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psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness, and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.9 Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year, but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year.
what constitutes the real happiness of human life, [the poor] are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them.
If rich kings are no happier than poor beggars, then why should poor beggars stop sunning themselves by the roadside and work to become rich kings?
The pleasures of wealth and greatness . . . strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it. . . . It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.
The joy of children is another that for most of us hits a bit closer to home.
Yet if we measure the actual satisfaction of people who have children, a very different story emerges.
Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of “empty nest syndrome” is increased smiling.18 Interestingly,
Why do we rely on our imaginations in the first place? Imagination is the poor man’s wormhole.
imagination’s first shortcoming is its tendency to fill in and leave out without telling us
Imagination’s second shortcoming is its tendency to project the present onto the future (which we explored in the section on presentism).
Imagination’s third shortcoming is its failure to recognize that things will look different once they happen—in
if they lost the coin flip. Why? Because simulators did not realize how quickly and easily they would rationalize the loss
Science has given us a lot of facts about the average person, and one of the most reliable of these facts is that the average person doesn’t see herself as average.
We experience our own thoughts and feelings but must infer that other people are experiencing theirs.
Because we value our uniqueness, it isn’t surprising that we tend to overestimate it.
we expect others to recognize our feelings even when we can’t recognize theirs.
The problem is that we cannot easily estimate how we’ll feel when we get it. Bernoulli’s brilliance lay not in his mathematics but in his psychology—in his realization that what we objectively get (wealth) is not the same as what we subjectively experience when we get it (utility).
The determination of the value of an item must not be based on its price, but rather on the utility it yields.
There is no simple formula for finding happiness. But if our great big brains do not allow us to go surefootedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.
