Creating happiness — and the problem with the World Happiness Report
Happiness is not always easy to achieve, but defining it can give you a clear target and path forward. One shift in perspective can change everything.
Phil Rosen
Issue #9
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March 28, 2022
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Reading time:
6 mins
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Welcome back to Tip Jar.
Here’s a simple question: What makes you happy?
Happiness is not always easy to achieve, but defining it can give you a clear target and path forward. Today, I break down two primary measures of happiness — and how one shift in perspective can change everything.
Let’s get into it.
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The problem with happiness — and an answer
“Are you happy?”
If you asked this to the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, he would first distinguish between two forms of happiness, hedonia and eudaimonia.
Pleasure versus fulfillment, that is.
Nice clothes, expensive cars, five-star hotels, good sex — hedonia is straightforward. It has to do with a subjective, feel-good state, usually based on an external thing.
Meanwhile, the definition of eudaimonia is closer to fulfillment or meaning. It’s intrinsic. It’s closely related to moral excellence or responsibility, and doesn’t necessarily correlate with pleasure.
Eudaimonia has more to do with the happiness of your soul. When time flies, for example, that time is usually meaningful or gives you a sense of forward progress. That’s eudaimonia.
This deeper type of happiness can manifest when we gain ground in something that challenges us, or accomplish something we care deeply about.
It also has a lot to do with activities that convince us we are doing our best, or improving ourselves to the best of our ability.
One psychology study found a strong correlation with eudaimonia and a slate of deep, positive sentiment:
"Correlations involving eudaimonia were significantly stronger with measures of...self-realization values, effort, and importance than...correlations with hedonic enjoyment."
The initial question becomes easier to answer because our parameters clear up what we’re feeling, and why.
Every year, the World Happiness Report uses algorithms, statistics, and big data to rank the happiest places on Earth. It quantifies things like gross domestic product per capita, corruption, life expectancy, and freedom.
(Finland, according to the 2021 report, is the happiest country in the world.)
But measuring subjective happiness with objective data leaves a lot on the table. Arguably, the data skews results toward pleasure (hedonia), rather than fulfillment (eudaimonia).
A person can be meaningfully happy, said Aristotle, so long as they do the best they can and make a genuine, forward effort. Even the false perception of progress has been shown to inspire fulfillment.
Pleasure shouldn’t be ignored, but using a survey to quantify pleasure on a global scale seems like a step too far — one that can convince people to aim for the wrong things.
A better "World Report" could be one that gauges how many people per country are able to pursue meaningful work, or make daily progress, or nurture a sense of fulfillment.
Okay — it wouldn't be practical to give psychological tests to billions of people every year. But that doesn’t mean this framework can’t help you adjust course in your own life.
List out what makes you happy. Then, decide which ones are pleasure-based, and which are more meaningful.
This exercise can help you reverse-engineer a more meaningful life. Figure out which activities give you the greatest sense of fulfillment, the most obvious opportunities to make progress — then do more of them.
And yet, if we listen to Aristotle, maybe all it takes is a change in perspective.
Maybe, we can all be happier is by telling ourselves more often, and honestly, “I am doing my best.”
— Phil
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