I’m glad I was able to change your perspective!

Happiness is subjective because it is complex.

At the end of the day, we’re all humans. We’ve mostly got the same genetic code and the same basic wants, desires, and values (e.g. compare a human with another human, vs. a human vs a dog – in that perspective, us humans are fairly similar). But because happiness is complex, those basic desires and values get expressed and interpreted in slightly different ways, causing the subjectiveness.

But I think that with a deep enough understanding of happiness, it would no longer be subjective.

I’ll need to reread this because this kind of post which is well-researched needs time to be digested. Happiness is subjective and after reading your post my conclusion is different – happiness is subjective and complex.

Thanks for the post, Amit.

GREAT points Amit.

I think length depends a lot on your target audience. But your target audience is hard to know until you’ve established yourself… So it’s a little bit like circular reasoning.

But in general. Yes short is better.

In the future we’ll be constantly hooked up to instant gratification by means of some mega-iPhone hologram type thing! 🙂

Comprehensive is the name of my game. Although I’m reconsidering – shorter seems to get more traffic.

Anyhow, you raise some interesting points Ludvig!

You raise the question of spread. Although the average person reports a 10% increase in life satisfaction for every doubling of income, there will be some who report a much smaller increase, and some who report a much larger increase. So actually, the spread is not so large here – most people don’t really report larger increases than 10, 15, 20%. This is because wealth has some negative effects on life satisfaction (like decreased ability to savor).

On the other hand, even if life satisfaction isn’t increasing, even if mood isn’t increasing, that doesn’t mean happiness isn’t. Money represents different things to different people… because happiness means different things to different people.

“You can enjoy doing a certain activity, and then train yourself to like something else over time. That’s been the story of my life for the past 2-3 years.”

Absolutely. People grossly underestimate their ability to cultivate enjoyment for things they currently hate (a new food, a new hobby, a new job, etc…). And this goes a step forward. People in the middle-ages would never have imagined electrocuted pieces of metal (TVs) giving them happiness. In the future, who can say what we will want and enjoy?

I think it’s hard to measure happiness because it’s highly individual, and it also depends on how we train our brains. You can enjoy doing a certain activity, and then train yourself to like something else over time. That’s been the story of my life for the past 2-3 years.

I like completely different things now compared to before.

I also dislike it when people borrow authority by quoting that famous study saying that you don’t get happy by earning money past a certain income level. The reason I don’t like it is because money represents different things to different people.

Ofc I’m not directing this last part specifically towards you!
🙂

Excellent insight, thank you for commenting!

I would imagine that sadness and misery are easier to measure than happiness, only because we’ve been studying them longer and because they have more noticeable effects on a person’s life. But even then, inversion does make sense. How can we claim to objectively measure sadness, when we don’t quiet understand its opposite – happiness.

In the eyes of lay-people, I think the question more is, “Is mass aggregated self-report more accurate than cultural wisdom, intuition, memory based decisions, and the like?” I think the answer is yes, which is why this blog exists! But like Diener, I look forward to improved methods and understanding. Experience sampling is a good start.

Anyhow, happy new year, and thanks for reminding me that I need to watch the movie HAPPY 🙂

Haha, you’re now the fourth person I know from Denmark who has made a comment like that. Thanks for sharing your experience!

It’s not that they claim to be the happiest country, but that there have been global happiness surveys, and that folks in Denmark tend to mark down the highest results (e.g. “How happy are you, from 0 to 10” – folks in Denmark are more likely to mark down 7 or 8, rather than 5 or 6). I think those surveys must be missing something, because like you, I’m skeptical that Denmark is actually the best place to live in the world.

Thanks!

Right. If were were just talking about positive emotion, it could be done – we’re got fMRI machines which can more objectively track the rise and fall of emotion. But ultimate happiness? Too complicated. Which is why when an AI programmer tells me that he thinks he knows how to program human values into an AI, I think he’s a little crazy.