One of the primary human impulses is to maximize our happiness. But our satisfaction in life is driven by our emotions. And our emotions, in turn, are determined by the ways in which our mental filters cause us to interpret and react to events and situations.
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom is about how human beings can maximize happiness. It explores how different philosophical traditions have defined happiness throughout human history, places them within an evolutionary framework, and shows how there is a constant back-and-forth between reason and emotion.
Neither western ideas about the fulfillment of goals nor eastern notions about the elimination of desire as being the path to happiness are 100 percent right. The key to happiness is to strike the right balance between the two—to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.
Before we can really delve into how you can maximize your own happiness, we need to understand the basic divisions that characterize the human brain—because the brain is home to the neurological and psychological mechanisms that determine how we experience the world.
The most apt metaphor for thinking about the human mind is of a human rider sitting atop an elephant. The rider, representing reason, can do her best to attempt to direct the elephant. But the elephant, representing emotion, is far more powerful and has its own will; it will only comply with the rider’s commands if those commands are not in conflict with its desire.
But we should be careful not to overgeneralize. Reason and emotion are not mutually exclusive or engaged in some zero-sum contest against one another. While emotion is usually the senior partner in the relationship, it is a partnership nonetheless. The two work together—reason enhances our emotional intelligence and our emotional intelligence strengthens our powers of reason.
First, we’ll need to delve into some evolutionary anthropology to establish why the elephant is so much more powerful than the rider. Understanding the dynamics of this fundamental division within our brains will guide our analysis of human happiness. Once we do that, we’ll be able to explore specific strategies for maximizing happiness.
In general, these strategies are centered around:
Our analysis of all these strategies will blend insights from positive psychology, ancient and modern philosophy and religion, and evolutionary anthropology.
As humans, we are controlled primarily by our desires, which are driven by our emotions—not our powers of reason. Our emotions determine our opinions and positions on moral questions. It is only after we arrive at these positions that we invent reasons to justify them retroactively.
The automatic system (the elephant) simply responds to stimuli around it and forms judgments and preferences based on what it perceives. And, in a pure contest of wills, the automatic system will nearly always beat the controlled system (the rider). The key is to change the stimuli in your environment into those that will produce desires whose pursuit and fulfillment will lead to true satisfaction. You can’t master the elephant; but, perhaps, you can change what the elephant sees.
The elephant determines our likes and dislikes, often in ways that we’re not consciously aware of. These emotional cues color our thinking, causing the elephant to dominate the rider. A perceived threat will make us consciously evaluate all stimuli as possible threats; a rush of sadness will cause us to adopt a more bleak way of looking at the world as a whole. These are the basic mental preconditions that affect all humans.
So, in general, emotion is always a stronger force within the mind than reason. And if we delve a bit further, we discover that an individual's general emotional state isn’t solely determined by the stimuli they encounter; it’s also influenced by a genetic predisposition toward happiness or sadness known as the affective style.
However, your affective style doesn’t set your level of happiness in stone. The affective style is best thought of as a range or emotional thermostat—some people simply have higher happiness levels at the upper end of their range than others. But within those constraints, there’s still great potential for improvement. Even if you have a negative affective style, you can still become happier. Moving to the upper levels of your affective style is akin to taming the elephant and guiding it down a different path. Effective methods for doing this include meditation, cognitive therapy, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
A key factor that affects our happiness is the strength of our connections to other people. And reciprocity—the phenomenon by which we treat others as we have been treated by them—is one of the strongest ties that bind society together.
The reciprocity reflex tells us to repay others when they do something for us. From an evolutionary perspective, it works because it increases everyone’s chances of survival. The reciprocity reflex causes the other members of the group to help you if you have helped them, creating networks of mutual obligation. These are the seeds of altruism.
But there is a flaw in this. Because reality is filtered through the lens of our mental perceptions, we are vulnerable to deception. Real altruism may not matter as much as behavior that we perceive to be altruistic on the part of others. There is a real advantage for those who can manipulate the reciprocity reflex to appear to be fair, while actually reaping the benefits of being selfish. If there's a food drive happening in your neighborhood, for example, you can curry favor with your peers by telling people you contributed to it even if you didn’t. You get the goodwill (and future reciprocity) of your neighbors without having to sacrifice anything.
And, while we may enjoy pointing out the hypocrisy of others and relish the feeling of moral superiority that it gives us, we are all hypocrites who excel at inventing rationales for why whatever we’re doing is virtuous. This is the rider acting as a sort of chief counsel for the elephant—i.e., the conscious, rational mind manufacturing reasons to justify what the emotional, impulsive part of ourselves wants to do.
To pierce through our self-delusions, we must recognize our perceptions for what they are—just perceptions. Stop treating the rider as chief counsel and start taking responsibility for your thoughts and behavior. Look at past conflicts with other people and find where you were wrong. There were probably times where you said hurtful things or violated your own moral code through your actions. Once you’ve done this, you can recalibrate your mental filters and finally disengage from judgment, self-delusion, and attempts to manipulate others.
This will make people value their interactions with you more because you’ll be acting as a genuinely open and empathetic person. And, because of the reciprocity reflex, they’ll start doing the same for you—which will make for better and happier relationships, for you and them.
Many religious traditions teach that self-denial is the route to happiness. Buddhism famously encourages its adherents to break all emotional attachments to things and refrain from all attempts to attain what they don’t have. Striving, according to this view, is the source of human unhappiness. But some things are worth striving for. The key is not to eliminate desire; it’s to start desiring the right things.
Our brains evolved to respond to immediate pleasures like food or sex (which both advance species success) with jolts of dopamine, which serve as a reinforcement mechanism. But the effects of any reinforcement mechanism are immediate and short-lived. The pleasure, instead, comes from the baby steps you take along the way. This is known as the progress principle. As a corollary, no single event is likely to permanently alter your affective style, because you’ll just reach a new plateau. This idea is known as the adaptation principle.
The progress and adaptation principles have important things to teach us about how we can increase our happiness. They tell us to focus more on the road to achieving a goal, not on the goal itself. Although some conditions of life are beyond the ability of an individual to alter, there are changes you can make to your life circumstances to bring lasting happiness.
Simple things like reducing exposure to unwanted noise, cutting down on commuting time, improving one’s perceived body deficiencies (like being overweight or being too skinny), and introducing more autonomy in one’s life have been shown to make people happier in the long term. Most of all, meaningful and joyful connections to other people are central to happiness. These are the things we should all strive for.
People are happiest when doing a task that is difficult, but closely aligned to their strengths. For a bodybuilder, this might be lifting a heavy weight; for a violinist, it might be practicing a particularly complex piece of music. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow,” or what we might call “being in the zone.”
The key to flow is that you are receiving constant positive feedback; the progress toward the goal sustains you. In flow, the elephant and rider are perfectly synchronized, with the elephant chasing what it wants and the rider guiding it along and spurring it to action.
Another effective way you can boost your happiness through striving for the right things is by shifting from conspicuous consumption to inconspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption is when we buy visible, materialistic things for the purpose of demonstrating our wealth, prestige, or status to others. Inconspicuous consumption, by contrast, refers to the kind of spending we do for our benefit, on things that make us intrinsically happy. These are things, such as vacations, that we value for their own sake, not for what they convey about us relative to other people.
Embracing, in moderation, the pleasures of life and forging meaningful attachments is a key part of what it is to be human. Happiness can come from within; but it also comes from without.
People with lots of meaningful relationships and connections to other people have been shown to have better health outcomes and report being happier. But how do we form those connections? It turns out that a great deal of our relationship success later in life hinges on the quality of our connections as children.
Attachment theory states that children have two primary needs—safety and exploration. From an evolutionary perspective, both are necessary. Safety guarantees survival, while exploration enables children to develop the skills they need to succeed as adults and have children of their own.
This knowledge that the parent will always be there to act as a guardrail gives the child the sense of security she needs to develop independence. Accordingly, when children are deprived of their attachment figures, they become insecure and unable to develop the emotional security and independence needed to thrive in adulthood. Unconditional love does not inhibit the development of independence; it’s what makes it possible in the first place.
Thus, providing unconditional love to children will enable them to form healthy, stable connections as adults. Indeed, the research shows that our childhood attachment styles carry forward into our adult romantic relationships, setting the pattern for how we form bonds with other people for the rest of our lives.
In thinking about how to maximize our happiness, we have to consider what makes us unhappy.
Research suggests that human beings need some amount of struggle in their lives in order to reach their full potential. People who suffer setbacks, even tragedies like the loss of a loved one, often find new strengths as a result of their experience.
Trauma survivors discover that they have a much stronger network of people who love and care for them than they previously thought. This discovery activates the reciprocity reflex—we feel a deeper love for and connection to people in our social network and want to foster even closer ties with them. And because we come to value these relationships more, we devote more of our energies to cultivating them, instead of seeking money or possessions.
Setbacks can alter one’s life story or self-narrative. This is the rider’s domain, the conscious reality we construct for ourselves about who we are and how we got to be that way. The experience of triumph over loss enables us to replace a story about our frustrated hopes or positive experiences turned sour with a more compelling story about overcoming adversity and using that experience to learn compassion and empathy for others. And in the end, this is a more fulfilling story to have about ourselves.
Our teenage years in particular are the period in our lives when our self-narratives begin to truly coalesce and some of our most important life experiences take place. Events that happen during this time are those we revisit the most throughout the rest of our lives, serving as a constant point of self-reference. Accordingly, some adversity in one’s teenage and early adulthood years, if properly overcome, can provide a real character-building boost to people later in life.
So far, we’ve talked mostly about how our interpretations of events or our relationships with other people influence our happiness. But we should also look inward. What are the innate qualities we should possess if we wish to be happy?
Virtue is defined as the cultivation of the best version of oneself. It is about fulfilling your potential, engaging in constant self-improvement, and striving toward the acquisition of a set of positive attributes or qualities. The specific virtues you aim for depend on your particular strengths and interests. The key to cultivating virtue—and, thus, cultivating happiness—is improvement, be it moral, intellectual, or even physical. And it’s intimately linked to human happiness.
Western moral philosophy, unfortunately, gives pride of place to rationalism and science. This has inculcated in the Western mind an aversion toward ideas of virtue based in feeling and habit. For the celebrants of reason, feeling was something to be conquered and overcome; the rider had to master the elephant, not merely coordinate with it. But you don’t reason your way toward good morals; instead, cultivating virtues leads you to use the powers of reason in a way that will lead to moral actions.
Positive psychology links ancient virtue theories with our modern understanding of how the human mind works. Positive psychology attempts to elevate the human experience and cultivate excellence, instead of merely treating disorder. The field identifies six core virtues that are celebrated across all civilizations:
The cultivation of these virtues should be a joyful, enlightening experience. You are focusing on things you enjoy, which is intrinsically rewarding. The cultivation of virtue is its own reward.
Some of our most powerful moments of joy come from our experiences with the divine or spiritual. We experience a sense of uplifting when we witness someone doing a good deed; we are often driven by a desire to follow suit and do good deeds of our own. It is often closely linked to religious or spiritual experiences that bring us closer to the realm of the divine. This is elevation, the feeling you get when you are:
The feeling of experiencing God’s love as part of a congregation is a common manifestation of elevation. It’s why religion is found in every culture at every time across the world; it fulfills a basic human need to connect with something greater.
We’ve seen how important attachments and connections are to any individual’s enjoyment of life. By binding the individual to a community, connecting that individual to a higher purpose, and facilitating intrinsically rewarding altruistic behavior toward members of the group, religion has served as a great facilitator of human happiness.
One of the essential conditions for a satisfied life is meaningful work. The most meaningful and satisfying work is that which people find intrinsically rewarding. Humans desire occupational self-direction—work that is complex and challenging, engages their interests or talents, and allows for a high degree of independence and autonomy. This kind of work harnesses the progress principle to maximize our happiness, rewarding us for each baby step we take toward the goal.
We are responsible for creating the conditions for our own happiness. It is about finding the right balance between connecting to your community and connecting to yourself. Happiness comes from your attachments to the world around you, but it also comes from the cultivation of inner virtues—training the elephant to explore its full potential, while respecting its power over the rider.
But by aligning the rider with the elephant, you will discover your own path to purpose, meaning, and, ultimately, happiness.
One of the primary human impulses is to maximize our happiness. Indeed, this is the goal of the modern field of positive psychology. But in our pursuit of happiness, we also have much to learn from the philosophical and literary wisdom of past thinkers, from Buddha to Sigmund Freud.
In this summary, we’ll survey the world’s intellectual, philosophical, and theological ideas on happiness, from ancient India and Greece to the present day. But we won’t just explore these ideas in isolation—we’ll integrate them with one another and evaluate them using the insights we’ve gained from modern psychology. Using our better understanding of how the human mind really works, we will figure out how we can best use these ideas to gain the most joy out of our own lives.
As we’ll see, our satisfaction in life is driven by our emotions. And our emotions, in turn, are determined by the ways in which our mental filters cause us to interpret and react to events and situations. The human brain is perpetually divided against itself in the struggle between emotion and reason. Emotion demands that some need be satisfied; reason tries (and often fails) to control such impulsive needs.
Neither western ideas about the fulfillment of goals nor eastern notions about the elimination of desire as being the path to happiness are 100 percent right. As we’ll explore, the key to happiness is to strike the right balance between the two—to use reason to focus the mind away from desires that will only bring fleeting happiness, while giving in to those desires that will bring lasting fulfillment.
First, we’ll need to delve into some evolutionary anthropology to establish why the elephant is so much more powerful than the rider. Understanding the dynamics of this fundamental division within our brains will guide our analysis of human happiness. Once we do that, we’ll be able to explore specific strategies for maximizing happiness. In general, these strategies are centered around:
Our analysis of all these strategies will blend insights from positive psychology, ancient and modern philosophy and religion, and evolutionary anthropology.
Have you ever wondered why we do harmful or destructive things even when we know we shouldn’t? Or why we think about saying outlandish or offensive things in situations where we know it would be inappropriate to do so? This is because the mind is not really one unified entity. Instead, it’s split between reason and emotional impulse.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the nature of the divided mind and the consequences it has for our thoughts and actions. As we’ll see, the divided mind is the key to understanding the mental processes that govern our perception of the world. This is important, because those mental processes play a large role in determining our overall level of happiness.
The most apt metaphor for thinking about the human mind is of a human rider sitting atop an elephant. The rider, representing reason, can do her best to attempt to direct the elephant. But the elephant is far more powerful and has its own will; it will only comply with the rider’s commands if those commands are not in conflict with its desire. Thus, the rational part of ourselves can advise and guide our emotional core; but in a pure contest of wills, emotion will nearly always defeat reason.
This rider/elephant metaphor neatly describes the back-and-forth struggle going on within the self. But there are other dimensions to this division. The mind is divided in four key ways:
We’ve all experienced involuntary bodily reactions before, when our bodies reveal our innermost thoughts even when we don’t want them to. Our palms sweat when we’re nervous and our eyes tear up when we’re sad or angry.
This is because our autonomic nervous system, or “gut brain,” controls many bodily functions separately from the “head brain,” where conscious thought lives. The two simultaneously influence one another, but can also operate independently of one another.
Our brains are divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere controls language and analytical tasks. The right side, meanwhile, recognizes patterns, and is most notably responsible for facial recognition. The two hemispheres are connected by a mass of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum.
We can see the split in action in patients who have had the corpus callosum severed or damaged in some way. This causes a literal “split-brain” syndrome in which the two hemispheres begin to function independently of one another. Thus, the left hand (which is controlled by the right hemisphere) might pick up objects that the patient has consciously put down with the right hand, and even attempt to physically restrain actions that the patient is consciously attempting to do with the right hand.
Neurologists have discovered that people with more brainwave activity in their left hemispheres tend to have higher levels of overall happiness than do people with more brainwave activity in their right hemispheres. We’ll explore this in greater detail when we discuss negativity bias and affective style in the next chapter.
As human survival came to depend on the successful execution of complex tasks and thinking, natural selection began to favor the development of more advanced parts of the brain.
This is why we have a frontal cortex, which is one of the “newer” parts of the brain (from an evolutionary perspective). In our rider/elephant metaphor, we can think of the frontal cortex as the rider. It enables higher thinking, analysis, and decision making. It is what gives us the power to learn and analogize from previous experiences, rather than only responding to particular situations.
This power of generalization is vitally important for human survival. You couldn’t function in society, for example, if you had no ability to recognize the general form of a human face and instead had to examine the face of every person you encountered before you determined it was another person. Generalization enables us to aggregate inputs and distill them down to general patterns that inform our reactions to stimuli.
Our limbic system, meanwhile, coordinates our drives and desires. In our metaphor, we can think of it as the elephant, wrestling for control with the frontal cortex. And, like the elephant, it exerts a great deal of control. Indeed, it can be dominant.
But we should be careful not to overgeneralize. Reason and emotion are not mutually exclusive or engaged in some zero-sum contest against one another. While emotion is usually the senior partner in the relationship, it is a partnership nonetheless. The two work together—reason enhances our emotional intelligence and our emotional intelligence strengthens our powers of reason.
One of the most effective ways to enhance our happiness is to bring reason and emotion into better harmony, by using the power of reason to guide (but not control) our emotions toward healthier and more fulfilling desires.
Most mental processes are unconscious, although they are capable of influencing behavior that we think is conscious. Experiments have shown, for example, how seeing words related to older people causes test subjects to walk more slowly. We might have hundreds of such unconscious processes going on at once.
Conscious processing, on the other hand, usually involves more complex strategies and planning. We can only consciously think about one thing at a time. The conscious processing parts of our brain, like language, are relatively “young” and we still haven't quite worked out how to use them.
The conscious processing parts of our brains let us exert some control over our immediate desires for pleasures like food and sex, but the automatic system still has the upper hand. We are not complete masters over our desires, and we may never be.
As humans, we are controlled primarily by our desires, which are driven by our emotions—not our powers of reason. This is the most consequential manifestation of the split-brain phenomenon. One part of our brain, the elephant, determines our opinions and positions on moral questions; the other part of our brain, the rider, creates reasons to justify those opinions—but only after the elephant has made its decision.
The automatic system (the elephant) simply responds to stimuli around it and forms judgments and preferences based on what it perceives. And, in a pure contest of wills, the automatic system (the elephant) will nearly always beat the controlled system (the rider). The key is to change the stimuli in your environment into those that will produce desires whose pursuit and fulfillment will lead to true satisfaction. You can’t master the elephant; but, perhaps, you can change what the elephant sees.
Of course, this is easier said than done. If someone tells you, “Don’t think of a hippopotamus,” it is nearly impossible to consciously not think of one. Similarly, we often find ourselves thinking about doing or saying outlandish things at inappropriate times. The reason is that we obviously know we’re not supposed to do those things. But the fact that the avoidance of such behavior is a social goal forces our minds to evaluate our progress toward that goal—and, in the course of that evaluation, we think about the behavior we know we’re supposed to avoid.
We would be healthier and happier if we paid less attention to the controlled, conscious parts of ourselves and accepted the elephant as an equally vital (if not more vital) part of ourselves. Too often, we treat it as some alien, external entity that we must struggle to master. But this is not the case. Instead, we need to reconcile and harmonize the two components of the self.
The remaining chapters of this summary will use the split-brain phenomenon as the basis for understanding how and why we experience happiness—and how we can use this understanding to maximize our happiness.
One major stumbling block on our road to happiness is our negativity bias. As we saw in the last chapter, our perceptions and interpretations of the events that we witness determine our reality—not the events themselves. And unfortunately, those interpretations tend toward pessimism and negativity. The key is to shift our mental structures and patterns of thought so that we have more positive and fulfilling interpretations of the events in our lives. In this chapter, we’ll analyze why we have such a strong negativity bias and explore some strategies for overcoming it.
The elephant determines our likes and dislikes, often in ways that we’re not consciously aware of. For example, studies have shown that white Americans have an automatic negative reaction when they’re shown black faces or symbols of black culture.
Similarly, people tend to be drawn to things that sound like their own names. People named Dennis are surprisingly overrepresented in the field of dentistry and married couples have been shown to be disproportionately likely to have first names that share the same first letter (like Dan and Dana or Jason and Jessica). Thus, even major life decisions—like what we choose as a career or who we marry—that we think are made consciously and rationally are actually strongly influenced by the likes and dislikes of the unconscious parts of our brains.
This phenomenon comes into play more when we look at the phenomenon of negativity bias. We are strongly wired to dislike and fear bad things more than we like good things. This is an inheritance from evolution. For our hominid ancestors, it was far more dangerous to misjudge a risk (like eating a plant that turned out to be poisonous) than it was to miss an opportunity (like failing to spot a new source of water).
The first type of error could lead to instant death; in the second scenario, there was likely another source of water that could be found. Therefore, those individuals who had strong fear and aversion instincts had an inherent advantage that enabled them to pass this quality along to their offspring. It’s why we evolved to startle at sudden noises that frighten us but have no equivalent emotional or physical reaction to positive stimuli. It also informs our strong biases toward loss aversion, whereby we value the avoidance of losses more than we value equivalent gains.
These emotional cues color our thinking, causing the elephant to dominate the rider. A perceived threat will make us consciously evaluate all stimuli as possible threats; a rush of sadness will cause us to adopt a more bleak way of looking at the world as a whole.
(Shortform note: For a more detailed discussion of loss aversion, read our summary of Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
The elephant determines our likes and dislikes, often in ways that we’re not consciously aware of. These emotional cues color our thinking, causing the elephant to dominate the rider. A perceived threat will make us consciously evaluate all stimuli as possible threats; a rush of sadness will cause us to adopt a more bleak way of looking at the world as a whole. These are the basic mental preconditions that affect all humans.
So, in general, emotion is always a stronger force within the mind than reason. And if we delve a bit further, we discover that an individual's general emotional state isn’t solely determined by the stimuli they encounter; it’s also influenced by a genetic predisposition toward happiness or sadness known as the affective style.
But we should be clear. Your affective style doesn’t set your level of happiness in stone. The affective style is best thought of as a range or emotional thermostat—some people simply have higher happiness levels at the upper end of their range than others. But within those constraints, there’s still great potential for improvement. Even if you have a negative affective style, you can still become happier. Moving to the upper levels of your affective style is akin to taming the elephant and guiding it down a different path. Effective methods for doing this include meditation, cognitive therapy, and serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs).
Meditation, widely practiced in eastern religions, is a way of focusing the mind and blocking out the constant verbal commentary running through one’s head. Typically, it entails sitting still and focusing on a single word or idea. It’s not easy to do at first, but it can be highly effective at breaking attachments (desires for material things, but also certain emotional drives like sex). Such attachments often power our negative thoughts (because we have such a deeply ingrained sense of loss aversion and fear losing those things that we already have).
According to proponents of meditation, eliminating one’s attachments as much as possible will maximize one’s happiness in the long run because the psychological costs of losing are so much higher than the psychological gains of winning. Once you acquire things that you become attached to, your mind will be dominated by fear of losing them. Instead, it’s better to shed those attachments entirely.
People who suffer from negative thinking can also be trapped in a painful and negative feedback loop. They start with low self-esteem. And because emotion (the elephant) informs rational thought (the rider), these individuals selectively seek out “proof” to confirm their belief that they’re worthless, often by magnifying minor setbacks into major catastrophes. This “proof,” in turn, further reinforces the original negative beliefs.
What can break this pattern is the technique of cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy challenges patients to consciously question their ingrained patterns of negative thinking. Practitioners encourage patients to label these thoughts as they happen and identify more positive and realistic ways of interpreting the events in their lives.
Thus, instead of thinking “I’m stupid and worthless and doomed to a life of failure” after performing poorly on a test, a patient undergoing cognitive therapy might reorient their thinking toward something more along the lines of “It was just one test; it doesn’t define my life.” Over time, the patient’s automatic thought patterns become more positive. In essence, cognitive therapy is the rider training the elephant not to lunge toward fear and sadness.
(Shortform note: Interested in cognitive therapy? Learn more with our summary of Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond.)
SSRIs (serotonin reuptake inhibitors) are a class of drug that includes Prozac and Zoloft. They have been shown to be remarkably effective in treating many mental health disorders, from clinical depression to eating disorders.
But these drugs have also generated some controversy precisely because they are seen as quick-fixes. Critics worry that SSRIs let people eschew the hard work of becoming “better” people and enable them to transform into something other than their “true” self.
But what if the “self” as it occurs naturally is a vessel for unhappiness and dissatisfaction, as it is in so many people with a negative affective style? If SSRIs can make people more happy, productive, and fulfilled, why are they harmful? We should think of them as purely mechanical—fixing something that’s broken and causing pain. After all, when we change a deflated tire on a car or replace a burned-out lightbulb on a lamp, we don’t decry these actions as altering the “true” nature of the car or the lamp.
Another key factor that affects our happiness is the strength of our connections to other people. And reciprocity—the phenomenon by which we treat others as we have been treated by them—is one of the strongest ties that bind society together. In this chapter, we’ll explore the origins of reciprocity, why it acts as such a strong binding agent, and how it shapes and governs our happiness by strengthening our relationships with other people.
Kin altruism is the mechanism by which individuals care for and protect individuals within their kin group (those with whom they share a blood relation). It’s observed in the behavior of many non-human animals and can be explained by simple Darwinian instincts: if the ultimate goal is to ensure the survival of one’s genes, it makes sense to be altruistic toward other members of the kin group.
But this does not fully explain the human phenomenon of reciprocity as we observe it. Humans, unlike other animals, work with, care for, and protect people with whom they have minimal or no blood relation. If anything, such behavior cuts against Darwinian impulse, as these other people are our “competitors” for scarce resources and their survival could be construed as hampering our own. Clearly, something else is going on.
What separates us from these other animals is the reciprocity reflex. This tells us to repay others when they do something for us. It’s so deeply ingrained that we hardly think about it, yet we practice it all the time. When a friend treats you to lunch, you make sure you pick up the check the next time you go out; when your neighbors invite you to a party, you invite them the next time you’re hosting an event.
We have an instinct to repay favors, even from strangers. From an evolutionary perspective, it works because it increases everyone’s chances of survival. The reciprocity reflex causes the other members of the group to help you if you have helped them, creating networks of mutual obligation.
This reflex is supported by two emotional sub-reflexes—gratitude and vengeance. Gratitude causes us to aid those who’ve aided us in the past; vengeance causes us to withhold aid from those who’ve been stingy or selfish, making it less likely that free riders will exploit the community’s altruism. This opens up the possibility of mutually beneficial cooperation, which makes the group as a whole stronger and strengthens social ties between members of a community.
(Shortform note: For a fuller discussion of reciprocity, read our summary of Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.)
Will self-sacrifice for others (which has become synonymous with morality in much of western thought) also be self-rewarding?
To answer that, we should briefly look at the two main explanations for why humans engage in altruistic behavior.
But these do not fully explain the altruistic behavior we see; we often act altruistically even when there is no chance of reciprocity or direct benefit for ourselves, including people who don’t believe in an afterlife. Something else must be at work. Altruism must provide us with more intrinsic benefits.
And, in fact, studies have shown that engaging in altruistic behavior does lead to an increase in all measures of happiness. This is especially true for older adults; because they are lonelier and have reduced social networks, altruism widens their circle and gives them new sources of comfort, as well as purpose.
Thus, while morality certainly encompasses far more than just altruism, we should not take that to mean that we shouldn’t be altruistic. By doing good for others, we are doing good for ourselves.
One of the most prominent and important manifestations of the reciprocity reflex is gossip—the sharing of social information about people. When someone tells you something about someone else, the reciprocity reflex causes you to share what you know about people in your community with that person.
This sharing of social information was likely an important element in contributing to group survival for early humans, enabling scarce resources to be shared more efficiently and potential threats to be identified more easily. Further, it reinforced positive social norms by making our ancestors aware of the misdeeds of people outside the immediate kin group whom they may not have personally known—bolstering both altruism and the reciprocity reflex by ensuring that selfish people didn’t receive cooperation, while altruistic people did.
In fact, evolutionary psychology suggests that gossip may have been one of the earliest purposes of language itself. The sharing of important social information that it facilitated enabled humans to survive in larger and larger social groups. And as we came to live in settled agricultural communities where we needed to interact with greater numbers of people, natural selection favored the evolution of larger brains to accommodate for new and necessary cognitive tools like language.
(Shortform note: To learn more about the function of gossip in early human societies, read our summary of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens.)
As we’ve seen, being a cooperative and altruistic person will generally lead to better outcomes for you, because (thanks to the reciprocity reflex) people will be more likely to repay you with their own cooperation and altruism.
But there is a flaw in this. Because reality is filtered through the lens of our mental perceptions, we are vulnerable to deception. Real altruism may not matter as much as behavior that we perceive to be altruistic on the part of others. Indeed, there is a real advantage for those who can manipulate the reciprocity reflex to appear to be fair, while actually reaping the benefits of being selfish. If there's a food drive happening in your neighborhood, for example, you can curry favor with your peers by telling people you contributed to it even if you didn’t. You get the goodwill (and future reciprocity) of your neighbors without having to sacrifice anything.
While this may give us a temporary boost of happiness (because we get to have our cake and eat it too), it also degrades the quality of our interactions with others, as people begin to sense that we’re manipulating them. As we’ll see, a better path to happiness is to be genuine and open with others, which (because of reciprocity) will make them want to do the same for you.
While we may enjoy pointing out the hypocrisy of others and relish the feeling of moral superiority that it gives us, we are all hypocrites, excoriating others for behavior that we ourselves engage in. We are able to do this without suffering cognitive dissonance because we are masters at inventing rationales for why whatever we’re doing is virtuous (or at the very least justifiable).
If we return to our central metaphor, this is the rider acting as a sort of chief counsel for the elephant—in other words, the conscious, rational mind manufacturing reasons to justify what the emotional, impulsive part of ourselves wants to do.
It is closely related to the psychological phenomenon of motivated reasoning, whereby people seek out pseudo-evidence and ignore contradictory evidence in order to reach the conclusion that they want to reach. And because we can always cherry-pick to find some supporting evidence to justify the conclusions we want to reach, it confirms our self-delusion that our reasoning is objective.
It goes back to our earlier point in Chapter 1 about the primacy of emotion—it is the emotional core of the self (the elephant) that shapes our rational thinking (the rider), not the other way around.
(Shortform note: To learn more about motivated reasoning, also known as confirmation bias, and other common cognitive biases, read our summary of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow.)
The irony is that, despite our own motivated reasoning and self-serving rationalizations, we are very good at identifying this same behavior in others. In one study at Cornell University, students were shown to greatly overestimate their own propensity to give to a philanthropic cause. But these same students were quite accurate with regard to how generous they believed others would be.
Of course, having a positive view of yourself is not inherently a bad thing. Indeed, a positive self-image is strongly correlated with better mental health outcomes. But it can come at a price, namely, creating a sense of over-entitlement. Over-entitled people inflate their own contributions to the group while minimizing or discounting those of others. This makes it unpleasant for others to deal with us, thereby harming our relationships and decreasing our overall level of happiness.
We can see this tendency to overrate our contributions in one 1979 study that analyzed the self-reported contributions of husbands and wives to total household work. When asked what percentage they contributed to maintaining the household, the husband-wife pairs gave answers that added up to more than 120 percent! This would only be possible if each was overrating their own contributions and discounting those of their partner.
Another psychological phenomenon that contributes to self-delusion is naive realism. This is the belief that one’s own opinions are arrived at through a clear and objective study of reality, but that those who disagree are motivated instead by ignorance, prejudice, or self-interest.
People are quite receptive to information about biases, but only when it provides insight into the behavior and motivations of others. When asked to apply these insights to themselves, however, we are entirely unwilling to examine our own biases. Instead, we persist in the delusion that we are objective, even when confronted with evidence that nearly everyone holds inflated views of themselves. Somehow, each of us clings to the belief that we are the sole exception.
We can take our analysis of people’s self-serving biases further to discuss the problem of evil.
This is a theological problem that has bedeviled every religion: how could evil exist alongside an all-powerful and benevolent God? If a deity knowingly allows evil, then how could they be benevolent? And if they are unable to prevent or overcome evil, how could they be all-powerful?
But this problem rests on a misconception of what evil really is. In the 1990s, social psychologist Roy Baumeister identified what he called the myth of pure evil—the idea that people who commit heinous acts do so out of pure cruelty and a desire to hurt. In his study of both perpetrators and victims of cruelty, Baumeister found that this was rarely the case. Most perpetrators were responding to what they perceived as some injustice done against them; in their minds, they were the victims, not the perpetrators. It’s another powerful example of how mental filters influence our perceptions of reality.
Baumeister found that there was actually far more nuance and complication surrounding even the most appalling crimes. Murders, for example, were often the end result of an escalating tit-for-tat cycle of aggression and counter-aggression between the perpetrator and ultimate victim (a dreadful manifestation of the reciprocity reflex). Often the murderer could have just as easily ended up as the victim.
Believing that one’s opponents are pure evil is how perpetrators rationalize extreme acts of violence against their victims. Idealism is a major driver of this, as anything can be justified to defeat those who stand in the way of one’s utopian vision.
Given all the mental filters we’ve explored in this chapter, it’s clear that our picture of reality is distorted by our built-in biases and delusions. Indeed, we are primed to see the world as being filled with insults, grievances, and threats. But these are largely illusory; they are how we perceive the world, not how it actually is. So how do we see the truth? How do we free the elephant from the emotional torment of constantly judging likes and dislikes?
One way to pierce through the psychic web is to simply recognize our perceptions as merely perceptions. Ancient Hinduism, for example, viewed our experiences of life as a game in which we all play a small, but meaningful part. Its adherents urged people to live life without caring too much about outcomes or judging others.
Most importantly, you can stop treating the rider as chief counsel and start taking responsibility for your thoughts and behavior. Look at past conflicts with other people and find where you were wrong. There were probably times where you said hurtful things or violated your own moral code through your actions.
Once you identify these, ignore the natural impulse to rationalize and defend yourself. This doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover; you just need to see where you could have gone wrong. That way, your apology to the other person will be rooted in genuine reflection and empathy. In turn, their instinct for reciprocity will kick in and they will likely follow suit with acknowledgment and reflection of their own. This exchange of empathy and understanding will be mutually beneficial and will serve as a positive template for you to model your interactions and relationships with others going forward.
Once you’ve done this, you can recalibrate your mental filters and finally disengage from judgment, self-delusion, and attempts to manipulate others. This will make people value their interactions with you more because you’ll be acting as a genuinely open and empathetic person. And, because of the reciprocity reflex, they’ll start doing the same for you—which will make for better and happier relationships, for you and them.
Think about how you can readjust your perceptions.
Think of a past instance in which you behaved selfishly. How did you rationalize that behavior to yourself at the time?
Do you think that this behavior stemmed from a built-in bias or self-delusion that you believed at the time? Briefly explain.
Think of a conflict you had with another person. Based on what you’ve read in this chapter, can you identify the ways in which you might also have been to blame?
A cornerstone of Buddhist belief, and that of many other Eastern religious traditions, is that the striving for status and possessions will leave you spiritually unfulfilled and, ultimately, joyless.
These faiths encourage breaking all emotional attachment to things and refraining from trying to attain what you don’t have. The striving, according to this view, is the root of human unhappiness.
And it’s true that we often feel hollow and unfulfilled even after we get the things that we want (or, at least, we think we want). But the self-denying philosophy of Buddhism gets some things wrong about human psychology. It turns out that some things are worth striving for. The key is not to eliminate desire; it’s to start desiring the right things.
Before we delve into what we should be striving for, it’s worthwhile to explore why so many of the things we do strive for leave us feeling unfulfilled. We often experience only brief, temporary happiness when we achieve some long-held goal like landing a promotion, getting a new car, or getting good grades. Soon after, we feel the unquenchable urge to reach the next milestone. Why are we never fully satisfied?
The answer is actually rooted in evolution and neurochemistry. Our brains evolved to respond to immediate pleasures like food or sex (which both advance species success) with jolts of dopamine, which serve as a reinforcement mechanism. But the effects of any reinforcement mechanism are immediate and short-lived. We wouldn’t have advanced very far as a species if every baby step we took toward a goal were rewarded by a permanent period of elation—we would be content never reaching the goal! The pleasure, instead, comes from the baby steps you take along the way. This is known as the progress principle.
There is a fundamental truth of human psychology that follows from the progress principle—no single event is likely to permanently alter your affective style, because you’ll just reach a new plateau. This idea is known as the adaptation principle.
In the long run, we are much more sensitive to positive or negative changes relative to our baseline than we are to absolute changes. We can see this in happiness studies comparing lottery winners with people who’ve become paraplegic due to injury or illness.
One might think that the lottery winners exist in a state of constant elation, while the paraplegics are trapped in a state of endless despair. And this is true—for the short period after winning the lottery or losing the use of one’s legs. But, after time, studies show that both groups adapt and settle into a new normal. Lottery winners become used to their new riches and find themselves no longer thrilled by their change in status (and often come to resent it because they are hounded by friends and relatives asking them for money). Meanwhile, paraplegics come to accept their condition and discover that life can have its joys even in their new normal.
Many people strive for money and social status. But happiness research shows that having a high income or a position of prestige and authority is not well correlated with happiness at all. Rich, white Americans, for example, do not report being any happier than poor, minority Americans, despite the former’s obvious material and social advantages.
It’s true that, all other things being equal, money is slightly correlated with higher happiness, but with very little marginal value for each dollar once someone has already met a certain financial threshold. Impoverished people do become much happier once they acquire enough money to meet basic needs like food and shelter. But after that, each additional dollar adds very little in the way of happiness.
Strong connections to other people and to something greater than yourself matter more. Being in a good marriage is a series of joyful interactions with your partner, without a big “payoff,” keeping well with the progress principle. It’s no coincidence that good marriages and connections to religious communities are strongly correlated with happiness—topics we’ll explore in greater detail in later chapters.
As we saw earlier when we explored affective style, it’s more useful to think of an individual’s happiness as operating along a range or spectrum instead of as a fixed amount. It’s certainly influenced by genes, but one’s precise level of happiness is not predetermined.
According to experts within the field of positive psychology (which we’ll explore further later in the summary), our happiness (H) is a function of:
Expressed as a formula, it reads: H=S+C+V.
We already explored S when we discussed the concept of affective style in Chapter 2. Now, let’s explore the other two variables to complete our model of the happiness formula and give us some insight into the goals we should be striving towards.
Although some conditions of life are beyond the ability of an individual to alter, there are changes you can make to your life circumstances to bring lasting happiness.
Simple things like reducing exposure to unwanted noise, cutting down on commuting time, and improving your perceived body deficiencies (like being overweight or being too skinny) have been shown to make people happier in the long term.
Having more autonomy over the conditions of your life is also important. In one study done at a nursing home, patients who were given responsibility for watering the plants in their rooms and who got to decide which movie they would watch on movie night got higher scores on all measures of happiness and had better health outcomes than did the control group that had been given no such autonomy.
Strong relationships, however, are the most important. Bad relationships (whether with spouses, coworkers, or others) have extraordinary power to make life unbearable. They feel inescapable and color all aspects of life, even when you’re not around the person with whom you have a bad relationship. Meaningful and joyful connections to other people are central to happiness.
Knowing that we can affect our overall happiness by improving the conditions of our lives should cause us to rethink the idea that the elimination of desire will lead to happiness. Striving for autonomy and for better relationships with the people around you will increase your happiness in the long run. As we said at the start of the chapter, don’t stop striving; start striving for the right things.
Voluntary activities (V) represent the only variable in the happiness formula that lies completely within our control; thus, focusing on our voluntary activities is the most effective way for us to increase our level of happiness.
Positive psychology co-founder Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi finds that people are happiest when doing a task that is difficult, but closely aligned to their strengths. For a bodybuilder, this might be lifting a heavy weight; for a violinist, it might be practicing a particularly complex piece of music. Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow,” or what we might call “being in the zone.”
It follows from what we know about the progress principle, which we explored earlier in the chapter. We derive more pleasure from the baby steps we take along the way to accomplishing our goals than we do from the actual achievement of a goal. The key to flow is that you are receiving constant positive feedback; the progress toward the goal sustains you. In flow, the elephant and rider are perfectly synchronized, with the elephant chasing what it wants and the rider guiding it along and spurring it to action.
It’s important to draw the distinction between short-term pleasures like food and sex that quickly dissipate (because our evolutionary reinforcement mechanisms are designed to make the dopamine rushes these activities bring temporary) and gratifications that challenge you and draw on your strengths.
The pleasure of eating your favorite meal will dissipate the second you take your last bite; gratifications like doing acts of kindness for others will make you feel satisfied for a long time afterward.
Another effective way you can boost your happiness through striving for the right things is by shifting from conspicuous consumption to inconspicuous consumption.
Conspicuous consumption is when we buy visible, materialistic things for the purpose of demonstrating our wealth, prestige, or status to others. Examples would include things like a sports car or a piece of fancy jewelry. These aren’t things we buy for their intrinsic value; they’re things we buy for what they’re supposed to project about us to others.
Conspicuous consumption naturally leads to an endless competitive cycle—in response to your purchase, someone else buys something even more expensive, leaving you dissatisfied because it devalues your own purchase. The only way you can regain that happiness, of course, is by purchasing your next big-ticket item.
Closely related to the idea of conspicuous consumption is the way in which we tend to value relative happiness more than absolute happiness. We are willing to accept less overall happiness, as long as we know we have more than others. One study showed that most subjects preferred a job in which they earned $90,000 and their coworkers earned $70,000 to one in which they earned $100,000 but their coworkers earned $150,000. That is, they were willing to accept less money as long as they knew they would be making more than their peers. The added social prestige was worth at least $10,000 to these subjects.
Inconspicuous consumption, by contrast, refers to the kind of spending we do for our benefit, on things that make us intrinsically happy. These are things that we value for their own sake, not for what they convey about us relative to other people. Positive psychology research suggests that money spent on experiences like vacations is far less likely to fall into the conspicuous consumption trap than money spent on material objects like cars or expensive watches. People tend to compete with one another over who owns the biggest house or the nicest car; they don’t, however, try to one-up each other with who took the longest vacation or who traveled the furthest.
Why do we treat experiences so differently than objects? Because experiences tend to bring us into contact with other people. We forge deeper connections with others through enjoying them together.
As we close this chapter, let’s come back to where we started, with the ancient Buddhist or Stoic schools of thought that urged self-denial and the elimination of desire for externals (things that reside outside the self). In ancient times, when societies could be unstable and war or plague could threaten one’s existence at any moment, these ideas about abandoning attempts to control the circumstances around oneself made sense—you really did have substantially less control over what happened to you.
But this is less the case in modern societies, especially wealthy and democratic ones. In the industrialized world in the 21st century, we do have the ability to make plans, formulate goals, and achieve them. And, as we’ve seen, if you choose the right ones, you can find meaningful and lasting happiness.
Embracing, in moderation, the pleasures of life and forging meaningful attachments is a key part of what it is to be human. Happiness can come from within; but it also comes from without.
In previous chapters, we’ve touched upon how our social attachments and relationships are central to our happiness and speak to a basic human need.
This is not a new insight by any means. In the 19th century, sociologist Emile Durkheim’s studies showed that people with fewer social attachments were more likely to die by suicide. And people with lots of meaningful relationships and connections to other people have been shown to have better health outcomes and report being happier.
In this chapter, we’ll explore the dynamics of our attachments to others and how pioneering research transformed how we think about the importance of love to human development.
Before we talk about how crucial love is to human development, however, we need to discuss how psychology used to treat love. In the early days of psychology, the school of thought known as behaviorism taught that unconditional love was something to be avoided. The behaviorists believed that human action was governed by conditioned responses to reinforcements. Accordingly, people would only engage in behaviors they associated with rewards and refrain from behaviors they associated with punishment.
Behaviorism informed how institutions like schools and hospitals were administered, often with unfortunate results. Behaviorists argued against the provision of unconditional love to children, believing that providing this positive reinforcement regardless of the underlying behavior would make children weak and dependent. They believed that babies needed nothing more than milk from their mothers, leaving love and emotional attachment entirely out of the equation.
Psychologists Harry Harlow and John Bowlby succeeded in discrediting much of what behaviorists believed about the role of love and attachment.
In his research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harlow observed that monkeys engaged in many problem-solving tasks for which there was no conditioned reinforcement—they simply enjoyed solving problems for the intrinsic joy they derived from them.
Harlow’s most famous experiment, however, was with baby rhesus monkeys who had been separated from their biological mothers. Harlow and his team of researchers wanted to test the behaviorists’ idea that the mothers’ sole purpose was to provide milk for their young. His team managed to create a milk formula that substituted for mothers’ milk, enabling a group of baby monkeys to be separated from their mothers. But Harlow found that these monkeys, raised without their mothers, were completely unable to socialize or form attachments once they were placed within a group.
This raised the idea that perhaps there was something about mother or mother-like figures that was crucial for development, beyond their ability to give milk. Accordingly, the team created two types of artificial mothers for the caged monkeys—one made of wire, one made of cloth. The monkeys would be raised alone in a cage with one of each type of artificial mother. For one set of monkeys, the wire mother was outfitted with a tube that could provide milk; for the other set of monkeys, the cloth mother was equipped with this technology. If the behaviorists were correct that the provision of milk was a mother’s sole function, then the babies would attach to whichever mother provided the milk.
But this was not the case. The babies formed close bonds with their cloth mothers, regardless of whether or not these were their milk providers. They nestled, cuddled, and burrowed themselves within the folds of their cloth mothers. Harlow concluded that the monkeys required what he called “contact comfort,” a need to nestle in the warmth of their mothers.
Around the same time, John Bowlby’s work with maladjusted and orphaned children in post-World War Two Europe revealed the same thing—that love was paramount to a child’s development, and a loving mother or mother-figure was crucial in the provision of this love.
Bowlby found that children who’d been deprived of the love of a parent because of the war had great difficulty forming healthy relationships. They were either cold and distant or tended to form close attachments to anyone who showed them the slightest attention. Bowlby merged his own observations with Harlow’s experimental data to create what is known today as attachment theory.
Attachment theory states that children have two primary needs—safety and exploration. From an evolutionary perspective, both are necessary. Safety guarantees survival, while exploration enables children to develop the skills they need to succeed as adults and have children of their own.
The two work in tandem. When the safety level drops too low during exploration or play, the child instinctively cries out for its parent to restore safety to the right level (children do this instinctively when they reach their arms up for their parents to hold them when they are distressed).
This knowledge that the parent will always be there to act as a guardrail gives the child the sense of security she needs to develop independence. Accordingly, when children are deprived of their attachment figures, they become insecure and unable to develop the emotional security and independence needed to thrive in adulthood.
According to attachment theory, therefore, the behaviorists had it exactly wrong. Unconditional love does not inhibit the development of independence; it’s what makes it possible in the first place.
A developmental psychologist named Mary Ainsworth further developed attachment theory. In her experiments, Ainsworth temporarily separated children from their mothers in a controlled environment where the children could play with toys in a room with a stranger. The children generally had three different reactions to the separation.
Ainsworth theorized that the attachment style was the product of the history between mother and child and the views that each had come to form about the other. The explanation likely arises from the affective styles of both parent and child, combined with the history of how the parent has responded to the child’s cries for help in the past. These come together to set the template for the attachment style between the two. The attachment style is molded over the course of countless interactions between the pair and likely can’t be attributed to any single factor or event.
(Shortform note: Learn more about how parenting styles affect people in adulthood with our summary of The Body Keeps the Score.)
Of course, our parents are not the only figures with whom we form close and lasting attachments. Research shows that our childhood attachment styles carry forward into our adult romantic relationships, setting the pattern for how we form bonds with other people for the rest of our lives.
Human sexuality differs from the sexuality of other animals. Unlike with animals, human sex is not solely for reproduction, and fathers fall in love with their mates and their children. Why are we so different?
Our large brains may provide the answer. In Chapter 3, we explored how our settlement in communities made it advantageous for us to develop tools like language, which required larger brains. But these large brains on infants would have made it difficult for women to pass them through the birth canal.
But the evolutionary process found a way around this—human infants, almost uniquely among animals, are born with their brains highly underdeveloped. While this enables women to pass them safely during birth, it renders human infants helpless and requires their mothers to provide constant care; they cannot survive otherwise.
This means that males, if the survival of their genes is the ultimate evolutionary goal, must play a significant role in protecting the mother and child. This is the evolutionary root of paternal love and affection, as well as sexual jealousy by the male for the woman. It explains the curiously close bond between parents, a behavior that is nearly unmatched in other species.
These basic evolutionary truths about human sexuality, however, have been distilled into some modern notions about romantic love, namely that it is passionate and eternal. But the real picture of romantic love is more complicated than this. Love researchers identify two types of romantic love—passionate love and companionate love
Passionate love is the all-consuming kind that new lovers fall into and is often romanticized in songs and films. It is addictive, triggering dopamine releases in the brain just as narcotics like heroin and cocaine do. And like all drugs, it can lead to withdrawal symptoms; the highs eventually wear off as your body develops a higher tolerance. When we are in the throes of passionate love, the elephant is in full stampede—with the rider gleefully spurring her along.
Companionate love, on the other hand, is the stable kind of love we feel for those whose lives are inextricably linked to ours. It is based on caregiving and attachment. These are the lasting bonds that sustain marriages for decades and give us the kind of rich and fulfilling relationships that form the bedrock of so much of our happiness. Passionate love may well grow into companionate love; and the best relationships contain a mixture of both. But companionate love is what our most durable and lasting relationships are made of.
Even though today’s popular culture celebrates romantic love, philosophers and theologians of an earlier age were skeptical about its merits. Eastern traditions often downplayed the importance of romantic relationships, with Buddhist teaching viewing it as yet another attachment that one needed to deny oneself in order to reach enlightenment. Confucianism, meanwhile, saw love as interfering with the more important values of filial piety and proper social hierarchy.
The philosophers of ancient Greece also disdained romantic relationships. Prizing reason (the rider) above all else, thinkers like Plato believed that romantic love was an intoxicating spell that turned a rational man into an irrational beast. For the Greeks, love was not just trifling—to fall in love and place one’s happiness in the hands of another was akin to self-enslavement, something that was deeply corrupting to the dignity of the individual.
Much of this ancient moralizing about the dangers of sex and romance seems to be more about social control—especially of the young by the old—than about any higher principle. Young people tend to flaunt society’s rules when they’re in the throes of romantic love, so it made sense for ancient thought leaders to try and discredit the idea of love entirely.
But we know now that attachments to others through marriage and love are intimately linked to human happiness. The ancients lacked the insights of modern psychology that we now enjoy. Therefore, we should embrace attachment and love, confident in the knowledge that we are doing ourselves a great psychological disservice by avoiding them.
In thinking about how to maximize our happiness, we have to consider what makes us unhappy. If we could design the happiest possible lives for ourselves, surely we would opt for one without any setbacks or adversity, in which we get everything we want without having to overcome any struggles.
But this would actually be counterproductive. While the behaviorists in the last chapter were certainly overstating the case when they argued that providing unconditional love to children would render them weak and undeveloped, there is some truth to the idea that human beings need some amount of struggle in their lives in order to reach their full potential.
In this chapter, we’ll explore how, under certain circumstances, adversity can be beneficial for human happiness and fulfillment.
Health psychologists now talk about post-traumatic growth in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder. People who suffer setbacks, even tragedies like the loss of a loved one, often find new strengths as a result of their experience.
One way that adversity helps build character is through resilience. People who’ve suffered through hardships can emerge with a new appreciation for their strengths. They often find that they can survive events they once thought they couldn’t. It goes back to the adaptation principle we explored in Chapter 4—even after a terrible loss, we tend to settle into a new normal. By discovering new reserves of resilience, you gain the confidence to face new challenges with less fear and anticipation.
Trauma survivors also discover that they have a much stronger network of people who love and care for them than they had previously thought. This discovery activates the reciprocity reflex—we feel a deeper love for and connection to people in our social network and want to foster even closer ties with them. And because we come to value these relationships more, we devote more of our energies to cultivating them, instead of seeking money or possessions. If we look back to what we learned in Chapter 4, loss can help us shift our focus away from conspicuous consumption towards inconspicuous consumption. We come to crave closer connections to things like family and religion that have deeper, more intrinsic value for us.
The idea of inner change coming from tragedy and even near-death experiences is, of course, well-explored in the world of literature. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the miserly and misanthropic Scrooge transforms into a benevolent, kind-hearted humanitarian once he is shown a vision of his own death by the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-to-Come—and how little he will be missed by those who knew him unless he changes his ways. Dickens was demonstrating knowledge of a great psychological truth.
We’ve seen that some elements of our overall level of happiness are tied to built-in pieces of our personality, like our affective style. But can adversity play a role in altering one’s personality? To answer that, we need to examine exactly what an individual’s personality is made of. Personality appears to consist of three levels:
The basic traits of one’s personality consist of what psychologists call the “big five”—neuroticism, extroversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. These basic traits are squarely within the elephant’s control and represent automatic mental processes. They appear to be fairly fixed and stable over time, remaining relatively unchanged regardless of events and experiences in an individual’s life.
But the other levels of personality are more subject to change, especially through adversity. Characteristic adaptations comprise things like goals, beliefs, and values. They are our tools for coping with and succeeding in the world, given the constraints of our basic personality traits and the circumstances of our environment. But because our circumstances can change—often as a result of tragedy or loss—our characteristic adaptations can shift as well. We develop new ways to cope with changed circumstances, often by engaging in pursuits that will be more emotionally and spiritually fulfilling, like religion, family, and learning.
Lastly, there is life story or self-narrative. This is the rider’s domain, the conscious reality we construct for ourselves about who we are and how we got to be that way. We reimagine events to tell ourselves a consistent narrative. It’s a core part of the self and identity.
The experience of triumph over loss can play a powerful role in rewriting our self-narratives. It enables us to replace a story about our frustrated hopes or positive experiences turned sour with a more compelling story about overcoming adversity and using that experience to learn compassion and empathy for others. And in the end, this is a more fulfilling story to have about ourselves.
People who are genetically predisposed to optimism are more likely to thrive in the aftermath of a crisis. Their optimistic natures instill a belief that their efforts will be successful, so they more diligently set to work trying to solve the crises that come their way. Even if they fail, they still manage to find silver linings.
People with a negative genetic predisposition (those with more brain wave activity on their right frontal cortex than on their left) will have different reactions to adversity. Believing that their efforts are doomed to failure no matter what, they pursue an avoidance strategy, often seeking to blunt the emotional effects of crisis through drugs, alcohol, or other distractions. This can lead to a self-reinforcing pattern of negative thought, a phenomenon we explored earlier when we looked at cognitive therapy in Chapter 2.
One key to rising above crises and breaking the pattern of negative thinking around them is opening up and talking about them. One study by social psychologist Jamie Pennebaker found that patients in an experimental group who spent just 15 minutes writing about their most upsetting life experiences had better health outcomes over the next six months (fewer incidents of illness and hospital visits) than those in a control group that didn’t write about similar setbacks.
Pennebaker suggested that, by coming face-to-face with their worst moments, the people in the first group succeeded in incorporating these events into their self-narratives. This enabled them to come to terms with these experiences, and ultimately derive meaning from them. He found this to be true regardless of the nature of the specific tragedy that had befallen the test subjects; what mattered more was the ability to incorporate it into a larger narrative.
Thus, adversity can be beneficial to anyone. It’s not what happens to you; it’s how your mental processes interpret and filter those events. Accordingly, you can alter your cognitive style by:
Even though some measure of adversity can be beneficial for everyone, there are periods of an individual’s life during which she is less likely to derive lasting growth from it than others. We still have a moral obligation to minimize suffering, especially for children. All other things being equal, pain and trauma in childhood are more likely to lead to a child developing a negative affective style, which leads to worse emotional and physical health outcomes.
The story may be different, however, for teens. Our teenage years are the period in our lives when our self-narratives begin to truly coalesce and some of our most important life experiences take place. Events that happen during this time are those we revisit the most throughout the rest of our lives, serving as a constant point of self-reference. Accordingly, some adversity in one’s teenage and early adulthood years, if properly overcome, can provide a real character-building boost to people later in life.
The sociologist Glen Elder saw this in his studies of people who lived through traumas like the Great Depression and World War Two. People who were in their teens and early twenties at the time later reported finding a new purpose and sense of self as they overcame these hardships, whether it was through sacrificing to support their families through the depression or serving their country during the war.
But Elder found the opposite to be the case for people who first experienced trauma later in adulthood. By this life-stage, the self-narrative had crystallized; people who had never experienced trauma and lacked a self-narrative rooted in empowerment were less resilient in the face of new hardships. Elder’s research showed that people who had their first brush with adversity when they were older were more likely to struggle to find new strengths in the face of these crises.
Think about how overcoming challenges has shaped you.
In a few sentences, identify an incident in your life when you experienced an unexpected setback or loss.
How did you cope with and overcome this setback? Were there people in your life that helped you get through it?
What did surviving that experience teach you about yourself and the relationships in your life? Did you find that you were more resilient than you thought you’d be? Elaborate in a few sentences.
The concept of virtue is often associated with puritanical values and behaviors like rigid piety and abstinence from sex. But is this really the most useful way to think about virtue?
Virtue should be defined as the cultivation of the best version of oneself. It is about fulfilling your potential, engaging in constant self-improvement, and striving toward the acquisition of a set of positive attributes or qualities. The specific virtues you aim for depend on your particular strengths and interests. The key is improvement—be it moral, intellectual, or even physical.
Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was the quintessential self-improver, a man who constantly devoted himself to learning new things and acquiring new skills. Throughout his life, Franklin identified specific virtues that he actively sought to cultivate. In his later years, he looked back on his life with great satisfaction—and attributed his happiness to his relentless pursuit of virtue.
In this chapter, we’ll study this relationship between virtue and happiness, using new insights from the emerging field of positive psychology.
Of course, the celebration of virtue is hardly new. It goes back to some of the most ancient writings. A range of thinkers from Confucius to Buddha to Aristotle wrote about the need to engage in the right kind of thinking and behavior in order to lead a positive and fulfilling life.
They tended to use allegories, proverbs, and fables to make their points, rather than logical proofs or scientifically tested theories. They put a great deal of stock in behavior, rather than knowledge—it wasn’t what you knew, it was what you did. This was why role models were so important in ancient virtue narratives, serving as examples upon which one was supposed to model proper conduct.
From a psychological perspective, this was rather insightful. Moral instruction that guided an individual to develop an intuitive understanding of how to properly conduct oneself in all situations—and to want to do the right thing—demonstrated a sophisticated understanding by the ancient thinkers of the need for the rider to tame the elephant and guide it toward the pursuit of the right things.
Intellectual developments like the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, however, set western civilization on a different course. These movements, building on the foundation laid by the ancient Greeks, placed rationalism and science at the center of the western intellectual tradition.
As a result, western ideas of virtue shifted away from feeling and habit. For the celebrants of reason, feeling was something to be conquered and overcome; the rider had to master the elephant, not merely coordinate with him. But we know that this is not possible and reflects a misunderstanding of how the human mind works. The elephant leads the rider, not the other way around. While we may think that our beliefs and opinions derive from a rational study of the world around us, they are actually the product of our emotions and mental filters.
Because science and reason can be broadly defined as mankind’s quest to find a small set of rules to explain the infinite phenomena of the universe, western thinkers became myopically focused on the search for a single moral rule that could guide proper conduct in all situations at all times. This search led to two primary schools of thought.
Kantian ethics (also known as deontology) are based on the ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant argued that individuals should adhere to a core set of universally applicable moral laws. Anything that was in violation of these laws would be construed as an immoral act.
Kant was most concerned with individual rights and obligations. He argued that individual moral principles should be judged on the basis of whether or not they would make sense as universal principles.
For example, if you plan to pirate movies because it’s inconvenient and burdensome for you to pay for them, would you then be in favor of a universal law that justifies stealing in all situations where paying for something is inconvenient? If you would not (and most people wouldn’t), then you must judge your own conduct as wrong. As an individual, you would have failed in your duty to behave morally. This test is known as the categorical imperative.
The individual is the fundamental unit in Kantian ethics. Conduct is judged based on whether or not the individual has lived up to their societal duty.
Utilitarianism, on the other hand, is concerned with outcomes. This school of thought, founded by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, claims any action that maximizes human happiness is the morally correct one. Thus, it would be morally correct to kill one person in order to save the lives (and, therefore, increase the happiness) of 10 others.
Utilitarianism, by its nature, is little concerned with individual rights or the respect that people ought to have for one another. People are just instruments for the maximization of total happiness. Thus, actions that would be justified under utilitarianism would frequently violate the categorical imperative of deontology.
Deontology and utilitarianism both, however, place little emphasis on character and inner belief.
They are overly concerned with teaching people how to navigate certain moral quandaries or make efficient trade-offs, not with the cultivation of inner virtue.
These attitudes pervaded much of western moral philosophy, teaching people to reason their way into moral conduct. But this approach confuses the rider with the elephant and is thus at odds with how human psychology works. You don’t reason your way toward good morals; instead, you behave morally first, leading you to train yourself to use your powers of reason toward moral ends. The elephant leads the rider; it is more important to calibrate one’s emotional desires towards virtuous ends.
Moreover, human beings are shaped by the time, place, and culture in which they live. What was moral to someone living in 8th-century France would not be moral to us, and we shouldn’t attempt to create a universal set of morals that can apply at all times and places. Virtue should be context-specific and grounded in cultural traditions.
Following from this, we should embrace a new concept of morality (or re-embrace an ancient concept of morality) that is more based in group norms. This approach acknowledges the way the human mind actually works and will yield better outcomes for both the individual and society.
We have lost much of our ancient grounding in group or communal morality as we have shifted to a paradigm that places the freedom of the individual as the highest ideal. But too much freedom can be harmful, because it unmoors us from rules, norms, and standards of virtue. Even if we have the freedom to do whatever we please, we lack any coherent moral framework to help us decide what we want to do with our lives. Our overabundance of freedom leaves us rootless and untethered.
A shared community understanding of morality is good; we do not want diversity of morality. After all, if moral differences become merely matters of taste or preference, there is no real morality to speak of.
If the ancients evinced a keen understanding of how psychology interacts with morality and subsequent western philosophers led us astray, how do we find our way back? What is the bridge that links ancient virtue theories with our modern understanding of how the human mind works?
The answer lies in the relatively young field of positive psychology. Positive psychology was founded by Martin Seligman in 1998. It attempts to use psychology to elevate the human experience and cultivate excellence, instead of merely treating disorder. Seligman and his colleague Chris Peterson combed through the world’s great moral tomes, looking for a common set of virtues celebrated in these texts.
Given that these writings came from every corner of the world across every period of history, the virtues Seligman and Peterson identified weren’t the same across all cultures, and some were emphasized more in one culture than another. But there were six core virtues that were celebrated across all civilizations: Below the six virtues are 24 character strengths. By developing these character strengths, an individual can work toward the ultimate cultivation of the virtues.
Most importantly, working toward these virtues should be a joyful, enlightening experience. You are focusing on things you enjoy, which is intrinsically rewarding; in keeping with the progress principle from Chapter 4, you are getting a reward from being on the journey, receiving positive reinforcement for each baby step you take. The cultivation of virtue is its own reward.
If we could plot human experience on a graph, we might define it as existing along two axes.
On the horizontal X-axis, we have the world of connection and relationships; here, we make distinctions between strangers and friends, known and unknown.
On the Y-axis, we have the world of hierarchy; those we perceive as being our social superiors or inferiors. But there seems to be a third dimension, a Z-axis. This is what we might call divinity; a sense of uplifting when we witness something extraordinary or beautiful. It is its own unique moral dimension.
In this chapter, we’ll explore this dimension of sacredness and how, by drawing closer to the divine, we can experience the joyful emotion of elevation.
Before we talk about spiritual uplifting, we should explore the opposite sensation. Many ancient religious texts are concerned with purity and cleanliness (i.e., rules about handling corpses, not eating certain kinds of meat, ablution rituals). There seems to be an ancient sensitivity to the emotion of disgust.
As has been the case with so many of the ancient writers and thinkers we’ve surveyed, this preoccupation with disgust actually reflects deep insight into human psychology and evolution. Our sense of disgust was probably an advantage in natural selection, as it would have prevented us from coming into contact with decayed or poisoned things that were harmful to us.
This is seen in ancient proscriptions against the eating of animals that come into contact with corpses, excrement, and garbage; as well as the transmission of human bodily fluids, which the ancients knew could cause illness, even millennia before our modern germ theory of disease.
This logic of disgust extended into the realms of sexual norms and body appearance. There seems to be a hard-wired idea, universal across cultures, that one must treat one’s body as a temple and never defile it with impure or corrupt foreign externals.
This notion of cleanliness connects us to the divine, elevating us above the animals (who, after all, perform the same crude biological functions we do). Our disgust at impurity and our desire to conceal or sanitize many aspects of our animal behavior, whether it is the elimination of waste or the act of mating, is one way that we travel along the divine Z-axis.
Hindu teaching even mandates that recitation or study of the holy scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita should never be done during eating or elimination, ensuring that the spark of divinity within each individual is always separate from the baser functions of our biology.
These notions go far beyond mere tools of hygiene or social control (as a non-believer might be tempted to think). They speak to something much more profound and universal. To fail to treat one’s body as a temple is to degrade and diminish the godliness within oneself. This leads to bad karma and reincarnation as a baser animal in the next life.
Even in the west, where (as we explored in Chapter 7) our ethics are more based on individual autonomy—do what you want as long as you don’t harm others—this relationship with divinity still exists. We see this in writings from the Victorian Era, when writers argued that young men needed to guard their virtue and purity by refraining from indulging their more animalistic impulses like masturbation.
These rules separate the disgusting from the divine. It is hardly a coincidence that all religious traditions have designated times and spaces for religious observance, a way of walling off the worldly from the otherworldly.
Even secular people and cultures retain some vestiges of this. We have a special psychological reverence for certain times (like anniversaries) and spaces (such as those where significant life events took place, like one’s childhood home) that have no immediate religious connection. We also touch divinity through secular experiences like seeing natural beauty or appreciating great art.
Even taking some hallucinogenic drugs like LSD or psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) can bring about these feelings of transcendence. It is no coincidence that many religious traditions make the ingestion of psychoactive plants a key part of initiation into the spiritual community.
If disgust and the desire to separate our bodies from the divine represent a “downward” movement along the Z-axis, what about the opposite?
We feel a very unique but difficult-to-describe set of emotions and physical sensations when we witness someone doing a good deed, often accompanied by a desire to follow suit and do good deeds of our own. This is when people move “up” along the Z-Axis, moving closer to the divine. This is elevation, an emotion that we might think of as the opposite of disgust.
Elevation is best described as the feeling you get when you are:
It is a calming feeling, possibly activated by the vagus nerve, which controls the heart rate. Notably, studies have shown that people point to their chest when asked to describe their physical sensations during elevation. This same nerve also produces oxytocin, the hormone that encourages bonding and attachment in mothers and triggers milk production. One study showed that women were more likely to lactate and engage in warm and nurturing behaviors with their babies after watching an elevating video.
The feeling of experiencing God’s love as part of a congregation is a common manifestation of elevation. It’s why religion is found in every culture at every time across the world; it fulfills a basic human need to connect with something greater. If we look back to the lessons of Chapter 6, religion powerfully enriches our self-narratives by placing us within a larger cosmic story.
Alone among animals, humans have a highly cultivated idea of the self. We create narratives and self-conceptions and then judge our actions by the standard of that narrative. It gives us rich interior lives, but it can also lead to egotism and self-consciousness. We are our own worst critics and our own worst enemies because of the endless self-commentary and self-criticism.
Eastern traditions generally de-emphasize the self, seeing it and its needs as obstacles to true enlightenment. Thus, they urge meditation and self-denial. This de-emphasis of the self also exists in western thought. Many moral debates in the west boil down to how important the self should be.
Should the ethic of autonomy—do what makes you happy as long as you don’t hurt others—be dominant? Or should we hew to the ethic of divinity—self-sacrifice or denial of the individual in service of a set of shared spiritual ideals? The progressive left generally favors the former, believing that enshrining community ethics will trample upon individual liberty and lead to the persecution of minority groups. The traditionalist right tends to favor the latter, believing that excessive individual liberty leads to a values-free society in which any immoral conduct can be justified or rationalized.
But the debate is a false choice. Ultimately, we need both. We need to acknowledge the fundamental human craving for shared experiences of the divine, while not pushing a version of it that excludes people who might not share the spiritual beliefs of the majority in a given society.
To discern the meaning of life, it is crucial to understand human beings as they actually are.
As we’ve seen, we are not hyper-rational beings. In most situations, the elephant is in charge, not the rider. Philosophers seeking to explain or understand the human condition need to incorporate this fundamental psychological truth into their work.
Knowing this is important because it determines what the most effective strategies are for living a purposeful life. We explore those strategies in this final chapter.
One of the essential conditions for a satisfying life is meaningful work. We need to engage in pursuits that fill our lives with purpose and meaning. Work doesn’t have to be narrowly defined as a career. It can be anything that’s action-oriented and sets things in motion.
We have a need to see that our actions have an effect on the world around us. This is a psychological need known as effectancy. Anything from simple child’s play to a stable adult career can provide effectancy, satisfying our hunger to see that there are results associated with the labor we provide.
The most meaningful and satisfying work is that which people find intrinsically rewarding. Those who enjoy their jobs the most are not motivated by money and don’t treat their employment as a means to an end. Such individuals would do their jobs even if they didn’t have to because it provides purpose and fulfillment beyond extrinsic rewards.
Importantly, people desire occupational self-direction—work that is complex and challenging, engages their interests or talents, and allows for a high degree of independence and autonomy. It is what Csikszentmihalyi called “flow” in Chapter 4. This kind of work harnesses the progress principle to maximize our happiness, rewarding us for each baby step we take toward the goal.
One need not be engaged in white-collar or highly paid work to enjoy occupational self-direction. Blue-collar and manual workers can enjoy this same feeling of self-worth if they believe what they do is critical to the achievement of a larger mission. In one NYU study, the janitors who cleaned the bed pans reported some of the highest levels of satisfaction of anyone working in the hospital surveyed by the research team. These janitors believed they were making a visible and meaningful contribution to the creation of a safe and healthy environment for patients.
The key is to find work that engages your strengths, which will initiate a cycle of more positive thinking. You’ll start to connect the dots between your work and the achievement of larger goals. Without these intrinsic rewards, you’ll just be doing a job on a purely translational basis, seeing your work only in isolation and connecting it to no larger purpose.
Our happiness is intimately connected to our experiences with others. We do not operate in isolation. We all have physical brains; that physical brain creates the mind, the set of mental patterns and structures that govern our conduct and guide our interpretations of reality; and, collectively, our minds form societies and cultures, our shared sets of beliefs and values. Happiness comes from the seamless interaction of these three levels of existence. And religion is one of the most important elements in binding these levels of existence together.
In Catholicism, for example, the faithful partake in rituals that create sensory feelings like the sensation of kneeling in the pews or the taste of the communion wafer on one’s tongue; these physical sensations encode themselves as memories and emotions that the individual associates with faith and transcendence; and they connect it all to a larger social and cosmological superstructure that orders one’s place within God’s kingdom.
People who are not themselves religious may be skeptical about religion’s relationship to morality. But it really did play a decisive role in creating the moral structures that govern our lives. We saw earlier that altruism can be partly explained by natural selection and the reciprocity reflex—it was advantageous for individuals to be altruistic to other individuals within the group, because that altruism would ultimately be rewarded.
But this explanation cuts out group selection: in which group, not individual, traits are the main unit of natural selection. Historically, evolutionary biology focused on genes, which can only be passed within kinship groups. The field paid little attention to group selection.
But humans didn’t just evolve genetically—they also evolved culturally. And culture is inherently a group phenomenon. Cultural characteristics like beliefs or technologies can be vital in natural selection, but they occur completely outside of genetics. Thus, some groups can win at the natural selection competition on the basis of culture.
As a cultural trait, religion encouraged patterns of mutual trust and obligation—altruism—that aided in group survival and success in the competition with other groups. It gave the group a cohesion and unity of purpose that enabled it to overcome the individual incentives for selfishness and free-riding. It also helps to explain the role of synchronized prayer and movement, subsuming the individual within the larger religious community. These are devices that nearly every religion has.
We’ve seen how important attachments and connections are to any individual’s enjoyment of life. By binding the individual to a community, connecting that individual to a higher purpose, and facilitating intrinsically rewarding altruistic behavior toward members of the group, religion has served as a great facilitator of human happiness.
We are responsible for creating the conditions for our own happiness. This comes from having the right relationships to other people, to your work, and to some sort of higher purpose that is greater than yourself.
It is about finding the right balance between connecting to your community and connecting to yourself. Happiness comes from your attachments to the world around you, but it also comes from the cultivation of inner virtues—training the elephant to explore its full potential, while respecting its power over the rider.
But by aligning the rider with the elephant, you will discover your own path to purpose, meaning, and, ultimately, happiness.
Explore the main takeaways from the Happiness Hypothesis.
Do you think that our perceptions and behavior are more driven by reason or emotion? Why?
Why do you think relationships and attachments to other people are so vital to happiness?
After reading this summary, are there specific virtues that you’d like to grow and develop? Identify them and explain why you believe they will increase your overall happiness.