game

We sometimes ask our students whether they would accept the following pact with a genie. After floating out of his lamp, he offers to give you everything you desire, and as soon as the wish comes into your head, without the typical three-wish limit. The smirking genie says that anything you want will instantly come to you. You can’t wish for happiness, and you can’t wish that you will need to work for things to obtain them: no trickery of this type is allowed. Just solid old-school wishing for gold, castles, travel, beauty, friends, sports talent, intelligence, musical talent, good-looking dates, fast cars, and the like is permitted. Of course, most students wave their hands wildly, signaling that of course they would accept this great offer. Undoubtedly they are thinking of school loans, good grades, summers in Paris, and body fat. But – typically – as the class discussion proceeds, doubts begin to creep in. Maybe this all-wishes-granted deal, having everything and working for nothing, would become boring. Maybe you would adapt to all your blessings and they would no longer produce happiness. The discussion proceeds a bit further, and a few students begin to think the infinite-wishes deal might be hell on earth. Things would become boring, they reason, and life would lose its zest.

Students’ qualms about receiving everything without effort express our intuitive understanding that working for things we desire can be part of the pleasure of obtaining them. Just as climbing the mountain may be the major part of the fun, and simply being boosted to the top by a genie would be much less rewarding, much in life might be more meaningful and rewarding because of the efforts needed to obtain it. Not only will the eventual reward be more exciting, but the activities needed to gain the reward can themselves be very rewarding. The former justice of the United States Supreme Court Benjamin Cardozo expressed this well: “In the end the great truth will have been learned: that the quest is greater than what is sought, the effort finer than the prize (or, rather, that the effort is the prize), the victory cheap and hollow were it not for the rigor of the game.” The renowned justice went beyond saying that the goal-seeking activities enhance the final reward; he claimed that these activities are in fact the prize itself!

-Diener and Biswas-Diener, Happiness, pp. 17-18
(Chapter 2: Two Principles of Psychological Wealth)

You’ve probably heard the saying “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” The quotation is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, but it was also popularized by Aerosmith. If you do a Google search for “journey, not a destination” you’ll get a lot of interesting variations – other things that are “…a journey, not a destination”:

• Success
• Excellence
• Fitness
• Leadership
• Sustainability
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
• Windows Vista Security

But the most popular variation that comes up in the first few pages of Google is:

“Happiness is a journey, not a destination.”

This is also the essence of the first principle of Psychological Wealth.

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Meaning (as in “meaning in life” or “meaningful work”) is obviously important. It’s important to a person for its own sake. It also affects other people—for example, it could be a motivational factor, affecting purpose, goals, and behavior. Most adults spend most of their waking hours working, so it’s important for people to find meaningful work, and to find more meaning in the work they’re currently doing.

A few psychologists are taking on the difficult task of using scientific methods to clarify the fuzzy topic of “meaning.” Michael F. Steger has done some research work in this area, and concludes that meaningful work has three, central components:

First, the work we do must make sense; we must know what’s being asked of us and be able to identify the personal or organizational resources we need to do our job.

Second, the work we do must have a point; we must be able to see how the little tasks we engage in build, brick-by-brick if you will, into an important part of the purpose of our company.

Finally, the work that we do must benefit some greater good; we must be able to see how our toil helps others, whether that’s saving the planet, saving a life, or making our co-workers’ jobs easier so that they can go home and really be available for their families and friends.

So, for our work to be meaningful we have to:

1. Understand what to do and how to do it

2. Know how the things we do fit into the larger picture

3. See how that creates a benefit for someone

A case can be made:

[a] that if people learn about the processes within their company or institution, they’re more likely to see how to do their jobs well, how it fits with what other workers are doing, and how the end product creates value, and

[b] that this can lead to a sense of meaning, which in turn makes people better at what they do.

Patrick McKnight and Todd Kashdan, in their theory of “purpose in life,” talk about “meaning” in the larger sense, pointing out that:

“Living in accord with one’s purpose…offers that person a self-sustaining source of meaning through goal pursuit and goal attainment” (p. 242).

A sense of purpose leads you to make goals and then reach them. And you recognize that it has meaning and value. Also,

“Meaning probably drives the development of purpose. Once a purpose becomes developed, purpose drives meaning.” (p. 243).

It works both ways – meaning and purpose feed each other. But probably mostly in the order McKnight and Kashdan identify.

Can this be applied more narrowly to the world of work? Once you know what to do, how it fits into the larger picture, and how that creates benefit, can the meaning you derive help give you a sense of purpose? With that sense of purpose can you then set and attain goals that give you a greater sense of meaning in your work?

“Purpose” has been a key research interest of mine, so I’ll certainly talk about it more in a future post, especially in light of its relationship to “meaning.”

I can’t help wondering if there are other things that could contribute to meaning in work. Often when you’re good at something, you like doing it more. I would think this could lead to a feeling that “this is what I’m supposed to be doing,” contributing to sense of meaning. Positive emotions are a better foundation than negative ones for broadening and building, and lead to more effectiveness in work.

Norman Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, presents a similar idea—of these two intertwined factors contributing to meaning in work:

I’ve always wanted to be successful. My definition of being successful is contributing something to the world…and being happy while doing it…. You have to enjoy what you are doing. You won’t be very good if you don’t. And secondly, you have to feel that you are contributing something worthwhile….  If either of these ingredients are absent, there’s probably some lack of meaning in your work.

Then there’s the other intertwined, bi-directional dynamic:

• Happier, more effective workers developing more of a sense of meaningfulness in their work, and
• People who feel their work is meaningful becoming happier and more effective.

Michael F. Steger concludes:

A growing body of evidence shows that meaningful workers are happy workers, more committed workers, and, in some tantalizing ways, better workers.

References:

Steger, Michael F. (2009). “Meaningful Work.” The Meaning in Life: Seeking a Life that Matters (Psychology Today blog) June 9, 2009.

McKnight, Patrick E. & Kashdan, Todd B. (2009). “Purpose in Life as a System That Creates and Sustains Health and Well-Being: An Integrative, Testable Theory.” Review of General Psychology. American Psychological Association. September 2009, Vol. 13, No. 3, 242–251.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2008). “Creativity, fulfillment and flow.” TED Talks (Conference on Technology, Education, and Design). October 24, 2008.

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In the last few decades real incomes and real wealth have increased much more than people think, but people are no happier, according to research. Gregg Easterbrook wrote a book about this, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, which prompted Martin Seligman to invite him as a guest lecturer in an online course I was part of.

Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, thought this might be because of the way people spend their money. “People often pour their increased wealth into pursuits that provide little in the way of lasting happiness.” They do things like buying flat screen TVs. Research has found over and over that you get a little jolt of pleasure from this, but it goes away pretty quickly. It turns out giving has more benefits. Also, just thinking about having more money makes people less likely to use it in ways that would make them happy (Vohs et al, 2006). And when a group similar to those in the third study below were asked to select the conditions in that study that would make them happier, they got it exactly backwards.

We’re actually not very good in general at predicting what will make us happy. One Harvard psychologist has devoted a lot of his research career to this. His engaging and witty best-seller is called Stumbling on Happiness, which I’ll definitely be talking about in a future post.

Getting back to Dunn and colleagues, who published their findings in March this year in Science, their research looked at this question in different ways by doing three separate studies. They concluded that buying stuff for yourself doesn’t make you happier, but spending money on other people does.

They surveyed 632 Americans, gave them standardized, validated measures of general happiness, and asked questions about income, spending on (1) bills and expenses, (2) gifts for themselves, (3) gifts for others, and (4) donations to charity. Spending on the first two categories was not related to happiness; spending on the second two categories was.

Next they looked at people who received a windfall profit-sharing bonus (mostly in the $3000-$7000 range), and how they spent it. General happiness measures were taken a month before and 6-8 weeks after. They reported what percentage of their bonus they spent on 6 different categories including “buying something for someone else” and “donating to charity.” High or low income didn’t affect the happiness measure, and the amount of the bonus didn’t either. But spending in the two “pro-social” categories I just mentioned predicted higher levels of happiness. How much people got wasn’t related to their happiness two months later. Spending it on others was.

A third study was an experiment which could demonstrate causality. Participants were given either $5 or $20 to spend by 5:00 p.m. and were randomly assigned to two groups. In one group they spent the money on a bill, an expense, or a gift for themselves, and in the other group they spent the money on a gift for someone else or to make a charitable donation. Those in the latter (pro-social spending) group had increased general happiness scores.

The researchers go on to say that it might be better to focus on “intentional activities” (“practices in which people actively and effortfully choose to engage”) in finding ways to increase happiness, rather than looking at life circumstances like income, gender, and religious affiliation. They also point out that a small change in spending habits can have a significant effect. Remember that in the third study, only $5 made a difference.

References:

Elizabeth W. Dunn, Lara B. Aknin, Michael I. Norton (March 2008), “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness,” Science 21: Vol. 319. no. 5870, pp. 1687-1688. DOI: 10.1126/science.1150952.

Kathleen D. Vohs, Nicole L. Mead, and Miranda R. Goode (November 2006), “The Psychological Consequences of Money,” Science 314: Vol. 314. no. 5802, pp. 1154-1156. DOI: 10.1126/science.1132491.

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Related: video of a monkey controlling a robotic arm.

Coming back to the first issue (downloading information), to my knowledge we have to be content for now to download the old-fashioned way. But if you think about it, this just keeps getting better, sometimes by leaps and bounds. Google’s better search algorithm was an obvious advance. Google made it even easier than previous search engines to find exactly what you want, even some very obscure bit of information. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before in history. In that sense we’re smarter than we’ve ever been. It’s a bit of a stretch to compare this to intelligence, but you could say everyone who knows how to search on the Internet has a sort of genius-level knowledge base. I thought about calling this your “Google Quotient,” but I found out the phrase was already being used to mean something else. (I googled it!)

As more complete, better-quality, and more specialized information gets put on the Internet, that knowledge base available to you just keeps improving.

I sometimes read a blog written by Scott Adams, who does the Dilbert cartoon. He’s a smart guy, and often raises interesting issues. A few days ago he mentioned again that he’d been suffering from a mysterious voice problem that baffled his doctors.

I woke up one day thinking my voice problem might be related in some way to my hand problem – a writer’s cramp called focal dystonia. So I Googled “voice dystonia” and up popped a link to a video of a person speaking with exactly the same speech defect I had at the time, something called Spasmodic Dysphonia.

So he was able to use Google to self-diagnose a rare condition, that diagnosis later confirmed by doctors. He tried recommended treatments and therapies, with limited success. Then Google came to the rescue again:

About a year ago I started using Google Alerts to tell me whenever someone mentioned Dilbert, me, or anything about Spasmodic Dysphonia on the Internet. About six months ago I got an alert with a link to an obscure medical publication with a report about an even more obscure surgical procedure for fixing spasmodic dysphonia. I took that information to my doctor, who referred me to an expert at Stanford University, who referred me to an expert surgeon at UCLA. Long story short, the operation I read about wasn’t as promising as the article suggested, but the final surgeon in my travels had his own version of surgery that had a good track record. I tried it, and now my voice is normal. I never would have found that path without Google Alerts.

One way to look at the success of science is that it’s the story of more and more pieces of reliable information being built up so that when you need an answer to a particular problem, it exists. With the development of the Internet, that information is more accessible, which should help more and more problems be solved. Will this make you smarter and happier? Well, if being smart is at least partly the ability to solve problems, the answer is yes, it would help you be smarter. Whether this would make you happier is a little more complicated. Some changes in our lives can make us lastingly happier, but many changes in life situation – even big ones – are easy to get used to. We adapt. New situations that are good, or bad, become normal after awhile. Psychologists call this the “hedonic treadmill.” You’re happy with some new thing you got. But then you get used to it. It becomes the new normal situation for you. And your happiness returns to your normal level.

A method for countering this erosion of your happiness is to renew the positive benefit the good thing provides by actively appreciating it. This goes along with the theme of gratitude I started writing about around Thanksgiving. As you know if you read those articles (Gratitude Visit) (Eight ways gratitude boosts happiness), gratitude can be a powerful support for increased happiness that lasts.

So my thought for the day is that I’m grateful for the development of science and technology (and its public accessibility) that solves problems and creates new possibilities.

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At the University of Pennsylvania, Seligman teaches a course on positive psychology, and has his students plan and carry out a “Gratitude Visit” as an assignment. In his best-selling book Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment, Seligman says that in his course evaluations he gets comments like “October 25th was one of the best days of my life.” He recommends all readers to do the exercise, and gives the following instructions:

Select one important person from your past who has made a major positive difference in your life and to whom you have never fully expressed your thanks. (Do not confound this selection with new-found romantic love, or with the possibility of a future gain.) Write a testimonial just long enough to cover one laminated page. Take your time composing this; my students and I found ourselves taking several weeks, composing on buses and as we feel asleep at night. Invite that person to your home, or travel to that person’s home. It is important you do this face to face, not just in writing or on the phone. Do not tell the person the purpose of the visit in advance; a simple “I just want to see you” will suffice. Wine and cheese do not matter [he mentioned in the book that this was part of "Gratitude Night" where students brought guests to a joint event], but bring a laminated version of your testimonial with you as a gift. When all settles down, read your testimonial aloud slowly, with expression, and with eye contact. Then let the other person react unhurriedly. Reminisce together about the concrete events that make this person so important to you. (If you are so moved, please do send me a copy at Seligman@psych.upenn.edu)

There are a lot of ways in which giving works better than receiving for making you happier. The Gratitude Visit is a great way to enrich both giver and receiver. Try it! If you would like to send me a copy, I’d be happy to read it.

Seligman, M.E.P. (2002). Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press. p. 72-75.

Seligman, M.E.P., Steen, T., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.

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