Why do we devalue happiness if happiness is such an important goal?

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Why do we devalue happiness if happiness is such an important goal? It turns out that there are three main reasons.

The first reason is that we hold many negative beliefs about happiness.

And because of this, we don’t find happiness to be as attractive as we otherwise might.

This is similar to how you will healthy food to be less attractive to you if you believe that unhealthy food is tastier. Those who believe that healthy food is not as tasty as unhealthy food find it more difficult to resist eating unhealthy food. In a very similar way, if you hold negative beliefs about happiness, you won’t find it as attractive and therefore you’re likely to sacrifice it for the sake of other goals.

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One common negative belief about happiness is that it will lead to laziness.

If I’m happy, many people think to themselves, why should I work hard? In fact, however, study after study reveals that happiness doesn’t make us lazy. If anything, it makes us more productive and more successful. Here’s just a small sample of findings on the effect that happiness has on productivity and success.

Happier insurance agents sell more insurance.

More Happy employees earn more.

Happier, that is optimistic, CEOs foster a more positive work climate which in turn improves organizational productivity.

Happier CEOs receive higher performance ratings from chairpersons of their boards and head companies with greater returns on investment.

A Happier batsmen and this is, by the way, my favorite finding of all of these, happier batsmen in cricket have higher batting averages.

Why does feeling happy make us more productive?

One reason may be that we are more creative when we are happy. Several studies have shown that we come up with more and better ideas, and are, therefore, more likely to be creative, when we are feeling positive or happy. You might have noticed this yourself. You are more likely to come up with good ideas when you’re feeling good. For example, when you’ve had a good night’s sleep and you’re relaxing. Rather than when you’re feeling stressed out or anxious or depressed.

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Another common misconception about happiness is that happiness makes people selfish.

If I’m already happy, many of us think to ourselves, why should I really care about others? As it turns out, however, we are much less self-centered and much more altruistic when we’re happier. Most of us actually know this from our personal experience.

For example, ask yourself, when are you likely to be nice to your family and less likely to kick your dog? When you have just be shouted at by your boss or when you have just received a promotion?

Of course, you’re more likely to be nice to everyone when you’re happy.

But somehow, we sometimes forget this when we think about happiness. We think that we would become selfish if you’re happy. Again, study after study confirms that this negative belief about happiness too is just plain wrong. Here’s just a small sample of findings.

Happy people volunteer more for social causes.

Happy people are more likely to judge others favorably and

are more likely and willing to share their good fortune with others more equitably.

People feeling happy to contribute more money to charity

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements of happiness, although if stupidity is lacking, then all is lost.

The absolutely essential one would be that you’d be stupid.

In other words, anybody who is happy is stupid because they don’t really understand the world and all the evil in the world and so forth. But what we found empirically without just thinking about it. But actually going out and finding facts, is surprising, and I wasn’t a true believer that I thought happy people were necessarily going to do better in life, that they do better in so many spheres.

The evidence for that, for example, in health and mortality is pretty strong. If you look at people’s happiness at time one, say when they’re 20. And you follow and see when they’re going to die, say at 80 or 90, or how often they get sick, get cardiovascular disease, some serious illness. You’ll see that that initial happiness will predict that. Not only does it happen at the individual level but you also see it at the regional level.

In the social areas I mentioned earlier, happy people get married more.

Happy people are more sociable.

There’s also evidence to suggest they actually do better in the workplace. So I mentioned earlier, that happy 18-year-olds, cheerful 18-year-olds, later earn a higher income.

Why is that?

Their supervisors like them better, they’re more energetic, they tend to be more creative so they do better in the workplace.

And then a fourth area where happy people do better is in citizenship.

That is, they help other people on the job even when it’s not their responsibility to do so. They may donate more money to charity, volunteer time, and so forth.

So we find in all those different areas, that happy people, on average, are doing better.

Happiness doesn’t make you lazy or selfish. If anything, it has the opposite effect.

Let me turn now to a third negative belief about happiness that many of us harbor,

Happiness is fleeting.

That is, we devalue happiness because we believe that it won’t last for long anyways, so why value it? But is happiness in fact, fleeting?

The answer is, it depends.

It depends on how you define happiness.
If you define happiness as sensory pleasure, happiness won’t last long.
If you define it as love or connection,

on the other hand, it has the potential to last much longer. Likewise, if you define it as something akin to what I call abundance. Which is the feeling you get from believing that you’re taken care of and that life is perfect with its imperfections, then that feeling has the potential to last even longer.

one reason is that we harbor negative beliefs about happiness.

In particular, many of us harbor three negative beliefs,

that happiness makes us selfish,
happiness makes us lazy, and
that happiness is fleeting.

we should all consider happiness to be a gift because it has so many positive effects on us.

The second reason we devalue happiness is that we fail to define it

It turns out that when something is not clearly defined, we tend to devalue it, this is because of something called the fluency effect.

According to this effect, we like something more when we understand it more easily. And as you can imagine, it’s not easy to understand something if it is not completely defined. This idea, that we gravitate towards things that are more easily defined or easy to see, reminds me of a famous story of this Sufi saint called Mulla Nasrudin.

Once, Mulla was searching for something desperately under the street lamp. A passerby noticed him and asked him, what are you searching for? Mulla said, I’ve lost my wedding ring and my wife is going to kill me if she finds out that I’ve lost it. The man was able to empathize with Mulla’s plight because he himself was married, and he started helping Mulla search for the ring. Soon, two other people who were also passing by joined the search party. They too were eager to Mulla because they also were married and they could easily imagine Mulla’s plight. After about ten minutes of searching, one of the men in the search party turned on Mulla and asked him, Mulla where exactly did you lose the ring? And Mulla said, oh, over there in the woods, pointing to a forest about 50 meters away. The three men were flabbergasted, their jaws dropped, and they asked Mulla in unison, why then were you searching for the ring out here? And Mulla, without batting an eyelid, says, oh, because we can more easily see here under the street lamp.

Over there, it’s dark and difficult to see.

The story shows us,

how we have a tendency to focus on things that we can see more clearly.

This is similar to the idea that we give greater value and priority to things that are more clearly defined. Here’s a more scientific exploration of the same idea.

Imagine that you’re looking for some cough syrup and you walk into a supermarket and you come across two brands, Brand A and Brand B.

As you can see, Brand A is easier to read.

Brand B on the other hand is more difficult to read.

Which brand are you more likely to buy?

Studies show that you’re more likely to choose brand A.

Why?

Because it is easier to read and process.

Much the same way that we value things that are easier to see and process, we devalue things that are difficult to see and process. In same manner we devalue happiness.

You are likely to devalue happiness if you aren’t clear about what it means to you.

In other words, a big reason we devalue happiness is that we don’t have a readily available concrete definition of happiness.

Medium maximization.

The simplest way to understand medium maximization is that we often forget what we ultimately want in life, and we end up chasing the mediums that are supposed to get us what we ultimately want.

Money is a classic medium. By itself, money has little value, it’s just pieces of paper. The only reason we want money is that it can help us get other things like a house, or a vacation, or medicine, or books.

Judging by what’s on people’s genie wish list, it’s not just money that distracts us from happiness.

Other goals like status and fame do it too, and many times we don’t even realize that we are sacrificing happiness for the sake of these other goals.

We discussed how we devalue happiness for three main reasons.