The unhappiest people are those who pay the most attention to how their pursuits compare to those of others. Striving constantly for more can be counterproductive, and it leaves out a key part of the calculus.
Most of what we do in pursuit of happiness is negatively impacted when we try to compare it to other people’s pursuits. Research has confirmed the negative impact of “Keeping up with the Joneses.”
One series of experiments, for example, asked subjects to solve puzzles. The happiest subjects were those who paid the least attention to their performance relative to others.
As you could guess, the opposite was true too.
The goal of the study was to determine how social comparison would impact subjects’ happiness and satisfaction. The rush of satisfaction we may get from beating a competitor is easily trumped by the dissatisfaction we get from doing worse than a competitor, researchers found.
It is this constant, unending urge for more that in large part defines how people operate.
Happiness, many believe, comes from high achievement or acquiring things you want. But this isn’t a lasting formula because our desires change so often.
Meeting a milestone might give you a brief sense of elation, but it usually doesn’t result in long-term satisfaction. That’s because we are hardwired for dissatisfaction.
There’s great evidence that we all display a massive bias for negativity, and that it’s actually an evolutionary adaptation. It’s a survival mechanism — something that keeps us going individually, and pushes us as a species to continue propagating.
We’ve evolved a trait for perpetual seeking and dissatisfaction because it allows us to strive forward and aim at something.
Originally, perhaps, it merely meant more mating and thus better survival odds for our genes. But now this instinct pushes us to consume, hustle, and work ever-harder.
That sense of insatiability makes progress attractive, and it makes us competitive. We want more not only for ourselves, but more in relation to those around us. Being top dog feels good (even though social comparison is associated with anxiety and depression).
Three key ingredients
Harvard professor Howard Stevenson described satisfaction as getting what you want, whereas happiness is wanting what you get.
It is difficult to achieve total contentment, and this is true for people no matter their age. Some of the happiest people in the world are those who have learned to pull back their urge to constantly strive forward.
That comes from focusing on what you’ve done and what’s right in front of you, according to Stevenson. The ability and discipline to be present is as important a determinant for happiness as any other factor, he said, including wealth.
But it isn’t just about mindfulness. What helps, too, is recognizing that our desire to strive forward is actually less powerful than our tendency to avoid losses.
Loss aversion is “the idea that losses generally have a much larger psychological impact than gains of the same size,” Stanford’s Russel Poldrack wrote in Scientific American.
For starters, this means it helps to recognize we are worse at being losers than we’re good at being winners. Losses hit our brains harder and more negatively.
The combination of our ambitious instincts, loss aversion, and lack of being present forms a potent trifecta that seems to battle against our happiness.
What we want versus what we have
Columnist and Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks pointed out a disparity in Western and Eastern philosophies. In the West, many believe that, as we move through life, we should accumulate accolades and awards as a way to show what we’ve accomplished. But in many Eastern philosophies, the reverse is true.
Buddhism, among other religions, emphasizes minimalism, and being content with less. That encourages self-mastery rather than a mastery of your external world via purchasing power or trophies.
We should be stripping more away as we age, rather than accruing excess. This can allow us to reveal more and more of our true selves, which some say is the key to happiness.
Rather than deriving satisfaction from getting more of what you want, Brooks proposes a different formula.
Satisfaction, he says, should be the sum of what you have, divided by the sum of what you want.
Evidence tells us our priorities lie in increasing what we have and striving for what we could have in relation to others. But this ignores our wants.
The trick seems to have to do with our ability to manage our wants, rather than emphasizing what we have or don’t have.
Ramping up our pursuit of things we can have is a never-ending treadmill. Achieving, buying, acquiring more and more won’t bring lasting happiness.
But managing our desires, instead, gives us a better shot at satisfaction.
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