Happiness from the Bottom Up

Abstract

This dissertation presents three papers organized around a central theme: understanding happiness from the bottom up, in the context of everyday life. The first paper asks whether, in the course of daily activities, people need to choose between two different facets of happiness: momentary happiness and life satisfaction. Results reveal a high degree of convergence: activities associated with momentary happiness are to a large extent also associated with life satisfaction (and related constructs such as feeling that one’s life is meaningful, worthwhile, and fulfilling). Activities that one might expect to be associated mainly with a satisfying life are also associated with greater momentary happiness, and activities that one might expect to be associated mainly with greater momentary happiness are also associated with greater life satisfaction. The second paper quantifies happiness in absolute terms, revealing the percentage of life that is actually “worth living.” Existing research on happiness relies on measures of happiness that have only relative meanings. In this paper, we measure happiness by leveraging a dimension of experience that does have absolute meaning: time. We collect data on the details of people’s everyday experiences, and employ a novel method to categorize episodes of time as absolutely positive or negative. We find that roughly 40% of people’s time is experienced as negative. When we offset the positive and negative utility of these episodes we find that life is a net positive, but only moderately so. The third paper examines the relationship between happiness and a particular domain of everyday experience: mind-wandering. Participants report mind wandering (i.e., engaging in task-unrelated thought) nearly half the time, but are less happy when doing so. Moreover, timelag analyses find that unhappiness tends to follow rather than precede mind-wandering, suggesting that mind-wandering causes unhappiness rather than the other way around. Interestingly, the variance in happiness explained by mind-wandering is largely non-overlapping with variance explained by people’s activities. This suggests that what people do (their activities) and think (whether and where their minds wander) may be two independent determinants of happiness.