“Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp,” novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” And yet, in his provocative and scholarly Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile (Oxford, British Psychologist Daniel Nettle finds that human beings are born with a preset level of happiness that may fluctuate during their lives but that remains basically unchanging.
Interestingly, most people rate themselves as “moderately to very happy” while persisting in the belief that they’ll be happier in the future. Our tireless drive toward happiness is simply evolution’s way of getting us out of bed in the morning. The possibility of good fortune lures us to go on, to achieve, to try header but following a period of euphoric adjustment to, say, a job promotion or a new romance, we slip back to our preprogrammed level of contentment. This phenomenon can be traced to “adaptation”—whereby having achieved their ambitions, human beings unconsciously up the ante.
At the same time, the author unearths a few everyday characteristics shared by people who say they are happy, including good health, a feeling of autonomy, and social connectiveness.
Reference: Peter Smith
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