In a recent comment to my post “How Do You Fix Greed? Part II: American Society Is Built for Greed,” someone asked

Why should l sacrifice my self to others? Read Ayn Rand, and you will know where greed comes from.

I was surprised by the question, because the answer seemed obvious to me, but the more I thought about the response, the more grateful I am for the comment, because it’s a fair question: even if greed is bad for society, which is something I’ve been asserting in recent posts, from a certain perspective there’s the following pressing question: So what? If I can get everything I want, why should it matter to me if other people are unhappy about that, or if it interferes with things society or culture expects from me?

For the asker’s interest, I’ve read Ayn Rand, and I’m familiar with a lot of arguments for greed. If you’re looking at the question on a strictly personal level, it comes down to this: people who let themselves fall prey to their own greed are assuming that getting more will bring them more pleasure, and that pleasure and happiness are the same thing. The truth–and there’s good science backing this up–is that having more stuff does not necessarily bring more pleasure, and that even if it did (which it doesn’t, remember), that pleasure doesn’t by itself amount to happiness.

I’m not going to go into detail about all the research here, to prevent this post from becoming unmanageably long, but before I continue I’ll link to other articles on this site, several of which reference the studies that provide the raw information for the connections between human relationships, happiness, and pleasure that I’m about to describe.

The Difference Between Pleasure and Happiness
If It’s Not Fun, Why Do It? A Few Pointed Answers
Why Happiness Is Key
How Other People’s Happiness Affects Our Own
Want to Reduce Stress? Increase Social Time
The Best 40 Percent of Happiness (this one covers lottery winners)
The High Cost of Not Liking Your Job

Why doesn’t “more” bring more pleasure?
Getting more things does not necessarily lead to more pleasure, although it’s true that some things, in some situations, can add to pleasure and even happiness. Unfortunately for our pleasure levels, though, the more we get, the less any given part of it matters. If you go to a restaurant and eat the most delicious meal in the world, the first time you eat it, you may be in ecstasy. If you eat it again the next day, due something psychologists call “hedonic adaptation,” it simply won’t be as good. It’s similar to the process a drug addict may go through, whether that drug is caffeine or crack or something in between. The first hit has an enormous effect, but subsequent experiences produce less and less dopamine, the neurochemical that makes us feel pleasure. In other words, the more I have, the less pleasure I get from each thing.

Additionally, having more power, money, resources, or things also means I have more concerns, because I need to defend myself from people who want to usurp my power, siphon off my money, use my resources, or take my things. As I get more and more, what I have pleases me less and adds more to my stress load. We often envy celebrities, people with political power, and others who have “more,” yet the rates of scandal, failed marriage, substance abuse, and other indicators of severe unhappiness seem to be exceptionally high among these kinds of people. Some of it is surely the pressure of being in the public eye all of the time, but regardless, it lends support to the point that having more is not necessarily pleasurable. Ask the many people who’ve won the lottery and later committed suicide–oh wait, you can’t: they’re dead.

Isn’t “happiness” just another word for “pleasure”?
Even the pleasure that we can get from having more doesn’t amount to happiness. Happiness, according to research, has a lot to do with having enough and not much to do with having extra. It also has a lot to do with how we think and feel about ourselves and about our relationships with other people. If I feel like a good person, am proud of my accomplishments and integrity, enjoy the company of people close to me, experience trust and connection with others, and otherwise make the most of myself and my relationships, I’m far, far more likely to be happy than if I have piles of stuff, people whose interest in me might be mainly about my having piles of stuff, and things I don’t need that I have to defend from people who either don’t have enough stuff or are as greedy as I am.

Greed at its heart is a misunderstanding, at attempt to substitute money, power, or stuff for the things that really make us happy (see the first article in this series, “How Do You Fix Greed? Part I: The Roots of Greed“). The altruistic and kind behavior that seems like sacrificing ourselves, when done in a healthy and proportionate way, surprisingly turns out to get us the most individual happiness of anything we could possibly do. Greed is an easy path to falling short of the happiness we could otherwise achieve.

Photo by CaptPiper

In yesterday’s article (“The Best 40 Percent of Happiness”) I talked about the factors that the current research suggests go into determining how happy we are. About 50% seems to be genetic, 40% from attitude, and only 10% from our life situation.

But this flies in the face of what seems like common sense. After all, the things that cause the most worry and excitement in our lives–jobs, money, romance, new experiences, health, etc.–really do change. We might have a job we hate one year and a job we love the next; we fall in love or get married or split up; we get illnesses or lose weight. Why wouldn’t these make major, long-term changes in our level of happiness? In fact, there are several reasons they generally don’t:

Hedonic Adaptation: “I could get used to this”
Hedonic adaptation is the process we go through of getting used to pleasurable things so that they no longer provide as much bliss as when we first encountered them. The first bite of a really delicious meal or the first week of an incredible romance, tends to provide a lot of stimuli we really like, triggering pleasurable mental and physiological reactions. However, our brains are designed to get used to these stimuli so that the reactions gradually lessen. This seems cruel, but on the bright side it’s also true of stimuli we don’t like, which is why we gradually get used to bad smells, for instance.

So eating caviar every single day eventually will begin to feel about the same as eating oatmeal every single day.

So anything we do that’s pleasurable has a short-term effect unless it’s alternated with other different, pleasurable things. For instance, if you love France and move there, then over time France will likely feel less and less like something special and more and more like the same old neighborhood. But if you move to a new country you like every year (due presumably to being an international jewel thief or space shuttle salesperson or something), then you’ll continue to be engaged by the new places, sights, and sounds–though you might get exhausted after a while and start thinking about the attractions of a good old boring home, too.

There’s more to it than just the one thing
Another reason situations tend not to affect our long-term happiness in the ways we expect is that we tend to focus on just the single most obvious result of a big change. For instance, if you think about winning the lottery, probably the thing that keeps your attention is having a ton of money or being able to quitting your job. You probably won’t be thinking about having to spend more time with your annoying sister-in-law, about people asking you for handouts day after day, or about how bored you might get if you don’t have a structured thing to do, like a job. That’s not to say that the pleasure wouldn’t balance out the inconveniences, at least in the short term, but it does mean that any good thing that happens to us is unlikely to be 100% blissful.

And these factors work the same way on troubles: people with physical disabilities get used to them; people who suffer losses become accustomed to making do with whatever’s left over; and things that are very painful at first tend to become less painful in time.

Cultivating long-term happiness
Whatever the reasons, the research seems clear that attitude means a lot more than situation–even if cultivating a better attitude makes our situation worse. That’s not to say that we should give up and not do anything about our troubles, although it’s possible that’s a route to happiness for some people. Most of us will want to work on our situation and on our attitude.

The important thing to know about cultivating an attitude that creates happiness is that just as we tend to get used to new stimuli, we also tend to get used to anything that inspires us temporarily–so that just trying to have a new attitude is unlikely to produce long-term change because after a while we’ll stop being inspired to do it and go back to our old ways. What will produce long-term change is cultivating habits that change attitude. As these habits become part of our daily behavior, they make a durable and lasting impact on how we see and react to the world, digging out the happiness that’s available from the situations we’re already in.

Photo by keeping it real

Following up on Part I and Part II, here is a third and (for now) final set of tools for improving mood.

One small victory: Any accomplishment or success, however minor, creates an opportunity to feel happier. Even simple achievements like doing a few dishes or solving one computer problem refocus attention on constructive things, provide a distraction from annoyances or disappointments, and offer fodder for positive self-talk.

Change of scene: Our emotions often respond directly to things, places, or people we’re used to associating with better moods. It’s difficult to stay in a funk when we’re with people we genuinely like or or in a beautiful and different setting–while even if the surroundings we’re used to at the moment are very nice, a process called “hedonic adaptation” (discussed more in “But It Started Off So Well! What Happened?“) makes places we’ve been exposed to recently much less impactful than they originally were.

You could also stay where you are and change something about it: read “Letting Your Environment Help You.”

Music: Music can have a speedy and powerful effect on mood, even when we don’t feel like listening. For a detailed treatment of the subject, you could read “How and Why Music Changes Mood.”

Visualization: The interesting thing about imagining things to make ourselves feel better is that in many ways, our brains don’t distinguish between something we’re imagining and something that’s actually happening, which is why a good movie can have such a strong emotional effect. Visualizing ourselves in a calm, pleasant place or dwelling on a past or expected event that’s particularly joyful gives a brain the chance to start reacting to that visualization and to shift into the appropriate mood.

Photo by Meanest Indian