The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [74]
Researcher Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues asked college students how they felt about their soon-to-be-announced dorm assignments. They had seemingly good reasons to worry about which of the various buildings would be their home, including proximity to campus, attractiveness, reputation for noise, room size, and group amenities. But these worries turned out to be misguided. This study, published in 2003, offers a title worth reading, too: “Location, Location, Location: The Misprediction of Satisfaction in Housing Lotteries.”8 Students vastly overestimated the impact that housing assignment would have on their quality of life. According to many studies, location seems to have almost no impact on happiness. It is both intuitive and counterintuitive somehow; we knew it, and we would have never guessed it.
In 1900 about 20 percent of both men and women were at work in suits and skirts—white-collar workers. About 42 percent of men were outdoors—in farming, forestry, mining, and fishing—and the second-largest group was factory workers.9 That same year, a third of wage-earning women were working as domestic servants—the kind of toil that no population stays in if it can escape. A hundred years later, 58 percent of men and 52 percent of women are in white-collar work. And whereas in 1900, domestic labor and farm work accounted for 47 percent of women’s paid labor, in 1998 it was 3 percent. Fewer people have to survive by dangerous, backbreaking, or grossly humbling work. Consider this, too: on average, Europeans live in dwellings that have more people than rooms: a family of five in a four-room apartment. In America, it took us two hundred years to achieve the average of one room per person. We reached it just after World War II, and it took us only fifty years to double it: the typical house or apartment now has 5.3 rooms for every 2.6 people.10 Ninety-five percent of our dwellings have central heating, whereas in the mid–twentieth century only 15 percent did. Imagine what a heated, private room for each child would have sounded like to most of history. Pure luxury.
The idea of living without these luxuries makes us unhappy. So where’s the happiness crest that they should have given us? We ride it every day. We are happier than we would be if, say, two of our siblings had died from childhood diseases, and too many people lived in our house so we could never be alone, and we worked a hard job every day. It may sound self-congratulatory, but we did not make the world we live in; we inherited it from people who rejected the world they were in and drew up plans for ours. How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac, and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium, and played on the grass. With no time to make strudel, with opium illegal, and with the grass all paved, you will be happier if you have access to packaged cakes, modern pharmaceuticals, and foam rubber beneath the monkey bars.
This mystery holds up even on a nation-to-nation comparison. There is a correlation between a country’s per capita GDP and its reported “satisfaction with one’s life,” but, as one research team put it, “the linkage is surprisingly weak.”11 The United States is one of the richest countries in the world, but we rank at only about the middle of advanced nations in our reported happiness.12 Why are people surprised about this? Because they expected money to help in a way that money does not help.
Why then do comparatively well-off people keep furiously working toward wealth? Or at least fantasizing about it? Because of the abundance inference: a little food makes us a lot happier, so we think a lot of food will makes us a great deal happier still. It is hard to notice, because even though the connection between lifelong happiness and money is weak (above poverty), the short-term burst of joy is still strong. You can get some euphoria from spending money. But euphoria is spice; you can’t have it for a meal. You don’t want euphoria to ever start cutting into