Good news: Happiness isn’t everything

I promise this will be the last good news article for a while. As a grumpy middle-aged German this series of good news articles is getting increasingly on my nerves and is making me decidedly unhappy. Hence, next Monday, normal service will resume, and you receive a random mix of good news and bad news posts. Happy now?

Indeed, happiness is still seen as the ultimate goal in life. So much so that the pursuit of happiness has become an American credo. But as Kuba Krys and colleagues have shown recently, this is a very WEIRD way to live your life.

And with WEIRD, I don’t mean weird, but the acronym WEIRD, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic. It has gained a lot of traction in psychology research. You see, most psychology (and indeed economic) studies are done in rich developed nations in North America and Western Europe (with a bit of Australia and New Zealand sprinkled in). All these countries are culturally very close to each other mostly because they share a common history in Western Europe or started as colonies of the British Empire.

What we increasingly recognise is that once you ask non-WEIRD people, results can change dramatically. In happiness research for example, the British-American tradition is to think of happiness as the ultimate goal in life. Being healthy, having harmonious relationships, finding meaning in life and work, etc. are considered to be steps on the way to achieving maximum happiness (see left hand sketch in the chart below).

In other cultures, in particular in Asian and African cultures, happiness is considered to be one part of well-being but not the ultimate goal in life. Rather, happiness interacts with other factors such as meaning or spiritually to create a much more diverse assessment of well-being (or what people like to call ‘the good life’) as shown on the right-hand side of the chart below.

Narrow and broad models of well-being

Source: Krys et al. (2024)

If you look at happiness in this broader context, then achieving maximum happiness will not be your goal in life. This in turn increases life satisfaction and well-being because other factors such as spirituality or living in harmony with nature and other people are much easier to control than happiness itself. Happiness is simply too fragile and vulnerable to external shocks.

Analysing the responses of tens of thousands of people worldwide, here is an overview chart of the optimal level of happiness that people in different countries aim for. Note how in general people in Western Europe try to achieve very high to extreme levels of happiness while people in Asia and Africa are content with more moderate levels of happiness.

Ideal level of happiness across cultures

Source: Krys et al. (2024)

What do we learn from this? Maybe trying to cheer my readers up by bringing them a week of good news isn’t really increasing their happiness. Rather, we all should look for a content life where happiness is in harmony with spirituality, nature, our friends, and family. Get off the hedonic treadmill and stop thinking about how to maximise returns for a moment. Take a step back and ask yourself what true well-being looks like for you. Because if you increase well-being, you will be able to better deal with the inevitable bad news that bombards us all the time and will continue to do so forever.