the survival of the species, but a grab bag of crude mechanisms that are easily (and pleasurably) outwitted. Pleasure is only loosely correlated with what evolutionary biologists call 'reproductive fitness' — and for that, we should be grateful.
Given how much we do to orient ourselves to the pursuit of pleasure, you'd expect us to be pretty good at assessing what's likely to make us happy and what's not. Here again, evolution holds some surprises.
A simple problem is that much of what makes us happy doesn't last long. Candy bars make us happy — for an instant — but we soon return to the state of mind we experienced before we had one. The same holds (or can hold) for sex, for movies, for television shows, and for rock concerts. Many of our most intense pleasures are shortlived.
But there's a deeper issue, which shows up in how we set our long-term goals; although we behave as if we want to maximize our long-term happiness, we frequently are remarkably poor at anticipating what will genuinely make us happy. As the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert have shown, predicting our own happiness can be a bit like forecasting the weather: a pretty inexact science. Their textbook case,* which should give pause to assistant professors everywhere, concerns the young faculty member's inevitable quest for tenure. Virtually every major U.S. institution promises to its finest, most successful young professors a lifetime of academic freedom and guaranteed employment. Slog through graduate school, a postdoc or two, and five or six years of defining your very own academic niche, and if you succeed (as measured by the length of your r?sum?), you will gain tenure and be set for life.
The flip slide (rarely mentioned) is the slog that fails. Five to ten years spent working on a Ph.D., the postdocs, the half-decade of teaching, unappreciative undergraduates, the interminable faculty meetings, the struggle for grant money — and for what? Without a publication record, you're out of a job. Any professor can tell you that tenure is fantastic, and not getting tenure is miserable.
Or so we believe. In reality, neither outcome makes nearly as much difference to overall happiness as people generally assume. People who get tenure tend to be relieved, and initially ecstatic, but their happiness doesn't linger; they soon move on to worrying about other things. By the same token, people who don't get tenure are indeed often initially miserable, but their misery is usually short-lived. Instead, after the initial shock, people generally adapt to their circumstances. Some realize that the academic rat race isn't for them; others start new careers that they actually enjoy more.
* Gilbert has another favorite example: children. Although most people anticipate that having children will increase their net happiness, studies show that people with children are actually less happy on average than those without. Although the highs ('Daddy I wuv you') may be spectacular, on a moment-by-moment basis, most of the time spent taking care of children is just plain work. 'Objective' studies that ask people to rate how happy they are at random moments rank raising children — a task with clear adaptive advantage — somewhere between housework and television, well below sex and movies. Luckily, from the perspective of perpetuating the species, people tend to remember the intermittent high points better than the daily grind of diapers and chauffeur duty.
Aspiring assistant professors who think that their future happiness hinges on getting tenure often fail to take into account one of the most deeply hard-wired properties of the mind: the tendency to get used to whatever's going on. The technical term for that is
— that's adaptation. Similarly, we can adapt to even more serious annoyances, especially those that are predictable, which is why a boss who acts like a jerk every day can actually be less irritating than a boss who acts like a jerk less often, but at random intervals. As long as something is a constant, we can learn to live with it. Our circumstances do matter, but psychological adaptation means that they often matter less than we might expect.
This is true at both ends of the spectrum. Lottery winners get used to their newfound wealth, and others, people like the late Christopher Reeve, find ways of coping with circumstances most of us would find unimaginable. Don't get me wrong — I'd like to win the lottery and hope that I will never be seriously injured. But as a psychologist I know that winning the lottery wouldn't really change my life. Not only would I have to fend off all the long-lost 'friends' who would come out of the woodwork, but also I'd face the inevitable fact of adaptation: the initial rush couldn't last because the brain won't allow it to.
The power of adaptation is one reason why money matters a lot less than most people think. According to literary legend, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway, 'The rich are not like us.' Hemingway allegedly brushed him off with the reply 'Yes, they have more money,' implying that wealth alone might make little difference. Hemingway was right. People above the poverty line are
*The psychological use of the term is, of course, distinct from the evolutionary use. In psychology,
happier than people below the poverty line, but the truly wealthy aren't that much happier than the merely rich. One recent study, for example, showed that people making over $90,000 a year were no happier than those in the $50,ooo-$89,999 bracket. A recent
Ironically, what really seems to matter is not absolute wealth, but relative income. Most people would rather make $70,000 at a job where their co-workers average $60,000 than $80,000 at a job where co-workers average $90,000. As a community's overall wealth increases, individual expectations expand; we don't just want to be rich, we want to be
One of the most surprising things about happiness is just how poor we are at measuring it. It's not just that no brain scanner or dopamine counter can do a good job, but that we often just don't know — yet another hint of how klugey the whole apparatus of happiness really is.
Are you happy right now, at this very moment, reading this very book? Seriously, how would you rate the experience, on a scale of 1 ('I'd rather being doing the dishes') to 7 ('If this were any more fun, it would be illegal!')? You probably feel that you just 'know' or can 'intuit' the answer — that you can directly assess how happy you are, in the same way that you can determine whether you're too hot or too cold. But a number of studies suggest that our impression of direct intuition is an illusion.
