What is happiness? My friend P.W. and I were talking about it some time ago and we found it difficult to agree even on the most fundamental characteristics of happiness. It was clear to both of us that happiness is subjective (the best way to assess whether somebody is happy is to ask them); in fact, the subjectivity is pretty strong: a lot of the factors we considered (wealth, intelligence, family, physical appearance, health) didn’t seem obviously related to happiness–we could think of plenty of frequent situations where added wealth didn’t make the person any happier, for example.

When I think of happiness, I imagine a two-dimensional model. One dimension is the person’s capacity to perceive happiness. This capacity changes over time, varies from person to person, but it changes slowly. It defines a sort of spectrum. The other dimension is where in that spectrum the person is currently perceiving themselves to be. Essentially, at any given point people are somewhere between very unhappy and very happy, but those limits change over time as people realize how much happier (or how much more unhappy) they can be–either because they understand the world better, or see additional opportunities that they haven’t seen before, get hardened in life, or simply experience more. I think a significant hurdle people encounter when they talk about happiness is that these two dimensions are frequently confused. It’s not clear to me, for example, whether what we frequently refer to as “happiness” is the first dimension (the range of happiness), the second dimension (the absolute happiness), or some combination of the two. A simple yet useful way to think about these dimensions is to imagine a scale going from X to Y (the range) and a pointer Z somewhere between X and Y (absolute happiness). There are three quantities we may care about: Y (or X) (the extremes of happiness and unhappiness that we can conceive of), Z (happiness on an absolute scale), or (Z-X)/(Y-X) (a notion of where we are relative to the range: happiness on a relative scale).

If we use this framework for understanding happiness, we’ll see that increasing your range (i.e. discovering what it means to truly be happy) lowers your relative happiness. You can see this fairly easily if you think about a frequently cited adage “Ignorance is bliss”. Would you rather lead a life where you are happy but don’t have much of a conception of the complexity of the world around you, or lead a life where you are not so happy but are aware of what surrounds you, understand the world, and can perceive how much happier you could be relative to the other case. Would you prefer your happiness range (Y-X) to be small and your relative happiness to be large, or vice versa? In other words, do you care about absolute happiness or relative happiness?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 at 07:07 and is filed under paramathematics, reductions, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.