Happiness derives from contrast
Suppose you win the National Lottery. Now suppose you have been paralysed in a major car crash. You probably think that, if the first were true, six months after the event you'd be much happier than if the second were true.
Well, it is not so. Studies of the way people react to major happenings show that big money lottery winners, statistically, are no happier than those paralysed in a car accident, six months after each event.
Six months is the keyword, here. There is an element of habituation, a mechanism by which our minds get used to almost anything.
Basically, the maintenance of an emotional state (whether good or bad doesn't matter) and the repetition of a stimulus result in a neutral state, in which the stimulus has no more or little effect. Happiness is relative, and depends just on the contrast with a previous state.
A way in which this habituation occurs is through a series of rationalizations, a sort of "lying" to ourselves which is not necessarily lying, but giving a different interpretation to things. Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard professor of psychology, in a study found that those in a serious long-term romantic relationship predicted they would feel much worse if the relationship ended than they actually did. Some time later, there was no real difference in happiness between those still in the relationship and those who split up.
What happens is, when we are left, we then think that person was not good for us or we didn't love him/her very much after all. The psychologist Gilbert gives the example of a man who missed an opportunity to become a billionaire, and many years later he would say that it turned out best that way.
Happiness is difficult to predict
Like all emotions, forecasting happiness is very difficult. This point is related to the previous one. We normally have much faith in our capability to predict our states, we believe we can predict how we'll feel much more than we actually can.
Since every major decision we make is based on a prediction of this kind, to understand this is very important. The decision to marry or divorce, to pursue one career rather than another are based on an implicit forecast of how we'll feel, often wrong. We may marry someone thinking we'll be happier than we turn out to be; on the other hand, we may find it too difficult to break a relationship because we think we'll feel much worse than we would in fact. We may not take enough risks, because we overestimate how bad we would feel in case of failure.
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