The Happiness Theory

Why are some people happier than others? Why are we happy some times and not at other times?

These are age old questions. In spite of the millions of dollars spent on research in finding the answers to this, we still don't have any satisfactory conclusions.

It is clearly not money that makes this difference. We all know people that have far less money and resources but are still happier than some ultra rich people. Even in our own lives we may have experienced the phenomenon that our happiness doesn’t increase proportional to the money we make.

Is it friends, families and communities that make the difference? Perhaps. Those factors certainly seem to play a bigger role than money does. Support from friends and family are certainly key in recovering quickly from tough and unhappy situations. Being around friends and family also brings joy (in most cases any way!).

But what causes happiness or unhappiness inherently at a very personal level in the first place?

Maybe, it has been so difficult to find an answer to this quest because there is no single answer. Maybe, it is so personal to each of us that we can't generalize it. That is a possibility.

But then, that doesn't explain why we can’t stay happy forever, once we figure out what makes us happy at a very personal level and actually achieve that.

No. Happiness appears to be a dynamic and living thing rather than in a static state. That is why there doesn't seem to be a such a thing as "achieving happiness".

As I look into my own life and examine my happiness patterns on a day to day basis, I happened upon a rather simple explanation, one that both satisfies my curiosity and seems to fit and explain the reasons for my own happiness and unhappiness. It may seem too simplistic at first, but think about it and apply it to your own situations and see if it works for you.

Simply put, happiness in any given moment seems to be inversely proportional to our own expectations and nothing more. That is, the lower our own expectations are in any given situation, the higher our happiness quotient will be, and vice versa. In that sense, it is a continuum rather than being binary.

We have all probably experienced this phenomenon in some simple situations. For example, when we go to watch a very popular movie, we sometimes notice that we don't enjoy or derive as much happiness as  we expected too much, based on what we heard about the movie.

This same concept can be applied to everything. If you get a pay increase higher than what you expected you are happier, if you got less than what you expected, you are less happy.

Like I said, it seems to explain the mystery behind my own happiness and unhappiness in almost all cases that I tested.

In the end, it is all about how we manage our own expectations. Easy, right? So, how do we do that?

Well, I "expect" that I will crack that code in the remainder of my lifetime :-).