I’ll be happy once I find my soulmate and get married.
I’m really just focused on getting this promotion, which will make me happy.
Once I’m in my 40s, the best days of my life are over and I’ll never be as happy as I was in my 20s.
I’ve dreamed since I was a kid that I’d be a successful actress. That is clearly not going to happen, which makes me unhappy now and will for years.
The Myths of Happiness addresses why these are…myths. Lyubomirsky is a happiness researcher who wrote The How of Happiness, but there’s plenty of new insights in here as well.
She breaks the book into different themes that that touch on these and other “myths.” The advice differs a bit between myths, but there are some common themes / messages:
Happy “in spite of” v. happy “if only.” Perhaps the most important takeaway is to eliminate “happy if only” thinking. It’s human nature to fixate on one event / milestone (promotion, marriage, etc. ) and assume that it will make us really happy. And it will! But not for a long time, due to…
Hedonic adaptation. Over time, we get used to things and they stop making us particularly happy. When people get married, they enjoy a large boost in happiness…which goes away after 2 years. Employees who move jobs have an even shorter honeymoon: they’re happier for only 1 year, and then they are back to their baseline. So a key part of creating enduring happiness is…
Overcoming hedonic adaptation and finding ways how not to get used to things. There are a lot of strategies she gives, but many of them center around variety and appreciation.
Variety - it’s important to introduce novelty and variety in our lives (particularly marriage and relationships). When we encounter surprises, it forces us to pay closer attention to what’s happening and appreciate the experience, which also helps us appreciate our partner more
Appreciation - finding ways to actively appreciate what we have is important. This can be expressing gratitude and appreciation to a partner. It can also be about framing our current circumstances. If we are dissatisfied with our current job and feel like a promotion is what will make us happy, we can instead focus on a past job we had in the past and how are current job is better than that.
The big stuff is less important than you think and the small stuff is more important than you think. People generally overestimate the impact of major life events on their happiness. For example, people who get divorced generally become happier over time. When thinking about a negative life event that will happen, we tend to think that it is the only thing that will matter 5 years from now. But in reality, there will be lots of new things - positive and negative - that impact our happiness in the future that we can’t even anticipate now. Conversely, the day-to-day mood and emotional valence of our lives matters more than we’d think. For example, providing yourself small pleasures daily will make you happier than one large pleasure once a month. So, what matters less is the once-in-a-decade trip we take with our spouse, and what matters more is having regular positive interactions with them.
Actively own and engage with your regrets. Many (all?) of us have “lost selves”: paths we could’ve taken with our lives but didn’t (e.g., marrying someone else, going into a different profession, moving to a different continent). The key to living with regrets is to acknowledge them and that they won’t occur, but to also incorporate them into our lives going forward:
If you wanted to be an Olympic athlete but couldn't, could you find some competitive sport as an adult to honor your passion and competitive nature?
If you wish you could’ve lived in a different country but couldn’t, is there a way to engage with that country’s culture and use it to enrich your current life? (e.g., teach your kids the language, learn how to cook the cuisine with your spouse or friends?)
There is a lot more in here, with specifics for each area. I enjoyed it overall and would recommend it, even having read many other books on happiness before this (links to other posts on the topic below).
Some additional thoughts / reactions
The “happy if only” dynamic is why think this is why people in their 30s are generally happier than people in their teens or 20s. (if not happier, than definitely at more secure and more at peace). When you’re in high school / college / the years post-college, there are a ton of milestones / checkpoints you can look to (getting into college, getting the right internships, getting your first job, being accepted to grad school, finding a girlfriend or boyfriend, getting married, etc). Everyone around you is also vying for these things, so it’s also easy to want to compare yourself to others to see “how you are doing.” Once you get past that and are midcareer, maybe with a kid or two, you realize that this is pretty much going to be your life for the next couple of decades - if anything, life will never be so simple (toddlers are much easier than teenagers). There isn’t some life event or thing that will magically appear and save you or radically change your life for the better. So, once you realize that “this is it,” it’s easier to focus on what is in your control and what isn’t
A related reason why I think it’s easier to be happy as you get older is that you also realize that other people’s lives aren’t perfect and that everyone is carrying some kind of burden or pain invisible to the people around them. So, you are less likely to make comparisons and more likely to be grateful with what you have. “If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.”
I thought the part of the book on regrets was particularly interesting. This is a topic that doesn’t get talked about enough, even though we all live with regrets. In general, engaging / ruminating on our regrets can be painful - and is a hard thing to discuss with others - so her treatment of how actually to actually address them in a productive way was quite helpful.
She also suggests taking more risks, as we are more likely to regret inaction v. action:
We tend to focus more on unfinished v finished tasks, so regret over inaction eats at us for longer
If you take a risk and do something and it doesn’t go well, you can usually fix it, but it’s impossible to fix inaction
Related posts:
The How of Happiness: Lyubomirsky’s original book on happiness
Happiness is a Choice You Make: Investigation of why old people are so happy