are you too happy?

From a study entitled "The Optimum Level of Well-Being, Can People Be Too Happy?":

Our analyses of large survey data and longitudinal data show that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation. Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success, as well as the resources that are available.

Those people right at the top of the happiness tree have, to mix our metaphors, moved out on to the sun lounge, that peaceful escape from reality.

I am a pronounced sceptic about happiness, or at least about the way it's talked of as an ultimate goal and a yardstick that everything, including public policy, must be measured against.

First off, it feels like a small and kind of solipsistic goal. "Who wants to be happy?" asked the young Bob Dylan. "Anyone can be happy." As the study above suggests, truly happy people don't achieve much of anything, because they're too happy sitting around being...happy.

Second, the idea that a person or society should take aim at happiness is inherently self-defeating. The best thing ever written about this subject is John Stuart Mill:

Happiness should be approached sideways, like a crab.

As individuals and as societies, the best way to be happy is to find a sense of purpose or mission that isn't defined by happiness. Happiness is, and should be thought of as, a happy accident. "Ask yourself whether you are happy," said Mill, "and you cease to be so."

(h/t Barking)

Comments

[ashcash]

perhaps the ultimate goal is inner harmony.....which in itself comes and goes as part of the journey to feel solid and real.

Happiness was mentioned somewhere recently as based on both the feeling of happiness and also a mental viewpoint that one is making ok progress in along the journey of life.

Suppose people are not going to be content until they feel solid and real. PPL are not going to be happy or content if the others unfairly come between them and their happiness. Beyond that any happy experiences are just that - experiences (and transitory).

[Charles]

Inner harmony, outer ecstasy it's all good though I have to say on behalf of the 'happier than most' contingent that I don't identify with the descriptions portrayed here.

But then if you wanted to know that you'd put a question mark in the post ;)