Analysing Happiness

Nine days into my Happiness Year I have yet to record one happy one faced day (or a sad faced day). I took some time to analyse happiness further, to understand it on a deeper level.

Happiness can be pictured as a happiness profile over time. Your happiness profile moves up and down and tends to a steady state (how you feel on average over the long term). Each person perceives the course of a day's events with ups and downs. For someone who is euphoric, their perception of events is generally up and their steady state is positive. A happy (or sad) faced day occurs when your happiness profile is above (or below) a certain threshold.

The key to being happy is to increase your steady state or lower your threshold required for a happy faced day.

I believe that people are usually happier at the start of the year. There is an afterglow from the end of year break and many people think 'new year, new start'. I also believe that there can be momentum with happiness. People can have a run happiness or sadness for over six months, before it returns to the steady state.

I can start by breaking down the longer term goal of a Happiness Year into attempting to make each day, and in turn each moment of each day, happy. It means turning events I may perceive as a down into a neutral or even an up. I have noticed that there are often times where I feel a fleeting down moment, in some instances out of my control. For example, if I am hungry or on a crowded train, I may have a down moment. If I can turn these down moments into a neutral or a minor up, I will gradually lift my steady state higher. I can also turn moments where I feel a minor up, such as when I see a nice cloud, into a major up.

By doing this, I am attempting to excel in happiness and be the best at happiness. I have to realise that what I am doing is contrarian and that the average person's steady state may be around a neutral. However, I am trying to be better, to be on the 99th percentile of happiness, and this means not perceiving events in the same way that people on average may perceive them.

By being happy, it does not mean that I am not motivated or driven. It means I am those things and happy.

This week also served as a reminder to me that after a long week working and socialising, work and trading are not for me. I have no happy faced days. It has negatively affected my other goals in life. I feel drained, dispirited, and wasting my life, despite being in a good position, having a good job, and trading well. I am not living the way I want. And that has to change. Starting now.

Happiness Year

It had always been a goal of mine to live a 'Happiness Year'. An year dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. Like some difficult things, I had always put it off, delayed it until the time felt 'right'. Problem is sometimes that time never comes.

Today marks the first day of my Happiness Year. I know it is not an easy task where you simply flick on a happiness switch. There will be good times and bad times. The idea is to make each time a happy time. I see it akin to re-wiring the brain to be in a happy state of mind, being positive and optimistic, despite the situation you are in. I will have to read up on the principles I have learnt and train myself to be happy.

(In this Happiness Year, my goal is to have a happy faced day each week. I aim to achieve 50 happy faced days to 5 sad faced days.)

Perhaps at the end of this year I will decide that it is something I want to continue. Let the year begin.

Turning Point

I recently reached a turning point in my life.

The turning point arose from the events of the past month where I accomplished a long term goal and made real progress on a few others, the (Requiem For A Dream) which led to me (Defining The Dream), and (Putting It All Together) where I took time to evaluate the direction that I want to go with my life.

I discovered that life is about maxmising utility. I will embody this new way of thinking in an audacious goal of living a 'happiness year' where I will devote a whole year to living happy.

I know how easy it is to forget about the importance of maximising utility. Even after writing these words I lost sight of what life is about while I was trading. To remember to never lose sight of this, it will form one of my life purposes.

As long as I am alive, as long as the sun keeps coming up every morning, I know I'll still be happy.

Putting It All Together

Isn't life just about maximising utility (relative satisfaction, or as I put it, the ratio of happy to sad faced days)? In so doing, living the dream?

Life is about doing what makes me happy and makes me feel good, loving God, myself, and others unconditionally (re: Self Worth / Who I Am). It is not about how happy I make others feel, least of all some random girl, or hating which doesn't do myself or others any good.

My happiness or utility is of utmost importance. It's all for this. One must be mindful that there are other important values in life too, happiness differs from one person to another, and that happiness refers to both the short term and the long term (one may be doing something that makes them unhappy in the short term if they expect it to provide longer term happiness). One must also understand that the ability to realise one's full potential, thereby offering wider scope of options to maximise utility, applies to people at the top level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. While I have been generally happy, I have spent too long living below my potential.

From experience, (What Makes Me Happy) has been pretty consistent over time and matches the findings in (Happiness). The Coke Happiness Ambassadors found that family and friends, music and dance, sports particularly football, and food are what makes people from around the world happy. Studies show that making love (+12.9 / 91), sport and exercise (+6.5 / 77), and music and dance (+6.2 / 73) [theatre and concerts, talking and conversation, playing, singing and performing and listening to music] make people happy (Mappiness app / Science magazine). While commuting (-2.0 / 62), home computer (61), working and studying (-1.9 / 59), care for adults (-4.0), unpleasant mind wandering, rest, waiting, queueing (-4.1 /48), and being sick in bed (-19.7) make people unhappy. Surveys also show that health is more important than income for happiness.

In terms of life satisfaction, the equivalent monetary benefit or loss per year of different contributors are: health (+$463,000), better social life (+$131,000), marriage (+$105,000), seeing friends and family regularly (+$97,000), divorce (-$34,000), unemployment (-$114,000), separation (-$255,000), death of a spouse (-$309,000). 6 of the 8 are solely about relationships.

Income (+0.18), education (+0.08), health (7.9/10) and marriage (+0.06 / 7.8/10) contribute to happiness [1], [2]. In terms of work, students (7.8/10) and the retired (7.8/10) are the most happy, voluntary part-time workers (+0.02) and the self-employed (+0.02) are happy, while the unemployed (-0.08) were most unhappy.

I don't want to fall into the trap of the U shape pattern of well-being where happiness declines from the early 20s to the early 50s then rebounding in older age. The midlife slump in satisfaction that people experience is equivalent in magnitude to the influence of a major life event like unemployment or marital separation. [1]

Life is a game of statistics. Improve your odds by practising and testing outcomes, learning from experiences, speaking to experts, and playing to your strengths. Evaluate each major decision with the aim of maximising short term and long term expected utility. Take a step back and think about the scenarios before you act while considering different points of view. Evaluate the best case, worst case, and 50th percentile scenarios while assessing benefits, costs and risk (re: No Regrets).

The Power of Thought

It's our thinking, not our circumstances, that determines how we feel.

William James, the father of American psychology, once said, "Thinking is the grand originator of our experience". As we think about something, we feel the effects of our thoughts.

Every experience and perception in life is based on thought. Our thoughts and consequent actions are shaped by ourselves, what we learn, and the world around us. We have innocently learned to interpret our thoughts as if they were reality, but thought is merely an ability that we have. We are the thinkers (the ones who produce) those thoughts. As Shakespeare said, '"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". An example of this is the placebo effect, which shows that placebos can have real, measurable effects on physiological changes in the brain.

When we realize that thinking is an ability rather than a reality we can dismiss negative thoughts that pass through. As we do so, we can maintain a positive feeling of happiness, because we no longer feel compelled to seriously follow every train of thought that comes into our heads.

In The Beginning

As a species on this planet our lives are insignificant. In relative terms, our time on this planet and the scale of our achievement is nothing.

We live in a universe that is difficult to comprehend. Our sun is one of an estimated 300 billion stars in the Milky Way that is approximately 100,000 light years across. Astronomers estimate there are 500 billion galaxies in the universe. This does not include the countless number of planets and other celestial bodies in the expanse that is space.

At the other end of the scale, current thinking is that fermions (quarks and leptons) and bosons form the elementary particles of matter. Then there is antimatter and dark matter, which have yet to be explored [1].

In the infinity of space and the infinity of time infinitely small particles mutate with infinite complexity.

Sometimes we may get caught up in thinking that the world revolves around us. Yet, so much about the world we live in is unknown. Let alone the universe or what lies beyond.

Focus on the Goal

What I have achieved so far is nothing relatively speaking. I have made no significant accomplishment and there are still things I should be good at doing.

To go where I want to go, it is essential that I go for my goals and believe I will achieve them. I must know what I have to do each day and have a winning attitude remembering that almost everything I want to do has been done before.

With goals, it is best to have a maximum of 1-2 main goals to focus on. This increases the likelihood of achieving them. 

Goals may change and some things that are important to me now may not be important to me in the future. I know that I have to keep my goals flexible and the possibilities open. I also endeavour to expand my perspective by doing things I am not good at and don't necessarily love, in order to behave better.

I have to remember to not dwell on the past, let anything get to me, or place unnecessary pressure on myself. Yesterday is history. The nights lying in bed crying about girls. The nights walking home alone talking to myself about finding the dream job and shouting in agony in the bathroom. This heartbreaking year of posting on sites and waiting but nothing happening. The number of interviews and interview practice. I have to re-frame the negative situations to something positive and see what I learnt.

I have to focus on what I can do. I have to learn from the past and pay heed to the lens of history. I have to be mindful of momentum. I have to remember what matters most to me and not let that get pushed aside.