So we've been interested in this question about whether or not it makes sense to even go for happiness. Maybe happiness is selfish, maybe it's just kind of a bad idea. But there's a different objection that I sometimes here from my students. Which is, yeah, maybe it'll be good to be happy, but I just don't think it's going to work, I just don't think it's possible to be happier. It's not possible to be happier because the world is kind of messed up right now, if you look out at the world, it's hard not to be sad and anxious. It feels like kind of life is a bit of a train wreck right now, especially when we're filming this right now, we're in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. It feels like the world has just been a big dumpster fire, that is really preventing all of us from being happy. How can we be happy if the circumstances are so bad? And the thing that the science shows, the kind of fun fact about the studies is that our life circumstances seem not to affect our happiness as much as we think. This is one of the big misconceptions about happiness. What do I mean by this? Well, let's play a little bit of the game that Brinkman and colleagues played with their subjects back in the day. Let's imagine that you go out to like a corner store and you play the lottery and you win. You've just won a million dollars, what would that do to your happiness? Think about the answer in your head. Versus, you're walking down the street, you're not really paying attention in the new haven traffic and get hit by a car and now you're paraplegic. Most of you in this room, I think have the privilege of being able to walk, but you don't have that privilege anymore. You are handicapped forever or you don't have that privilege anymore, you're no longer going to be able to walk. What would that do to your happiness? And we can have people, rank, would you be happy, would you be not so happy? But the key is I ask you, what would happen if the lottery ticket or getting hit by the heart happen today and what would happen in six months? What would happen in a year, right? What would happen to your happiness in six months or a year? Brinkman and colleagues did this study not with people he surveyed, but with actual people who went through these kinds of incidents. So he went out and he recruited lottery winners and asked them how happy they were six months after they won the lottery or one year after they won the lottery. Versus controls who were people who played the lottery, but they didn't win, basically most of us, right? And here's what he finds, if you look at these lottery winners happiness, they self report being reasonably happy there on average of four out of six on the scale that he used. But the controls happiness that he found was pretty much no different a year into these folks winning the lottery, they're basically statistically the same, which is not what we expect. We assume if we played the lottery and won that we'd be happy for a long time, but it seems not to be the case, right? What about the worst event, right, you're hit by a car and you become paraplegic. These researchers went out and found folks to whom that had really happened, right? So thing to be grateful for today if that has not happened to you, hasn't happened to you one thing to be grateful for, right? But there are people out there to whom this has actually happened, what happens to their happiness after this? And what they find again, is the accident victims happiness seem like not as different as you would expect from control level happiness. You see a slight dip for the victims overall happiness. But if you look at things like their levels of joy, their levels of pleasure, you don't really see the big difference you think. And so this leads to a big overall conclusion that we get from this and lots of other studies. Which is that, our circumstances matter less for overall happiness than we think. We think we want to change what's happening in our lives to become happier, right? We think that if good things happen to us that will improve our joy, that will improve our subjective well being. But it seems not to be as much the case as we think.
