What Makes Us Happy? (2009)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
One thing to remember is that happiness is relative and changes over your lifetime. What makes you happy does not make others happy, and what makes you happy at 20 may not make you happy at 30 or 40. It's easy for HNers to read an article like this and strive to achieve happiness in the boxes defined in this article, but living authentically in what gives you happiness is just as (if not more) important than the tenants that are outlined in this article.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Study
[2] http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674004146
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Aging-Well-Surprising-Guideposts-Devel...
Here is a good intro about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhuabY4DmEo
Many other people seem to have this baseline positive emotional state. They're more or less in a state of contentedness most of the time.
For me, that's not how I feel most of the time. My baseline emotional state is not happy. I'm not content. I get flashes of contentedness -- after accomplishing something awesome, for example. But most of the time, I feel relatively unhappy.
Thing is, for me, that lack of contentedness seems to drive me. It pushed me out of a really terrible career path back in college. It helped me find programming, and then drove me to learn it. It helped drive me across the country to work at a startup. It helps me spend insane amounts of time and energy on side projects. In the past five years I seem to have accomplished more than any of my peers have in the same amount of time.
I don't know if I WANT to be happy. I feel like it'll only slow me down. I feel like I bring more to the world by being unhappy.
And honestly, being envious of happy peers just sucks. For me, I've just put it aside.
It is quite plain to me that people are driven quite differently. There is always the background noise of attaining social approval and status through accumulation of wealth and shiny things.. but each of these cultures scores other things in a slightly different way.
To give one example, in many (perhaps most?) asian cultures, having 3 generations of a family living under one roof, is seen as a sign of (familial) success and unity. I have noticed that in general in the US, the longer you go into adulthood without moving out of your parents home it is considered a sign of failure.
I don't know which one is better, but it is interesting how society influences what makes you happy.
Just as you can argue that it can, at best, indicate correlation - and only apply to white Harvard men... it's also possible that the lessons learned are applicable to people outside that narrow scope. It's possible. But then it's also possible that the internal opinions, biases and struggles of Vaillant are bleeding into the conclusions as well.