Happiness and Success

If you are a highly motivated person, probably you will have to accept that your happiness level is below average. To advance human welfare, however, we need a motivational system that is NOT happiness-oriented:

The purpose of the human motivational system, according to psychologists, is not to make people feel happy, but rather to motivate actions that promote successful life outcomes. To be effective, this system should be flexible and adaptive, which it is. For example, people who become disabled typically experience deep depression after their accidents, but often adapt surprisingly quickly, soon reporting a mix of moods similar to what they had experienced before. Lottery winners invariably experience joy on receiving their windfalls, but often describe such feelings as fleeting.

To be happy is to take what you end up with, and to be successful is to get what you desire. When you accept and appreciate what you have, you experience what psychologists call synthetic happiness; When you achieve your goals or get what you really want, you have genuine happiness. The untold truth is that there is really not much difference between these two kinds of happiness: you are about equally well off with either one. But that runs in direct conflict with our motivational system: if we were to believe they are the same, nobody would take the extra effort to excel. As the result our culture makes us believe that genuine happiness is superior to synthetic one so that our society will advance. Or we might be able to explain it from an evolutionary perspective: the more motivated(less happy) tribes just won out in the process of natural selection.

If we do a global survey on happiness, I would not be surprised if most Latin American nations end up above countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Here is the original article from NYT, the main point there is to defend the pro-growth economic policy.