Part of the sequence: The Science of Winning at Life

One day a coworker said to me, "Luke! You're, like, the happiest person I know! How come you're so happy all the time?"

It was probably a rhetorical question, but I had a very long answer to give. See, I was unhappy for most of my life,¹ and even considered suicide a few times. Then I spent two years studying the science of happiness. Now, happiness is my natural state. I can't remember the last time I felt unhappy for longer than 20 minutes.

That kind of change won't happen for everyone, or even most people (beware of other-optimizing), but it's worth a shot!

We all want to be happy, and happiness is useful for other things, too.² For example, happiness improves physical health,³ improves creativity,⁴ and even enables you to make better decisions.⁵ (It's harder to be rational when you're unhappy.⁶) So, as part of a series on how to win at life with science and rationality, let's review the science of happiness.

The correlates of happiness

Earlier, I noted that there is an abundance of research on factors that correlate with subjective well-being (individuals' own assessments of their happiness and life satisfaction).

Factors that don't correlate much with happiness include: age,⁷ gender,⁸ parenthood,⁹ intelligence,¹⁰ physical attractiveness,¹¹ and money¹² (as long as you're above the poverty line). Factors that correlate moderately with happiness include: health,¹³ social activity,¹⁴ and religiosity.¹⁵ Factors that correlate strongly with happiness include: genetics,¹⁶ love and relationship satisfaction,¹⁷and work satisfaction.¹⁸

But correlation is not enough. We want to know what causes happiness. And that is a trickier thing to measure. But we do know a few things.

Happiness, personality, and skills

Genes account for about 50% of the variance in happiness.¹⁹ Even lottery winners and newly-made quadriplegics do not see as much of a change in happiness as you would expect.²⁰ Presumably, genes shape your happiness by shaping your personality, which is known to be quite heritable.²¹

So which personality traits tend to correlate most with happiness? Extroversion is among the best predictors of happiness,²² as are conscientiousness, agreeableness, se...

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