The Happiness Equation
In the book Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, Diener and Biswas-Diener explain the connection between income and happiness.
What they found was that the amount of money a person earned only modestly predicted whether or not they were satisfied with their income. Their studies found that some people with a lot of money could not meet their desires, and others with little money were able to do so.
Based on this research, the authors explain that happiness from one's income boils down to a simple formula – "the happiness equation" – which is:
Happiness = What we (actually) have / what we want (what we aspire to have).
Even those of us with basic math can figure out that according to this equation, as our wants increase, our satisfaction with what we have decreases in comparison and this results in a reduction in our overall happiness level.
So a simple way to increase our life satisfaction, or happiness, it seems, is to keep our wants and desires in check.
A simple formula, which requires us to be mindful of modern capitalism which thrives on keeping us consistently dissatisfied with what we have at present, always keeping us wanting more.
Can you see how this results in a never ending cycle of acquisition without satisfaction? No matter how much we have, it can never satisfy us if our wants and aspirations keep increasing at the same time.
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