The Happiness Paradox

Preface: I want to start by saying I am not a writer so forgive my grammatical errors. Nor am I practicing psychology, everything I will present is based on my years of observation and experience. I will try my best to explain concisely for easier understanding. Let’s get started.

Happiness has been a word thrown off lately, especially by the new generation. It has been interpreted in different ways and each with a different meaning. It has been the case ever since the beginning of time. This article will try its best to explain why so and the problems that arose with happiness.

Happiness is defined in two literature terms. One is the psychological term, which is the feeling we experience or synonymous when you feel joy. The other is the value term, which indicates the overall well-being of one person. The second term is what most people accept as their definition of happiness. The second term has also been a candidate many times by different words such as ‘real happiness, genuine happiness, true happiness…’ or whatever their terminology for the ultimate form of happiness.

This vagueness on the whole meaning of happiness is why it has become a complicated topic for each one of us. This complexity is the reason why a lot of us are misunderstood and aren’t adequately addressed. It affected our way of thinking, which contributing to most of our life decisions since we tend to follow or do the things that make us happy. It is also the reason for self-inflicted problems that will eventually degrade our quality of life.

The article will be divided into different categories containing the factors that affect our happiness while gradually presenting the problems associated with them.

Happiness Meter

We will start with what I think is the most important factor for happiness. The happiness meter is a metaphorical meter for a person’s assigned value for what makes him/her happy. This value varies from person to person all according to their levels of happiness.

For example, one of the things that makes me happy is video games. But video games aren’t exactly what makes me really happy. With that, I have to assess first what makes me the happiest so I can properly assess where video games are on my happiness meter. The first thing that comes to mind is having a house of my own which will provide me a huge deal of comfort and security that I will be able to do the other things that make me happy. With those examples, I can correctly put the house on 100% as one of the things that makes me happy then estimated video games as probably 80% on my happiness meter. I can now also easily adjust the other things based on the given comparison like putting food on 60% so on and so forth.

But there is a problem with the happiness meter just like any self-assessed value of an object. The value changes over time. It will be affected by a lot of factors including priority, frequency, availability, just to say a few. Later on, videogames may be lower on my happiness meter as other things that make me happy rise up like probably a romantic relationship. Or if the time comes that I also got a house of my own, then a house won’t be 100% on my happiness meter because I don’t set it as something I want as before. This is explained on the next topic which is called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. I will mention the happiness meter to explain a lot of points many times in this article.

Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility

The title may be familiar to some people because it’s actually an existing law in the field of economics. It states that utility is the satisfaction or benefit derived by consuming a product; thus the marginal utility of a good or service is the change in the utility from an increase in the consumption of that good or service. To put it simply, the value of any object changes by its quantity or as to how the timeless economic quote goes, supply and demand. We will try to apply this law to happiness.

For example, I ate my favorite meal of fried chicken this morning and it tastes delicious. Since I got lazy preparing for lunch, I still ate the fried chicken from the leftover this morning. The taste isn’t as good as it was a while ago. Come dinner, your friend visited you bringing a freshly cooked fried chicken again. This time, even though it’s fresh, you start to develop a bit of reluctancy since you already ate 2 meals of fried chicken. This is when the law of diminishing marginal utility kicks in. The value of the fried chicken may have been a 10 out of 10 this morning, a 9 out of 10 by lunch, and now it diminishes even more, lowering its value the more you consume the product.

If you stop to notice, it is actually applicable to most things in life. From as simple as eating a meal to something complicated like taking things for granted. Like when you were a kid and still living in your family, you get all things for free including the food that you eat, the clothes that you wear, the bed that you sleep on. You don’t look for those things when you were a kid because they were never taken away from you. You want other things like toys, more time to watch your favorite show, or just probably more allowance. It is because it is what you needed at the time, it is what is high on your happiness meter and your marginal utility. It is when you move away from your home like going to college that you start to realize the importance of food, clothes, and a house.

This is the reason why it’s hard to go back on something when you have already tried a better counterpart. When you already used something like an iPhone 10, it’s almost impossible to downgrade into, for example, an iPhone 6. It’s because you already established a median value in your happiness meter when it comes to phones, that when you go lower between the median value, you start to get dissatisfied. This is also the same phenomenon when losing a loved one. You get used to their presence or company that the moment they’re gone, that’s the only time you’ll find them or appreciate them.

So going back to the previous topic, the moment I already have a home of my own, its value to me diminishes since other priorities will start taking over. You may now start asking yourself, does this cycle just go on and on. Do things just keep shoving down the happiness meter while another thing goes to the top. This is actually one of the problems of happiness which we will expand later on.

Source of Happiness

You may have already asked the question what are our sources of happiness. I did ask myself the question a lot of time and luckily, I already found the answer, or at least I thought I do. This may sound simple but our source of happiness is our environment.

The environment we lived in is one of the key factors of our happiness. How we are raised by our parents, every support that we get, the people we get to be along with, the knowledge we digest and absorb, traditions, culture, genetics, freedom, the obstacles presented from lack of financial help, bullies, misfortunes, and many more all add up to build our version of happiness. It is also the reason for what type of person we are.

For me, I was raised in a striving family but we were able to get along just fine in life. It was the year 2005 and the age of technology is starting to make way. I wasn’t introduced to sports which were fine since I wasn’t that physically strong anyway which leads me towards one of my happiness which is video games. I was also opened up to a lot of non-physical activities such as reading, writing, watching TV, drawing, chess. I played with a lot of kids back then which helped me at least develop some of my social skills. Our family and relatives love listening and singing to karaoke which also defined my music taste. I wasn’t trained on any skill by my parents or any mentor. Everything that I tried to do was purely based on things that I like doing at the time. So one of the things that I had was the freedom to do anything I want. To cut it short, my happiness was shaped based on the things that I experienced all my life. This is why I like video games and other people like basketball.

Furthermore, our happiness isn’t just based on the things we were grown accustomed to. It is also affected by the things that we are unable to experience like a comfortable financial situation or even love which marginal utility takes part in. This explains why a house is at the top of my meter because, for most of my life, we or I were just renting an apartment. For some other people, a house may not be their top choice since they may have already a house of their own, they may prefer just to be with their family since that what brings happiness to them more.

Happiness being on a case-to-case basis will help us understand the confusion going on behind the real meaning of happiness. That there is no such thing as what they call ‘real happiness’ or ‘true happiness’ or whatever other people tell you. Happiness varies from each person all according to what makes them happy or believed will do. But there is a type of happiness that will about to change our lives.

Synthetic Happiness

Happiness is a construct. We proved this from the topic before. It is a culmination of different things that all fought their way to be called your happiness. We will prove this even more by understanding synthetic happiness.

Synthetic happiness explains that we will be happy no matter what happens in our life. Even if we experience the worst things, we will still end up happy because of one beautiful phenomenon. It is our brain.

The brain has its own self-defense mechanism and synthetic happiness acts as our psychological immune system. It’s a system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change our views of the world so we can feel better about the worlds we find ourselves in. It is the systematic way of the 3rd stage from the 5 stages of grief, bargaining. Simply speaking, our brain tends to accept or bargain the situation it is put in leading us to be happier.

Synthetic happiness is the final puzzle of why people who don’t have much are actually happy. Along with a low maintenance environment, good enough marginal utility, and a low happiness meter. If you’re not exposed to the commonly known luxuries of life such as delicious food, car, travel spots then you won’t know what you’re missing and you’d end up happy. But what if you know all of these things and in constant exposure to them. This is where synthetic happiness kicks in allowing you to accept your situation. It may come in different forms such as being contented, not pursuing the thing you want before, boasting what you have, or even speaking ill to others just to feel good about yourself. Synthetic happiness can also be the scientific explanation of moving on. Something you can share with your broken-hearted friend if they ever need a reason to hold on.

The effectiveness of synthetic happiness also comes to mind. Exact numbers can’t be given but research has been done on the subject before arriving at the creation of synthetic happiness. It works best in situations where you’re trapped and left with no choice anymore. This knowledge will help us understand more the next factor for happiness, the paradox of choice.

The Paradox of Choice

The paradox states that in western developed societies a large amount of choice is commonly associated with welfare and freedom but too much choice causes the feeling of less happiness, less satisfaction and can even lead to paralysis. Research on synthetic happiness established that more choices actually lead you to think too much about your options, getting frustrated when you made the wrong choice since you know you could have an alternative which will cause more stress in the long run. The paradox of choice also influences a lot of why we always try to dwell more on our regrets and hope that we could have done better.

Examples of the paradox include choosing where to eat if you go out with love ones where we all end up asking for recommendations. Choosing the perfect phone by comparing the prices, reading all the guides, watching all the videos, and still end up buying a different phone anyway. The situation even becomes harder when there’s point of no return or too costly such as choosing a degree in college, going abroad to work or study, buying a house. The gravity of making these choices can be too much of a burden for most of us leading to worse decision making.

The Happiness Paradox

Going back to synthetic happiness and gaining the knowledge that we could all be happy whatever we do in life. It breaks the whole system of how human history is made of. From our forefathers to our grandfathers, most of us work day to day to earn an income so that we can buy the things we want or feed our family with the ultimate goal of being happy. But knowing that we can do anything even by not working, we can still be happy because of synthetic happiness. This problem is what lead me to coin the term, the Happiness Paradox.

This brings us back again to the definition of happiness. Is happiness about the psychological feeling that we feel when get to eat that ice cream, we get to buy that new phone, or that lovely feeling when we fall in love. Or is it maintaining the overall well-being of a person so that they could be happy? The answer is both because you need to be psychologically happy while also having established good well-being. The next question is which would we need to focus on more. I got the answers for you. Happiness meter, marginal utility, environment, synthetic happiness, and the paradox of choice.

As you witnessed with the happiness meter, it is entirely up to you what to set as your 100% happiness. It can be composed of just 90% above happiness options like going to a country you dream of, attending that awesome concert in the front seats, eating that rare expensive food you always wanted, and many more. But the problem is when you don’t get those things, you just get more frustrated which defeats the purpose of happiness in the first place. You just raise the bar higher and higher that when you reached the moment that you can’t go above or sustain, you will start to feel sadness or worse, depression. This exactly what happens to most addictive things in life such as non-prescription drugs or gambling.

By placing a lot of things at the top of the happiness meter, you lower your marginal utility for most of the other things as well. You may not like that poor country anymore, being in the general population at that concert, and the ordinary food from the street. Pursuing the grandeur of life, you introduce yourself into a world revolving around money which involves a lot of choices for happiness. The more you also get yourself involved in a high-maintenance environment, the harder it is to get out as well since you know you’ll be surrounding yourself with all the things that make you happy. Even the richest or most powerful people aren’t still happy because of all these things. The big blow will always be why do all of that when you can be happy in the simplest of things anyway.

The answer is don’t chase happiness. Do only what you need to do and focus on them. Study very well, aim for that job, build that business, take care of your health, and don’t rush love. It is better to focus on your well-being first because it’s what able you to do all the things that you wanted to anyway. Let go of that chocolate that breaks your wallet, don’t bankrupt yourself going to that country, and don’t ever go out of your way just to feel good unless it is the only thing that will save you. Once you’ve achieved a good sense of your life then you can do whatever you want. Because our feelings are temporary but our overall state in life won’t change unless you do something about it. You can be sad now but you can be happy tomorrow. If you’re poor now, you are still poor tomorrow if you won’t do anything.

Happiness has always been complicated. It has been my journey to understand its intricacies and finally share what I know. With this article, I hope it helped you at least answer some of your own questions about happiness and get away from the confusion that’s surrounding you.