What is happiness?

The Psychologist Dr. Doping tells about an ancient notions of well-being, experimental studies of happiness and life satisfaction, depending on the material well-being.

If we talk about happiness, you need to ask several questions. What is happiness? There is real or an illusion? On what does happiness depend? Is it achievable? There is in this world, or only in another life? Another BC philosophers tried to understand these issues. There have been many different approaches to happiness. The peak of these conceptualizations were the works of Aristotle's ideas about happiness which remained unsurpassed for a long time. Nothing more serious after Aristotle theory for a long time did not appear.

Aristotle gave this definition: "Happiness - it is an activity of the soul in the fullness of virtue". He believed that the understanding of happiness depends on who we ask. To find out what happiness is, we have to ask the wise men, because different people will give different answers. Therefore, the first main idea - everyone has his happiness. It can vary in different individuals. The dictionary definition of happiness is: "Happiness - is the supreme good accessible to man." But there are differences as to what is good is. Aristotle and many of his contemporaries were trying to determine what a person needs to be happy, what qualities and virtues, a person must possess in order to be happy.

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Experimental studies of happiness

But there is another approach that happy - the one who feels himself to be. In this case, under some happiness understand the emotional state man can maximize the positive experience, which is sometimes described as the best experience. In the last 30-40 years we unfolded experimental psychological studies of happiness based on mass surveys worldwide. Since then, a lot of problems appear in the study of happiness. The researchers write that over the past 30 years, we've learned about happiness more than in the previous 2,000 years after Aristotle.

Experimental studies began with the fact that psychologists have gathered together all the indirect evidence and common sense, and stereotypes have developed evaluation techniques. Studies have shown that about half of what was considered obvious, was confirmed, and the half - no. For example, it was believed that young people are happier than older people. It turned out that happiness is not related to age. Young people have more intense positive emotions, but at the same time and more intense negative emotions. But the overall balance of positive and negative emotions with age has nothing to do. Approximately the same was the situation with the floor. Women are both happier and unhappier. They have more positive emotions than men, and more negative. But in general, in nature everything is balanced. Since the time of Ecclesiastes known stereotype of "Woe from Wit", according to which the more intelligent a person is, the less chance that he will be happy. When psychologists began to study this hypothesis, it appears that this is not so, there is no regular connection is not present.

The level of happiness is largely dependent on the total warehouse personality - temperament and character. Some scholars wrote that happiness is 50% is due to genetic factors, ie psychological features of our biological parents. But the data show that this is not true. Epigenetic studies, i.e. studies of the relationship of genetic factors and causes environmental factors, suggest that these factors can vary in the range from 10 to 40%. However, there is some one or two major genes that affect subjective wellbeing. There are a number of different genes, each of which makes a small, albeit statistically significant contribution. In total, taking into account the interaction with the environment, they provide a sufficiently weighty contribution.

The subjective view on happiness

Happiness - it's more a question of the subjective view. There have been studies examining how happy people are in the most disadvantaged social groups, ie people with severe incurable diseases, persons with disabilities, the homeless, the unemployed, representatives of the lower social strata. The researchers interviewed people who live in extremely unfavorable natural conditions: the Greenland Eskimos, in the jungles of the Masai in Kenya, street prostitutes in India. It was expected that they will have lower estimates of their satisfaction with life. But it turned out that the vast majority had a positive balance, and people who feel unhappy, even in these groups were a minority.

German psychologist Ursula Staudinger says about the "subjective well-being paradox": people can be happy regardless of the obvious reasons for this. American psychologists Sonia Lubomirski and Ken Sheldon summarized the results of different studies and formulated a model known as the "model of the pie." Pie is divided into three unequal parts, representing three groups of factors that determine individual differences in the assessment of people of their own subjective well-being or happiness.

The first group - external factors that do not depend on us, the conditions in which we were lucky or not lucky to be born and live.

The second group - the factors associated with sustainable warehouse personality. There are people who are happy in the warehouse of his character. Nothing can bring them out of the positive state. But there are people unhappy as Eeyore. Nothing can make them happy.

The third group - that is what we are building with their own hands. It is our goal that we set and achieve, the relationships that we build with others.

It was found that the weight distribution of these groups of factors is very different from what the stereotypes suggest. External factors related to geography, social conditions, security, education, explain 10-12% of individual happiness level differences. It depends on them less than it might seem.

The dependence of happiness on material well-being

Beginning in the 1990s, carried out mass surveys of many thousands of samples in different countries to cycle, to identify what the dynamics of the change of happiness in different countries and what it depends on. On the surface, is the question: Is money happiness? The extent to which happiness depends on the level of income, gross domestic product per capita, and so on? It was found that the curve is divided into two parts.

In the first, the bottom of the curve, where we are dealing with the poorest countries, this line goes up as the level of welfare at the level of the nation, there is a sharp increase in subjective well-being assessments. This pattern is very clear and evident not only at the level of nations, but also on the individual level. When basic needs are not met, the person is not well nourished and had no confidence in their own security, no shelter, housing and so on, it has a lot of reasons for negative emotions. In life, there is frustration, which prevents it from being satisfactory.

The basic needs roughly corresponds to what is indicated in our time the term "middle class". Following the well-being of the level at which people are able to eat well, live a healthy lifestyle, have medical care, shelter, education for themselves and their children. It is quite specific, and have saturation limits needs.


Then it turns out that the dependence of happiness on material well-being is changing. The curve sharply break in two. It becomes much more shallow. There have been discussions in the past 5-8 years, there ceases to grow after the welfare of the fracture point, or continues to grow, but more slowly, or, on the contrary, starts to go down a bit.

The most recent data that have been published on the subject, saying that a further increase in material well-being is positively correlated with happiness, but this relationship is mediated by what exactly you spend your money. This is the art of spending money that you have to satisfy their really deep personal psychological needs, and not just for a primitive consumerism. And it turns out that it is important not so much the wealth itself, as is the value you attach to money. People who give more importance to money are less happy than people for whom money is not the most important thing in life.

Happiness is not the destination point, but the way

Russian Silver Age philosophers have criticized the idea of a lot of happiness and the pursuit of happiness as the main principle of human behavior. Berdyaev, in particular, he noted that the state of happiness man stops him and nothing more is needed. All motivation is reset. Happiness - a state of complete fusion with the actual desired. In this sense, to pursue happiness - means to aspire to a stopped moment. Not by chance is often a state of happiness say that at this point you can or even want to die, because he has nothing else is necessary. But happiness can not last for a number of reasons. We are doomed to move towards the desired. Only a very short time we can fully achieve this fusion, and then we will live again at some distance from the desired. And this distance creates a tension, which leads to the fact that in certain moments of life we experience the state of happiness, and the rest of the time we try to find this state again.