Is Your Happiness (or Sadness) an Illusion?
When we assess our life, we’re often focusing only on current events. Here’s how to gain a broader perspective.
We can be fickle creatures, switching in a moment from “life is great” to “life sucks” depending on random events like spilling coffee, not getting a promotion, or getting in a car accident.
On the flip side, we can shift from “life sucks” to “life is great” when we win a fancy prize, get married, or get a new job.
When good things happen, we are flush with joy, and it can feel like life is perfect. When we’re deeply unlucky, we wonder, “why is this happening to me?” and convince ourselves we’re cursed.
Are our assessments accurate? In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, an astonishing analysis of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman explains how something called the Focusing Illusion can influence how we assess our lives, and how it can trick us into believing that certain purchases, events, or circumstances will make us happy or sad.
In the 1980s, USC psychologist Norbert Schwarz conducted a study to see if a small token of good luck could influence people’s evaluation of their life satisfaction. The subjects in the study were asked to complete a questionnaire on how they were faring in life overall. But before they took the test, Schwarz asked them to photocopy a document for him (one subject at a time).
Half the subjects found a dime on the copy machine, previously placed there by Schwarz. No dime was placed on the machine for the other half. Then, the subjects sat down to take their questionnaire.
The results were remarkable. The subjects who found a dime on the copy machine rated their life as better overall than the subjects who found no dime. It’s hard to believe that something as small as finding a 10-cent coin could influence how the subjects thought about their life as whole, but it did.
Why? Because of what Kahneman calls the Focusing Illusion — the tendency to focus on only recent events when assessing our lives. Says Kahneman, “the score that you quickly assign to your life is determined by a small sample of highly available ideas, not by a careful weighting of the domains of your life.”
We tend to weight whatever is currently drawing our attention more heavily than other aspects of our life. Positive or negative, the attention on our current circumstance tends to pull focus.
Why does this matter? If we’re trying to keep focus on what’s important in life, it can help to have an awareness of when we’re exaggerating the impact of negative or positive events.
Says Kahneman, “The focusing illusion can cause people to be wrong about their present state of well-being as well as about the happiness of others, and about their own happiness in the future.” People are “prone to exaggerate the effect of significant purchases or changed circumstances on our future well-being.”
Studies have shown that people overestimate the effect that being rich has on a person’s overall happiness in life. They also overestimate the effect that severe injury has on a person’s overall happiness. Over time, being rich doesn’t make people as happy as we tend to think it will, and severe injury doesn’t devastate people as much as we tend to think it will.
We assume rich people have few problems. They never have to worry about living arrangements or food, and they can afford anything they need. On the other hand, when someone is severely injured and winds up in a wheelchair, we tend to think their quality of life is ruined — their loss of mobility seems catastrophic.
What we often fail to realize is that humans adapt to their circumstances over time. Kahneman points out, “most long-term circumstances of life, including paraplegia and marriage, are part-time states that one inhabits only when one attends to them.”
Once people get used to their new circumstance, once they’ve had time to adapt, they don’t focus on that aspect of their life as much. After a while, they’ll focus less on their status as a married person, or a wealthy elite, or paraplegic, and focus more on the many other elements of life.
A well-known study showed that after several years, both lottery winners and paraplegics generally return to the level of happiness they had before their life changed.
This is why it’s important to keep things in perspective and to not expect big events to profoundly change our overall life satisfaction. No matter how happy or upset we are with something in the current moment, we’ll eventually focus on it less and focus more on all the other machinations of life.
Kahneman mentions that there are a few exceptions: “The main exceptions are chronic pain, constant exposure to loud noise, and severe depression. Pain and noise are biologically set to be signals that attract attention, and depression involves a self-reinforcing cycle of miserable thoughts. There is therefore no adaptation to these conditions.”
Those exceptions are usually treatable, though — so although they can’t be adapted to, they can improve over time with proper treatment. Note: it’s important to seek medical assistance if you’re experiencing chronic pain or depression.
What we believe will lead us to everlasting happiness (big purchases, a new partner, a new city), we adapt to over time, and we end up back at our baseline level of happiness. And what we think will destroy us (a break-up, a lost job, a business failure) doesn’t — we usually find a way to work through the disappointment and pain and return to our baseline level of happiness.
Kahneman gives the example of a new car — we exaggerate the long-term benefits of the car because we’ll eventually get used to it, and no longer pay attention to it when we’re driving. Think about it — no matter how special your car is, how often do you think about the car itself while you’re driving it? You’re usually preoccupied with other thoughts.
He sums it up by saying “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it.”
What does have a long-lasting effect on our happiness? Quality relationships and skills/learning. Unlike exaggerating the benefits of a new car, Kahneman says:
“You are not likely to make the same mistake for a social gathering or inherently attention-demanding activities such as playing tennis or learning to play the cello. The focusing illusion creates a bias in favor of goods and experiences that are initially exciting, even if they will eventually lose their appeal. Time is neglected, causing experiences that will retain their attention value in the long term to be appreciated less than they deserve to be.”
Buying a new car, a new house, and marriage are exciting at first — they involve a swift change and an instant new experience, while building relationships and learning involve work and concentration. But while you’ll focus less on a new car or the institution of marriage over time, you’ll always have to focus on other people to form solid relationships, or on a skill to learn it properly.
It’s well-documented that social relationships are a key indicator of happiness.
Instead of looking to a new purchase, new job, or more money to make us happy, perhaps we should focus on deepening our connections with those around us or looking to make new connections. Instead of marrying because it’s expected, we can focus on creating a deep emotional bond with a partner.
None of this is to say that people shouldn’t make life changes, make more money, or buy new things when necessary or desired. It’s not to say people shouldn’t pursue their dreams or goals. We just shouldn’t expect these items, events, or accomplishments by themselves to make us eternally happy.
It’s also not to invalidate anyone who is excited about a life change, or anyone feeling grief due to a loss or failure. Those are natural human states that need to be experienced and processed.
An awareness of the focusing illusion helps us remember that life is not linear, and that triumphs and failures don’t define us.
Human beings are extraordinarily resilient, and when something terrible happens, we usually find a way to work through it. Think about the many times in your life when you’ve persisted through incredible adversity.
Conversely, don’t expect money, marriage, a new house, or lots of expensive gadgets to permanently change your baseline happiness. They simply won’t hold your focus over time. It’s our deep relationships and learned skills that truly change our experience of life for the better.
