The Happiness Distribution

Why I believe we can learn to be happy

Introduction

When I was 22 (some 7 years ago) I first read the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. In his book he explores the history of Homo Sapiens and how they have changed the world around them. However, an idea that really stuck with me is something he explored further into the book when looking at the possible futures of the human race. When talking about humans and the epidemic of depression that plagues so many in the modern age, he introduces the idea of happiness as a 1-10 scale.

Happiness as a scale

The idea is actually very simple. In his book, Yuval introduces the idea that each individual has a base level of happiness. This could be determined by any number of factors, but he takes the very naturalistic view that this is determined by the chemical balance that your body is in at any one point in time. Let’s say that a very lucky person has a base happiness level of 7, whilst a less lucky person has a base happiness level of 4. In this view of happiness, the lucky person might experience life when things are going well at a happiness level of 8 and when they are going less well at a level of 6. Meanwhile the unlucky person might have a situation where life is objectively going very well for them, but still only reach a happiness level of 6, leading to the rather depressing conclusion that the unlucky person will rarely ever be as happy as a lucky person. However, this deterministic idea is not really how we treat most things in life. The difference being that we don’t really treat happiness as we would treat skills or capability.

How do we treat fitness

To illustrate my point, I am using the example of 5km times in the US. According to my very brief research, to be in the top 10% of runners, you need to run a 5km race in less that 26 minutes. Meanwhile, the average sits somewhere between 35 and 40 minutes (remember average for running 5km only ever includes people who actually choose to run a 5k in the first place, so even if you have an average time you are already winning).

To some people reading this, the idea of a 26 minute 5k might sound a daunting task and it is if you have never trained for running at all. However, being very conservative, if you gave the majority of people a year to train I can say with a high degree of confidence that most could enter that top 10% category. With training, you could move your base running pace to a much higher level and you capability will have massively increased.

Now some of you reading might be skeptical of this example, as it very much falls in the physical realm, so let me choose something else. During the COVID 19 pandemic, many of us were trapped at home and started to pick up a number of different hobbies. Mine was Chess.

I got obsessed with the game and from the 5th November 2020 to the 10th of February 2021 I played 957 games of chess (just under 10 games a day). In that time I reached an elo rating of 1000 which put me in the top 20% of players (who actually play chess). In 99 days, by training a skill, I had put myself in the top 20% of something.

The point I am making here is that it is generally accepted in our lives, that by training something, whether it is our capacity as in running or our skill as in chess, in most aspects of our life, we accept that we can change our base capability. Why should this not be the same for something like happiness.

Athletes and geniuses

Just a quick side note, to explore the extremes. In any sport, game or skill, there are the people who are the best in the world. To take an example from the Olympics, it is generally accepted that Micheal Phelps is the greatest swimmer of all time. Micheal Phelps had a mentality and training regime, without which he would never have reached the greatness that he did. However, he also had a set of inherent advantages that made him special. He is 6’4” with a 6’7” wingspan. He had high torso to leg ratio combined with hyper flexible ankles, elbows and shoulders that made it possible to get a range of motion that other athletes could not achieve. This gave him a set of attributes that meant that with the same level of training from other athletes, they couldn’t match what nature had gifted him. Micheal Phelps’s base potential was higher than other athletes.

However, this would all have been entirely irrelevant if he hadn’t put in the work. There is a world in which Micheal Phelps, with all his inherent advantages, never trained to be a swimmer at all and would have been just as average as anyone else.

And here is my point. In life, we are all given a hand, a set of attributes that we didn’t have any control over. Sometimes, we won’t necessarily have the optimum set of attributes to be a good runner or a good chess player, but it is my belief that work is actually more important than that original set of attributes. You may not have the hand that allows you to be the greatest swimmer of all time, but could you get into the top 20 or 10 percent? I think in most cases the answer is yes!

Learning to be happy

I am sure by now, you can tell what point I am going to make. If you can train to be fit and train to be good at a skill, why would you not be able to train to be happy? I believe you can and that is what I am trying to explore in my writing. Happiness, I believe to be complicated because it is inherently multi faceted. There are chemicals in your body that affect how you feel, there are factors outside your control in life that affect you and how you perceive the world. It is a more difficult problem than getting better at running and chess, because there is not a single simple goal to pursue. There is not one path to getting happier and there aren’t clear training plans.

However, what I am trying to tell you with this article is that if you are struggling with happiness that can change. It’s possible to work with what you have, train your skills and capacity and take yourself from where you are today to that top 10%. And considering that happiness is literally how you experience life every day, to me this seems something worth training for.