Happiness (073121)

#1. Did I do exercise?

#2. Did I serve other people?

#3. Did I get immersed in a meaningful activity?

- That could be as small as pruning a tomato tree, or reading one chapter of the book that I wanted to read. Or it could be as challenging as doing some hard data analysis, or writing some manuscript. But whenever I get some meaningful activity done by immersing myself in it, I feel so much happier and I feel so much .. how do I say content, fulfilled.

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Can you ever truly know what makes you happy?

New research shows how hard it's to understand your own sources of happiness.

The idea that happiness is a state you can achieve through your own actions underlies many of the inspirational messages you see conveyed in posters, in Facebook memes, and advice from popular happiness gurus.

The keys to happy living, in these messages, include such actions as thinking positively, looking for the silver lining in bad situations, and focusing on your own positive attributes. Indeed, such inspirational  messages include the written or unwritten assumption that you actually do need to be happy. But what is it that truly makes you happy? Can you ever really know?

Imagine you've just accomplished what to you is a major goal, and you're feeling pretty pleased about it. You wanted to finish an important project by a deadline, and you did. But how is it that you were able to achieve that goal? Was it due to  your own capabilities, or was it just luck that everything fell into place? Did you need other people to help you, or is it something you did on your own? And now that you've gotten the results you wanted, do you honestly feel better about yourself? Does your happiness in the moment translate to a boost in self-esteem?

On the other hand, what if you failed at your goal and missed that deadline? You could conclude that you're a failed person who can't ever get things done on time, or you could turn your explanation around onto the situation (other people, bad luck, an impossible task) and still come out feeling happy and good about yourself.

According to happiness mantras in the popular media, your best bet would be to preserve your good feelings about yourself by taking stock of your accomplishments in the face of what were insurmountable odds. (...)

University of Missouri's Liudmila Titova and co-author Kennon Sheldon (2019) believe that most people manage to preserve their happiness and self-esteem through what's known as a "self-serving bias(SSB)." A considerable amount of social psychological research supports the idea that most people with high self-esteem prefer to see themselves as the cause of positive outcomes but put the onus on others, or the situation, for negative ones. It's not enough to sing your way out of a disappointment, you also have to bend your perceptions via SSB.