Reaching the Top of the Happiness Scale

I read the other day about a study published in the Perspectives on Psychological Sciences journal. No, I hadn’t heard of it, either, but it sounds very important. And it must be since I was reading about it in TIME magazine. And TIME doesn’t report on unimportant stuff, so I’m assuming this is a very important study. It was on happiness. A bunch of experts asked a bunch of people a bunch of questions about life satisfaction and income, then ranked the whole bunch on what was termed a happiness scale.

And they apparently found there was a correlation between happiness and success. The higher you ranked, the more money you made. The article didn’t editorialize on whether this implies happiness leads to success or success leads to happiness or indicate if the experts who conducted this study had drawn any conclusions. Maybe its just a vicous circle. The kind of circle you’d like to join.

But apparently the correlation falls apart if you reach the very tippy-top-top of the scale. If you consider yourself blissfully happy, Number Ten Happy, your life satisfaction completely, well, satisfied, then, weirdly, it seems it’s likely you don’t make as much money, have as much stuff, or have GPAs quite as high as those who fall into slots Number Eight and Nine.

I got excited. Isn’t this proof that money doesn’t buy happiness? In which case, I have a shot to become very, very, very.... very happy.

But when I read on, I became confused. Experts think, therefore, that there may be an advantage to being slightly dissatisfied. Experts posit this means that the slightly dissatisffied try harder. They’re more likely to change a career. A major. Their hairstyle. Which means they’ll probably get a bigger house, have TiVo, and a Harvard degree.

Advantage, advantage... I pondered that word. Pondered the article. Pondered the perspective. Pondered changing my hairstyle. And after all that pondering, I could only conclude that this very important study missed something very, very important.

Ponder it.