Love Over Gold
We all want happiness, but we are often mistaken about how to find it.
“The pursuit of happiness” appears in the United States Declaration of Independence, and nearly every culture prizes happiness as a goal.[i]. Yet the common strategies people use to chase it such as seeking more money, status, power, and beauty, don’t often work.[ii].
Once our basic needs are met, extra income or success brings only short-lived bursts of joy. We quickly adapt, raising the bar for what we think we need next. Instead of enjoying and appreciating the gains we’ve worked so hard for, most of us begin to compare ourselves to even wealthier or more powerful people,[iii], placing us on what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill.[iv]. We keep running, but we stay in the same emotional place, addicted to a brief rush of joy that quickly fades when we notice someone richer or prettier or more powerful than ourselves.[v]..
I learned this firsthand. As a graduate student earning $14,000 a year in 1990, I believed that if I ever made $50,000, I would feel rich and be free from financial worry. But as my income grew over the years through academic and consulting work, I tended to spend as much as I earned. Most people do this, tending to increase spending proportionally with income.[vi]. Like most, as my career grew, my expenses grew as well. I stopped living on free hotel happy-hour buffets and began dining in restaurants, which was exciting at first. But soon I got so used to it that it felt ordinary. Each raise or project payment brought satisfaction for a time until life expanded again to fill the new income. Owning a larger home brought short-term pride, but it also meant furnishing it, insuring and maintaining it, heating and cooling it, etc., so as my income expanded, so did my expenses and along with it, the time and energy needed to maintain my new possessions and lifestyle.
I am not saying poverty is easier than wealth. I grew up poor and watched my divorced mother tape plastic sheets over the living room doorway to block it off and keep enough heat in the kitchen, and portion groceries carefully so our food would last until the next paycheck. Life is unquestionably easier with enough money to make ends meet than without it. Still, our minds adjust to raises in standards of living so quickly that even lottery winners return to their previous level of happiness within a year or two.[vii].
As actor Paul Newman famously said in 1987 after winning an Oscar, “The day after, I still have to get up in the morning and pull my pants on one leg at a time.”
Fame and fortune simply do not bring peace of mind. Many beloved public figures—Robin Williams, Anthony Bourdain, Naomi Judd, Chester Bennington, Ahn Jae-hwan, and Avicii—had everything society claims should make us happy, yet they chose to end their own lives. Comedian Jim Carrey summarized it well in a 2014 Commencement speech: “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of, so they can see that it’s not the answer.”[viii]".”
What Actually Makes Us Happy
So if money and power don’t bring happiness, what does? Psychologist Martin Seligman has spent decades studying what he calls authentic happiness and human flourishing and has found that five factors he calls PERMA play the biggest role in bringing us lasting happiness and fulfillment.[ix]
PERMA stands for
1. Positive Emotions: Experiencing joy, gratitude, and other positive feelings.
2. Engagement: Being fully absorbed in activities that use your skills and strengths.
3. Relationships: Having meaningful and supportive connections with others.
4. Meaning: Finding purpose and a sense of fulfillment in life.
5. Accomplishment: Pursuing and achieving goals that are important to you.
Building on PERMA, my former colleague Stewart Donaldson and collaborators have identified four additional pillars (Physical Health, Mindset, Environment, and Economic Security) that further enhance flourishing and well-being.[x].
Notice that none of these keys to happiness involve superficial factors like our physical appearance, popularity, power, or how expensive our house or car is. Only two factors, economic security and environment, refer to our external lives at all, by recognizing that it is extremely difficult to be happy and fulfilled when we can’t make ends meet or are in unsafe or unsanitary conditions.
Once our basic needs are met, happiness depends less on externals and more on connection, engagement, and inner alignment. Are we loved? Are we mostly content? Are we making contributions that have meaning?
Among these pillars, relationships stand out as especially powerful. The long-running Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed participants for more than seventy-five years, found that warm, positive relationships predict not only happiness but also longevity and physical health. In fact, good relationships were a stronger predictor of a long life than smoking, diet, or exercise.[xi]
When we consciously cultivate loving relationships, we can strengthen all the other elements of PERMA at once: we can experience Positive Emotions like love, joy, gratitude, awe, Engagement through attending, mending, and ascending activities, Relationships themselves, and MeaningandAccomplishment, since caring for others helps give our lives purpose and is an important accomplishment for those who value satisfying relationships.[xii][CT1]
Love is the key that unlocks happiness.
[i] Lambert et al., “Conceptions of Happiness Matter.”
[ii] Mathias et al., “Running on the Hedonic Treadmill.”
[iii] Easterlin, “Why Does Happiness Respond Differently to an Increase vs. Decrease in Income?”
[iv] Mathias et al., “Running on the Hedonic Treadmill.”
[v] Klausen et al., “The Many Faces of Hedonic Adaptation.”
[vi] Bhutta et al., The Smart Money Is in Cash?
[vii] Sherman et al., “A Dynamic Model on Happiness and Exogenous Wealth Shock.”
[viii]Jim Carrey at MIU.
[ix] Seligman, “PERMA and the Building Blocks of Well-Being.”
[x] Donaldson et al., “The PERMA + 4 Short Scale.”
[xi] Waldinger and Schulz, The Good Life.
[xii] Costin and Vignoles, “Meaning Is about Mattering.”