The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People(3)

Unfortunately, that is how we have been measuring happiness up until recently. We have been using income as a proxy for happiness, well-being or quality of life and using GDP per capita to measure our progress as nations. One of the reasons for this is that income – national or personal – is objective. However, happiness is not. Happiness is subjective.

This is often the first response I get when people hear that the Happiness Research Institute tries to measure happiness:

‘How can you measure happiness, it is so subjective?’



Yes, of course happiness is subjective, and it should be. To me, that is not an issue. What I care about in my research is how you feel about your life. That is what counts. I believe you are the best judge of whether you are happy or not. How you feel is our new metric – and then I try to understand why you feel that way. If you are happier than your neighbour, who has the bigger house, the fancy car and the perfect spouse, by our measures, you are the one that is doing something right.





Working with subjective measures is difficult, but it is not impossible. We do it all the time when it comes to stress, anxiety and depression, which are also subjective phenomena. At the end of the day, it is all about how we as individuals perceive our lives.

Happiness can mean different things to different people. You may have one perception of what happiness is, I may have another. Right now, we put the happiness label on different things, which, from a scientific point of view, makes it difficult to work around. So, the first thing we must do is to break the concept of happiness down into its various parts.

For instance, if we were to look at how the economy is doing, we could break it down into indicators such as GDP, growth and interest and unemployment rates. Each indicator gives us additional information about how the economy is doing. The same thing goes for happiness. It is an umbrella term. So, we break it down and look at the different components. Let’s go back to that morning in Paris. How happy was I?

When we look at how I was feeling at that moment, I was angry with myself for forgetting the computer, I was tired, and I was sad to hear that a lot of Americans would be facing four difficult years. In short, I was angry, tired and sad. Happy? Not so much, and pretty far from sitting on a sun-bathed balcony in the Alps eating leftover pizza with friends. On the other hand, I was in the middle of a book tour and had the privilege of talking to people around the world about my work and about happiness, so, overall, life was not treating me badly.

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THE THREE DIMENSIONS OF HAPPINESS


The first lesson in happiness research is to distinguish between being happy right now and being happy overall. We call these two states, respectively, the affective dimension and the cognitive dimension.

The affective – or hedonic – dimension examines the emotions people experience on an everyday basis. If you look at yesterday, were you depressed, sad, anxious, worried? Did you laugh? Did you feel happy? Did you feel loved?

In order to look at the cognitive dimension, people have to take a step back and evaluate their lives. How satisfied are you with your life overall? How happy are you in general? Think of the best possible life you could lead, and the worst possible. Where do you feel you stand right now? For you, the best possible life imaginable may involve fame and fortune, or it might mean staying at home to home-school your kids. To me, those are equally valid dreams. When trying to evaluate happiness, the important information is what your dream is and how close you feel to living that dream.

Of course, the affective and cognitive dimensions are connected, and they do overlap to some extent. If your days are filled with positive emotions, you are likely to report higher levels of overall life satisfaction. Equally, we can have shitty mornings and still feel we have a wonderful life overall.

To make things a little more complicated, let me introduce a third dimension called eudaimonia. That is the Ancient Greek word for happiness, and it is based on Aristotle’s perception of happiness. To him, the good life was a meaningful and purposeful life. In this book, I will mainly focus on overall happiness – the cognitive dimension – people who feel they have a wonderful life, but we will look at our everyday moods and our sense of purpose as well.

Once we have looked at these three dimensions, what we at the Happiness Research Institute ideally do is to follow people over time. Not in a creepy, stalker kind of way but scientifically.

We monitor large groups of people over long periods of time to see how changes in their lives impact on their happiness. If I were to follow you and ten thousand other people, some significant changes are bound to happen to each individual over the next decade that will make a difference to how happy they are. Some of them will fall in love and some will fall out of love; some will be promoted and some will be fired; some will move to London and some will leave the city; some will break hearts and some will have their hearts broken. Over the next ten years, highs and lows are guaranteed, we are bound to witness victories and losses – and at least one distrait, elbow-patch-wearing scientist will leave his computer on a plane. The question is, how do those events and changes in life circumstance impact on the different dimensions of happiness? What is the average impact on people’s life satisfaction from doubling their income, getting married or moving to the countryside? That is what we try to understand.

The combined average of World Happiness Reports 2013-2017