[Note to reader: this is a 2,000 word philosophy essay, rather than a easy-read blog post. It’s a work in progress, and comments very welcome]

Reading time: 10 minutes

In this paper I argue the typical answers people give to the above question, such as economic growth, improvements in healthcare, technology and education have a surprisingly trivial impact on long-term human happiness (defining ‘long term’ as greater than 6 months). I identify two general problems, adaptation and comparison, and suggest we are left with a narrow and counter-intuitive set of options for what we can do. I claim efforts to change how people see the world are more promising than changing the world itself.

Happiness

To specify my terms, I consider X happy at time T1 iff X is experiencing a positive mental state, where ‘positive’ just means intrinsically pleasurable. ‘Pleasure’ I construe broadly to include ‘shallow’ pleasures like eating and drinking as well as ‘deep’ ones like philosophy. X’s happiness is to be understood as the temporal integral of all her instantaneous mental states. Hence I am using happiness only as a descriptive term to refer to a set of psychological states and not, in the well-being sense, as an evaluative term to refer to what makes someone’s life go well for them. I am not identifying happiness, the mental state, with life satisfaction – holding a positive evaluation of one’s life as a whole – although I suspect the same conclusions mostly apply.

I propose what we might call an ‘attention-evaluation’ account of happiness, where instances of happiness are understood wholly as a product of how X evaluates whatever X is paying attention to. The idea is that X both needs to be conscious of something, and to feel that thing as positive or negative, for it to form part of her happiness. I use the phrase ‘pays attention to’ rather than ‘experiences’ because, in some sense, we are experiencing very many sensory inputs at each moment, but typically only paying attention to one. For instance, as you read this, you are unlikely to be thinking about your big left toe or the sounds outside, so those experiences seem outside your happiness in an importance sense.

It follows from the attention-evaluation account that happiness can only be altered by changing what people pay attention to or changing how they evaluate what they are paying attention to.

Two problems

I’m now going to present two empirical problems, adaptation and comparison. In terms of the attention-evaluation theory, these problems explain why the ‘typical assumptions’ for increasing happiness are wrong.  Either we pay less attention to the changes than we expected, or because we raise our standards of evaluation. I do not claim all happiness is subject to them but I do think they are gravely underestimated.

First, adaptation. Studies show that people adapt to most changes that happen to them. For example, those who win the lottery or become disabled return to their pre-event level of life satisfaction after about 6 months (I’m taking life satisfaction as a proxy for happiness).[i] Adaptation would explain why people in the developed world do not report becoming any more satisfied with lives in the last 60 years (since data collection of this began) despite massive increases in GDP as well as technology, healthcare and educational standards.[ii] In developed countries richer and poorer people are shown to have the same emotional lives.[iii] This phenomenon is sometimes known as the ‘hedonic treadmill’.[iv] One explanation is that we have a ‘psychological immune system’ and stop paying attention to the unchanging, background facts of our lives.[v] The idea is that it is evolutionary useful to be aware of changes in conditions rather than the objective conditions themselves.

Adaptation appears to cover most changes. For those it doesn’t, there is the second problem, which I label ‘comparison’. This is where something makes us happy if and only if it is better than something else, such our happiness comes at the cost of making someone else less happy –economists call a ‘zero-sum game’ where not all can be winners. We can distinguish ‘external’ from ‘internal’ comparison: in the former your happiness comes at the expense of other people; in the latter it comes at the expense of your later self.

An example of a non-adaptive, external comparison might be status. The evidence suggests richer people are more satisfied with their lives than poorer people and this positional effect isn’t something we ever adapt to: it’s always good to be a winner.[vi] But if something is necessarily relative – there’s a fixed amount of status to be consumed – it follows we can’t change it to increase happiness. This works the other way too: hearing of others’ misfortunes may make us feel comparatively happier.

The internal version is that having happy experiences may change your evaluations such that you rate your later experiences as worse, meaning your happiness over your lifetime has not increased. For example, I may go through a challenging period of depression for a year that I don’t adapt to – it’s just as bad after 11 months as it was at the start. Eventually my depression lifts and I find my perspectives have changed. I am now much more grateful than before. The idea that some hardship is necessary to enjoy life is a common one. Evidence suggests people feel they grow from adversity and richer people savour small pleasures less.[vii] [viii] Even happy experiences we don’t adapt to may fail to increase long-term happiness by causing long-term perspective shifts.

Adaptation and comparison need not be mutually exclusive. For instance, the happiness someone gets from becoming richer might be because of his increase in status relative to others (external) and that he is richer than he was before (internal). Both feelings might be subject to differing degrees of adaptation. Precisely how to specify the problems requires more research.

I think the adaptation and comparison problems are not recognised or taken seriously enough. There isn’t space to go into depth, but I want to make a few sweeping remarks about why the typical answers are wrong. Further improvements in economic prosperity, technology, education and healthcare seem unlikely to increase world happiness because people get used to those changes. Either this means people stop paying attention to improvements (who doesn’t take their kettle for granted?) or our evaluations raise in step (unlike, say, the Ancient Greeks, we now expect medicine to help us and are unhappy when it doesn’t). Alternatively, having fewer bad(/good) events in our lives may make us, or others, evaluate later experience as better(/worse), so removing unpleasant(/pleasant) events may have less impact than we thought.

Are there limits to comparison and adaptation?

On the basis of what I have said so far, we may feel frustrated (or, relieved) that adaptation and comparison imply there’s little we can do to increase happiness over the long-term. We may be able to boost it over the short-term but I won’t consider those as the goal is to find substantial, not trivial, gains to happiness. However, consider the following two cases:

Adam: Adam is born in a dungeon and tortured from birth. As he gets older, the severity of his torture decreases.

Steve: Steve is a successful, married businessman, loved by his wife and kids. He enjoys constant levels of success and love.

If we were to take the strongest position on adaptation and comparison, Adam’s life ought to be happier than Steve’s. Both would adapt totally to their lives and form comparisons from that point. As Adam’s life is getting better – he experiences comparably less pain – he should be happier.

This seems implausible and I think we can sketch an evolutionary explanation for this. It makes evolutionary sense we will keep paying attention to things, and feel them as good or bad, depending on whether, historically speaking, they contributed to our survival and reproduction. Take the two most obvious examples: pain and sadness. These are supposed to feel bad because they act as prompts to change whatever is causing them. Conversely, it seems unlikely we will ever get bored of food, sex, friendship or love. Hence I doubt anyone could adapt to a lifetime of pain or depression, whilst I am quite confident people can adapt to one where the latest technology is an iPhone 6, rather than 5, and feel no happier overall.

That still leaves the possibility that negative experiences – e.g. pain and sadness – cause positive comparisons and are good for happiness overall. At the extreme, we might wonder if there’s any point trying to do anything about, say, malaria or depression. Although these are negative at the time, it’s still possible they make individuals who suffer them appreciate their lives more afterwards (internal comparison). More contentiously, we might wonder if seeing others suffer makes non-sufferers feel more grateful (external comparison) and so some suffering increases overall happiness.

Ultimately, these are empirical questions I don’t hope to answer here, but I think we are forced to be more circumspect. The relevant test for whether some change C increase happiness is not:

Simple: Does change C make person P feel happy at the time C occurs?

But,

Complex: Does change C make person feel happier over her whole lifetime than if C had not occurred, and is this increase greater than the happiness reduction, if any, felt by others?

Which may be less clear.

This is not a hypothetical problem. For example, in a recent study, poor Kenya farmers in the same villages were randomized into two groups. One half received a substantial cash grant whilst the other received nothing. The self-reported life satisfaction scores of the non-recipients went down by more than those of recipients went up, suggesting, surprisingly, the donations were happiness negative.[ix]

More work is needed to understand how these comparisons work. My guess is that chronic, rather than short-term suffering, decreases happiness overall: a month of misfortune may be good for someone, but not a lifetime. Equally, it’s not clear that others will get more happiness from my depression than I get unhappiness, at the very least because the condition is largely invisible to them.

Changing how we think

What we’re left searching for are changes not subject to adaptation and comparison problems. I’ve argued that efforts to increase happiness by changing the external world are questionable. I want to sketch that an alternative, under-recognised way of increasing long-term happiness is changing how people think. Returning to the attention-evaluation theory, we need either to shift attention to more positive things, or make current things be evaluated more positively, to raise happiness.

I suggest that positive psychology interventions like mindfulness (a form of meditation) and gratitude journaling (where someone writes down things they are grateful for) would have a long term impact. Mindfulness increases happiness by teaching people to be aware of what they are paying attention to, and to switch onto more positive thoughts.[x] Brain scans of long-term meditating monks suggest meditation alters brain structure, allowing more positive experiences.[xi] Equally, studies indicate gratitude journaling make people evaluate experiences more positively.[xii]

I think these avoid adaptation and comparison. It doesn’t seem possible to get used to thinking more positive thoughts more often – that’s just what an increase in happiness is. If what we potentially value from experiences of adversity – malaria, depression, etc. – is that they made us more appreciative, we should just encourage appreciation directly. It doesn’t seem internally evaluating the world more positively has external costs: it’s hard to see how me enjoying a sunset more will lead other people to do so less.

Conclusion

I’ve claimed typical efforts to increase happiness by changing the world are likely to fail due to adaptation and comparison problems. Even when we realise there are evolutionary limits to them, questions remain. I’ve noted that changing how people see the world looks surprisingly, very promising. I realise this is a startling conclusion about how to increase happiness. In its defence I would only say that, having eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.

References

[i] Brickman, P., Coates, D. and Janoff-Bulman, R., 1978. Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?. Journal of personality and social psychology, 36(8), p.917

[ii] Easterlin, R.A., 2010. Happiness, growth, and the life cycle. OUP Catalogue

[iii] Diener, E., Kahneman, D., Arora, R., Harter, J. and Tov, W., 2009. Income’s Differential Influence on Judgments of Life Versus Affective Well-Being. In Assessing Well-Being (pp. 233-246). Springer Netherlands

[iv] Diener, E., Lucas, R.E. and Scollon, C.N., 2009. Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. In The science of well-being (pp. 103-118). Springer Netherlands

[v] Gilbert, D., 2009. Stumbling on happiness. Vintage Canada

[vi] Diener, E., Kahneman, D., Arora, R., Harter, J. and Tov, W., 2009. Income’s Differential Influence on Judgments of Life Versus Affective Well-Being. In Assessing Well-Being (pp. 233-246). Springer Netherlands

[vii] Davis, C.G. and Nolen-Hoeksema, S., 2009. Making sense of loss, perceiving benefits, and posttraumatic growth

[viii] Quoidbach, J., Dunn, E.W., Petrides, K.V. and Mikolajczak, M., 2010. Money Giveth, Money Taketh Away The Dual Effect of Wealth on Happiness. Psychological Science

[ix] Haushofer, J., Reisinger, J. and Shapiro, J., 2015. Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers. Working Paper

[x] Jha, A.P., Krompinger, J. and Baime, M.J., 2007. Mindfulness training modifies subsystems of attention. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 7(2), pp.109-119

[xi] Davidson, R.J. and Lutz, A., 2008. Buddha’s brain: Neuroplasticity and meditation. IEEE signal processing magazine, 25(1), p.176

[xii] Emmons, R.A. and Stern, R., 2013. Gratitude as a psychotherapeutic intervention. Journal of clinical psychology, 69(8), pp.846-855