While I think there are very serious concerns that advancing technologies, and AI in particular, raise (such as lack of control over these systems with could be a tremendous threat, reduction of agency, and the potential for extreme concentration of power), if we can keep these technologies well under control and pointed at the betterment of humanity (a big if) I don’t think they have to destroy meaning. Here’s why:

While some people do derive a lot of their sense of self-worth from their work (such as myself), and such people could be especially hard hit if they are replaced by technology, there are, thankfully, many things that humans intrinsically value, and therefore, lots of potential sources of meaning. By seeking and then (at least to a reasonable degree) creating what we intrinsically value, we create meaning.

So let’s have a quick look at different human intrinsic values (i.e., things people value for their own sake, not as a means to an end) and how advancing technology, such as AI, may impact each of them:

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Spirituality and purity: there are no reasons I see that technology would have to interfere with spirituality, religion, or attempts to act purely. So these values could continue being a source of meaning.

Truth and learning: if anything, really effective technology can accelerate the search for truth and our ability to learn. At the same time, technology gone wrong could make the truth harder to discern (e.g., if technology facilitates misinformation outcompeting accurate information).

Achievement: this one could be hard hit by technology insofar as it’s related to doing things that eventually AI may do better than all of us. At the same time, humans find a lot of value in achievements regardless of non-human performance. For instance, people compete in sprints (even though cheetahs could easily outrun us) and find value in achievement in chess (despite AI being able to easily beat the best human). A lot of people also value personal achievement – merely doing the best you can, or improving to do better than your own previous results.

Freedom: while technology could impair freedom (e.g., if it concentrates power into the hands of certain actors, they might choose to limit freedom), there is also potential for technology to expand freedom a lot by allowing us to do many things that weren’t possible before, either because we didn’t know how to do them or because they were too costly before.

Pleasure, non-suffering, longevity: there is no fundamental tension between technology and these values, and technology may be able to improve these by reducing sources of suffering (such as disease), increasing lifespans, and making pleasure more easily accessible.

Happiness (as distinct from pleasure and non-suffering): This is a tricky one, because technology can cut both ways here. For instance, while it’s likely social media has increased some kinds of pleasure, it may well have reduced overall happiness for some people by making them more disconnected or impacting the way they see the world.

Caring, reputation, respect, loyalty, and virtue: these don’t have to be impacted by technology; we could continue valuing these in our relationships with others, even in a world where AI has replaced most work. The main threats I see here from technology are the ways that social media can cause people to spend less face-to-face time together, and the way that AI friends or “relationship” partners could take the place of human relationships.

Justice and fairness: this could go either way. Technology could concentrate power in a way that makes these worse or systematize bias. On the other hand, if the benefits of technology are distributed widely, they could create increased abundance. Technology also has the potential, if harnessed correctly, to reduce (currently commonplace) human bias.

Diversity: globalization tends to reduce diversity, and so technology could accelerate that trend. On the other hand, giving people more freedom through technology could end up increasing forms of diversity (such as how people choose to live their lives).

Protection: technology has the ability to make us safer, so while we may experience more protection (for ourselves and our loved ones), it also could mean that our own role of protecting others is reduced, which could reduce the meaning derived from providing protection. On the other hand, if technology is not developed thoughtfully, the world could feel increasingly chaotic and even become more unsafe, so protection could become even more important.

Nature: technology has a track record of destroying nature, so that trend may continue. However, it’s possible that with sufficiently advanced technology, that trend will go the opposite direction (e.g., cheap green energy makes it easier to protect nature). Technology often destroys nature either as a means to accelerate or as a side effect of acceleration, but sufficiently advanced technology may reduce that effect.

Beauty: technology has the possibility of increasing beauty in the world (making it easier to create and experience beauty), but also runs the risk of filling the world with generic slop.

Overall, while advancing technology may have a negative impact on some things that humans intrinsically value, as long as we don’t destroy the world with these technologies and avoid allowing extreme concentration of power from them, other intrinsic values may not be impacted or even be benefited by technology. As long as we can seek and (to a reasonable degree) create what we intrinsically value, there are sources of meaning available.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2025, and first appeared on my website on December 22, 2025.

Here are four incredibly bad ideas (that are still commonly believed):

1) That people should be judged for, blamed for, or feel shame about the behavior of their ancestors.

Of course, if your ancestors did bad things, you should condemn those acts. And if you directly benefit from something bad your family member did, you should consider if you can make amends.

But, logically, people cannot be morally responsible for events that they were unable to affect.

This bad idea (that we are responsible for the behavior of our ancestors) is partly responsible for numerous cycles of violent conflict, as well as for unjust punishments and unhelpful guilt.

2) That small differences in group means are a good justification for jumping to conclusions about members.

This idea is partly responsible for a variety of forms of prejudice and harmful stereotyping.

Epistemically, a small mean difference provides only a sliver of evidence about individuals. Morally, it’s unjust to treat individuals as though only their group matters.

3) That there’s a simple explanation for all or most human behavior.

Variations on this idea have led to a great deal of confusion about human nature.

Human behavior is not all about sex, or self-interest, or happiness, or status, or individual survival, or even love.

Humans have a very diverse set of forces that influence behavior: emotions, culture, values, habits, instincts, heuristics, goals, etc.

4) That you need to follow a prescribed template in order to have a fulfilling life.

This idea has led to countless people being pressured into or trapped in lives that are bad for them.

Some people will be happiest as homemakers, others as professionals, and still others as adventurers, etc. Sometimes, the best life for a person will match the stereotype for their gender or group; other times, it will be the opposite, and at other times, it will seem completely out of left field.

Our boxes are much too small to force people’s lives into.

This piece was first written on July 5, 2024, and first appeared on my website on November 10, 2024.

1) “But I only care about well-being (in the sense of happiness, pleasure, or lack of suffering) – that’s my ONLY intrinsic value.”

2) “People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being.”

Here’s my response:

First of all, I want to say that I really appreciate thoughtful criticism of my work. It helps me see the truth more clearly and improve my ideas. Thank you to those who provide it!

Before responding to these critiques, let me clarify what my actual claims are.

I claim that:

i) One thing the human brain does is assign value to states of the world (e.g., if that person loved me, it would be valuable; if they hated me, it would produce negative value).

ii) Upon careful reflection, we will see that most of these things we value we only value instrumentally – that is, we value them because they give us other things. But some of our values are “intrinsic values” – we care about them for their own sake and would value them even if they give us nothing else (see here).

iii) Intrinsic values are psychological facts about humans. No claim is being made here about what people “should” value or what is “objectively” morally valuable.

Since we’re talking about psychology (not philosophy), we can study people to discover their intrinsic values.

How can people’s intrinsic values be studied? Well, we had people go through a quiz to help make sure they understand what intrinsic values are, and then we asked them about many values and had them rate them on this scale.

What we found is that most people say they have MANY intrinsic values. Here are examples of the most common ones we found among Westerners.

Okay, so now to address the critiques, starting with the first one:

Critique 1: “But I only care about well-being (or happiness) – that’s my ONLY intrinsic value.”

Well, you may be right that you only value well-being (with no other intrinsic values). On the other hand, in our studies, it’s very rare for someone to have only one intrinsic value, so perhaps you are mistaken about your values (or using definitions in a different way than me).

Even if you do only have one intrinsic value (which you might!), that doesn’t mean that most other people only have one – in our experience, most people report having many, even when a lot of effort is made to help them understand what exactly an intrinsic value is.

Let’s take on the second critique:

Critique 2: “People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being.”

One way to interpret this critique is as a claim about what objectively matters – e.g., “people might think other things matter, but the objective moral truth is that only well-being matters.”

This is a very controversial philosophical position that most laypeople and most philosophers disagree with. For instance, these survey results of professional academic philosophers show that most don’t accept consequentialism, let alone theories that only value well-being (see this result from the PhilPapers Survey).

But even if the objective moral truth were that only well-being matters, that still wouldn’t mean that people’s intrinsic values all bottom out in well-being.

Remember, these are psychological facts we’re referring to here, NOT facts about the universe or philosophy. People might (psychologically) intrinsically value things that are not “objectively”/”universally” valuable.

Another (quite different) way to interpret this critique (“People may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being”) is that all psychological values bottom out in well-being.

For instance, perhaps if people reflect deeply enough, they will realize that everything they think they value intrinsically (that doesn’t seem to be just about well-being), they actually ONLY value because of its impacts on well-being.

This strongly contradicts what people claim about their own intrinsic values.

I think there are actually a lot of situations where people intrinsically value something other than well-being.

Let’s consider some of these:

(1) Some people seem to value truth intrinsically – in fact, they’d rather know an unpleasant truth even if it made their well-being a bit lower than believe a lie. I’m not saying they value truth infinitely – just that they would sometimes be willing to sacrifice some amount of well-being for the truth. For instance, if a friend (who is now deceased) secretly hated them during the whole friendship, I think many people would want to know that, even if they predicted they would be less happy knowing than not knowing.

(2) As an extreme example, many people are horrified by the idea of spending the rest of their life in total bliss if the way it is achieved is via a machine that deludes them into thinking at every moment that they’ve just won a Nobel prize, or if it’s achieved by a drug with no side effects which makes them blissful but prevents them from ever doing anything else other than lying there and experiencing bliss. Many people are adamant that they wouldn’t choose such a life even if it makes them way happier than they would normally be, and even if their loved ones could get it too (so they wouldn’t be leaving loved ones miserable).

(3) Many people care about how people think of them after they are dead – after the point that their well-being can be impacted.

(4) Many people seem to intrinsically value human connection – while human connection (e.g., love) does tend to make people happy, people often are willing to do things that make themselves less happy for those they love – even when those things aren’t about improving the happiness of the loved one (e.g., making well-being sacrifices to satisfy the wishes of a loved one after that person has passed away).

(5) There are many things people profess a willingness to sacrifice some of their well-being for, and they actually back that willingness up with behavior (i.e., they say and act as though they believe the thing is more valuable than the marginal well-being it sacrifices). For instance, some people seem to value nature itself (I’m not talking about the suffering of animals in nature or the impact nature has on humans – I’m talking about the protection or preservation of nature itself – such as the protection of trees, ecosystems, or the survival of endangered species). Some people make some well-being sacrifices to have a more positive effect on nature.

(6) Another intrinsic value some people appear to have is not being too prideful or boastful. People do not usually care about this (I claim) because of considerations related to well-being. Similarly, many people care about worshipping god or being a good practitioner of their religion – for reasons unrelated to potential reward (though, of course, the religion might say there also can be a reward).

(7) Many people seem to value equality intrinsically. For instance, many people (in fact, most people, I think) would be willing to sacrifice a little total utility to spread the utility a bit more equally. They think a world where 10 people each have (in arbitrary units) 0.999 utility (leading to a sum of 9.99 utility) is better than one where one person has 10, and everyone else has 0, even though the former world has slightly less total utility than the latter. Equality may be a well-being-related value, but it is not the same as valuing well-being – many people are willing to give up some total well-being to get more equality.

All of that being said, many intrinsic values are, indeed, well-being-related.

But even if we just consider well-being-related intrinsic values, I think it’s a mistake to collapse them into a single intrinsic value of well-being (or happiness) since they can be very different from each other (despite all being well-being related) and can be valued in very different amounts by any one person.

As an example, most people value their own happiness to a different degree than the happiness of their family members, and they value their family members’ happiness to a different degree than that of strangers (or cows, or snakes, or ladybugs). So yes, these are all well-being-related values, but I think it’s more accurate to think of these as multiple intrinsic values because the amount they value each is not the same. Again, I’m not talking here about objective moral truth (is it right to value these different amounts?) – I’m talking about psychological facts.

Furthermore, some people even value positive states of well-being to different degrees than negative ones (e.g., they value reducing suffering more than increasing happiness). This suggests that well-being isn’t a single unified intrinsic value for these people.

There is one more interpretation of a critique like “people may THINK they value other things, but everything that matters bottoms out in well-being,” which is that all people REALLY value is their own pleasure – when they say they value something like nature itself or equality or being remembered when they’re gone, they are just getting pleasure out of the thought of that thing, and it’s that pleasure itself that they value. I think this is a very inaccurate perspective on the way human minds work, but it’s way too much to cover in this essay. Here is a whole other essay where I address that topic if you’re curious to see it.

So, do all intrinsic values boil down just to well-being? I don’t think so – intrinsic values are psychological facts about humans, and “bottoming out in well-being” just doesn’t seem to be how most human minds work. Most humans intrinsically care about lots of different things.

This piece was first written on June 5, 2024, and first appeared on my website on June 20, 2024.

This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.

Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the opportunity to have more free time. On the other hand, it’s a cliche that “money can’t buy happiness.” Many admire and aspire to the lifestyles of multi-millionaire celebrities, yet rich and famous people often seem desperately unhappy. 

But what does science say about this question? The answer is relevant for all of us as individuals: how important is it for our happiness to strive to make a high salary? It’s also relevant for states: if policy-makers want citizens to be happy, should they prioritize increasing their wealth, or other things?

So, what’s right? Does money make you happier, or is happiness something money can’t buy? In this article, we tell the tale of scholars’ attempts to find out whether money makes people happier, and why they ended up disagreeing on such an apparently simple question. We think you’ll find the results surprising — particularly the recent saga of how some scientists set out to understand the link between income and happiness.

As usual, we’ll discuss the studies’ methodologies and results in detail throughout this piece. However, if you’re short of time and/or just want to know what are the key takeaways, you jump to the “key takeaways” section, at the end of this article. 

Does money increase life satisfaction?

There’s a clear, cross-cultural relationship between income and ‘life satisfaction’ (or ‘life evaluation’). This is broadly how well someone thinks their life is going, relative to what’s realistic for them. For example, in the Gallup World Poll (a large survey, run in over 160 countries), surveyors measure life satisfaction by asking participants in their native language:

“Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?”

This is known as the ‘Cantril ladder’. Participants with higher incomes tend to place themselves higher on the ladder than those with lower incomes. This is true both across countries and within countries. In poorer countries, people rate their life satisfaction as lower than in richer countries:

Source: Our World in Data

Citizens of poorer countries, where the GDP per capita is less than $5000, have low average life satisfaction (3-5 out of 10), whereas in richer countries like Switzerland, Singapore or the US, the average life satisfaction rating is higher (6 or 7 out of 10). Results are typically similar for other measures of life satisfaction, such as answers to the question “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?”

To complicate things somewhat, the relationship between income and life satisfaction is logarithmic. This means that every time you double someone’s income, their life satisfaction doesn’t double, but increases by a fixed amount (in this case, roughly 1 point on the life satisfaction scale that ranges from 1 to 10). 

Note that the chart above is a “log plot” – you’ll see that on the x-axis, income roughly doubles at every division, going from $1000 to $2000 to $5000 to $10,000. So a straight line on this plot means that every doubling of income is associated with an increase in happiness of a fixed number of points. On a regular (not logarithmic) scale, the graph instead looks like this:

Source: Our World in Data

This means that though an increased income is associated with greater life satisfaction, this is proportionate to how much a person is already making. Let’s say you start making an extra $1000 a year in income: this will impact your happiness a lot if you were originally making $2000 a year, but it won’t make a big difference if you were already making $100,000 a year. To put it another way, for those who are poor, life satisfaction will typically increase quite a bit as they make an additional $10,000, but for those who are rich, this amount of money has far less impact. .

The charts above show the relationship between income and life satisfaction across countries, but higher-income countries and lower-income countries differ in many ways other than wealth. For instance, lower income countries tend to have worse healthcare systems, so it’s hard to tell if they have lower average life satisfaction due to lower incomes or due to worse healthcare systems (or due to a myriad of other differences between wealthy countries and poorer countries). So it’s hard to be confident from this data alone that higher incomes cause greater life satisfaction, rather than some other factors increasing both income and life satisfaction.

That’s why it’s useful to bring in evidence from within countries, to see if the effect holds within a single country as well.

Source: Our World in Data

Each country in the chart above is represented by a line, connecting the average reported life satisfaction of people in five income quintiles within the country. The chart is messy, but in general, the story is the same: most of the lines trend upwards, with richer citizens reporting a higher life satisfaction than poorer citizens.

Source: “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, NBER Working Paper 18992, April 2013. Reformatted in the Economist

The chart above shows a more limited sample of countries. This data is older, from 2013, but it shows a similar trend: if we look at the US line, we can see that average life satisfaction ranges from about 6.6 (out of 10) at the lowest incomes, to around 7.5 at the highest incomes. Compare this to the India line: average life satisfaction is lower in India overall, but just as in the US, poorer Indians on average report lower life satisfaction (about 4.2) than richer Indians (about 5.8).

Other ways of measuring life satisfaction also show within-country differences in life satisfaction depending on income. For example, in the chart below, participants in the US were asked whether they were ‘very satisfied’, ‘somewhat satisfied’, ‘somewhat dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ (rather than being asked to rate their satisfaction on a scale). The proportion of ‘very satisfied’ people is higher in higher income bands, and the proportion of dissatisfied people is lower. Although the number of participants is not high in the lowest and highest bands, on the right hand section of the table (Panel B) we see a fairly steady increase in the percent of people who are very satisfied as income rises. 

Source: “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, NBER Working Paper 18992, April 2013. 

Note that even this within-country data doesn’t prove that income causes greater life satisfaction: all these polls show is a strong association between income and life satisfaction. Perhaps even within countries, other factors (such as the quality of infrastructure in richer vs poorer areas of a single country) cause people to feel more satisfied with their lives and to earn more money. However, given that across-country and within-country evidence agree, and it’s reasonable to assume a priori that money can contribute to life satisfaction by enabling people to buy things they want and need as well as to have more control over their time, it stands to reason that there is probably a causal link. But we should keep in mind that the data don’t provide absolute proof that an increase in income causes an increase in life satisfaction. 

An additional complicating factor is that this data measures averages. Even if on average it’s the case that greater income causes greater life satisfaction, for any given person, income and life satisfaction could be more or less closely related than average. This means that two people of the exact same income may be impacted very differently by the same increase in income: perhaps the extra money allows one person to leave a career they hate and pursue one they love, whereas the other just puts the additional income into their savings and doesn’t end up using it for anything important. So we have to be careful not to make confident generalizations about individuals, based on the average. 

So, if more money is associated with greater life satisfaction, is it right to say that the wealthier tend to be happier? Not exactly: it depends what you mean by happiness. 

Does more money make you happier day-to-day?

The Gallup polls, and many other studies related to happiness, measure life satisfaction: participants are asked to reflect on their lives holistically and think about how things are going. However, life satisfaction is only one way to measure a person’s happiness. We might also consider how emotionally happy people feel day to day: whether they tend to feel joyous, content and calm, or stressed, depressed and anxious. This is sometimes known as ‘hedonic wellbeing’ or ‘experienced happiness’.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton wondered if there was a relationship between this moment-to-moment hedonic wellbeing and money, just as there was with life satisfaction. In a 2010 experiment, they analyzed more Gallup data, this time from 1000 U.S. residents. This survey, rather than asking participants to rank themselves on Cantril’s ladder, instead asked them whether they had experienced specific emotions for a lot of the previous day (for example ‘enjoyment’ ‘sadness’ or ‘worry’).

The researchers then grouped these emotions together into ‘positive affect’ – happiness, laughter and enjoyment – and ‘blue affect’ – sadness and worry. They also measured stress. People with higher incomes were more likely to report experiencing positive emotions the previous day, and less likely to report sadness, worry or stress.

Source: “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being”, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, PNAS 107, September 2010

As with life satisfaction, the relationship between hedonic wellbeing and income was logarithmic in Kahneman and Deaton’s data for lower incomes, meaning that doubling a person’s income was associated with a fixed increase in their hedonic wellbeing. However, unlike with life satisfaction, this experiment seemed to show that increases in emotional wellbeing taper off at around $75,000 per year (in the U.S.); after that, extra money didn’t seem to increase wellbeing anymore.

On the graph above, ‘ladder’ refers to Cantril’s ladder, the life satisfaction question asked in other studies. You can see that this line continues to go up while the hedonic wellbeing lines flatten out. Again, note that this x-axis is on a log scale, with income doubling every division.

This provides an interesting contrast to the life satisfaction studies: it seems that if you already make $75,000 a year in the U.S., you might become more satisfied with your life if you made more money, but you’d be unlikely to have more positive emotional experiences day-to-day. This makes some intuitive sense: money helps us meet our basic needs and can solve a lot of problems, but there are other problems that it’s much harder to solve with money and that even billionaires have to face — for example relationship conflict, bereavement, or mental and physical illness. Maybe once you’re making $75,000 a year, you can solve all the problems that are soluble with money, leaving only those trickier problems.

But it turns out that story is wrong! 

Questioning the taper 

It makes intuitive sense that day-to-day, hedonic wellbeing would taper off at higher incomes. However, Kahneman’s and Deaton’s result did not hold up to scrutiny. A decade later in 2021, economist Matthew Killingsworth tried to replicate their conclusion on new data. He found something different: in his analysis, hedonic wellbeing did continue to increase with income, even above $75,000 a year. It didn’t taper off or plateau. The slope of the graph was also the same below $75,000 a year and above $75,000, meaning that on average, a doubling of income from $15,000 to $30,000 a year and a doubling from $75,000 to $150,000 a year are associated with the same increase in emotional wellbeing.

What was going on here? Kahneman (the author of the first paper), Killingsworth (the author of the second paper) and psychologist Barbara Mellers, keen to get to the bottom of this, acted like ideal scientists: they embarked on an adversarial collaboration, all working together to try to work out why Kahneman’s and Killingsworth’s experiments had got such different results.

They discovered a few important differences between the 2010 and 2021 studies. First, the 2021 study used more accurate data collection methods. In Kahneman’s 2010 study, surveyors had asked participants to recall whether they’d felt certain emotions the previous day. But in Killingsworth’s experiment, participants instead received smartphone notifications several times per day that asked them to rate how they were feeling at that moment, on a scale of ‘very bad’ to ‘very good’. Since they asked participants multiple times and asked them to describe their feelings in the moment, rather than relying on memory, they got a more accurate measurement of each participant’s general hedonic well-being. There were also many more data points in the 2021 study: over a million data points from 33,000 people (vs 1000 people in the 2010 study, which when separated into different income buckets makes it a bit thin). Killingsworth’s experiment also surveyed more high-income people and had more different income bands, rather than lumping together all participants who made over $120,000 a year.

However, despite this, Kahneman and Killingsworth (when working together) did find some evidence for a plateau in hedonic wellbeing above $75,000 a year in income. So why didn’t it appear in Killingsworth’s study? Why did Killingsworth find that emotional wellbeing didn’t seem to plateau even at high incomes, up to $500,000 a year and beyond?

When the authors re-examined the data from the 2021 study, they discovered that the plateau did exist — for the 20% of the population with the lowest emotional wellbeing. That is, if you experience lots of negative emotion to begin with, additional income is not associated with increased hedonic wellbeing once you make over $75,000 a year, but if you have average or high hedonic wellbeing, additional income is associated with an increase in day-to-day positive emotions, even if you are already wealthy.

As they investigated, they realized that they had missed this because their methods of measuring wellbeing worked better as measures of unhappiness, or negative wellbeing: they couldn’t easily differentiate between people who were pretty happy, moderately happy, and very happy (in terms of their day-to-day emotions). This made it more difficult to spot that the plateau only existed for the 20% of the population with the lowest day-to-day wellbeing. 

So does that mean day-to-day wellbeing does increase the richer you get?

Well, yes…and no. Media discussions of this story focussed simply on whether happiness increases with income, since that was the main focus of the research. 

But another relevant question — probably more relevant for most people — is how much happier does more money make you? Let’s look at the data (on a regular, non-log scale):

Source: our reanalysis of data from Kahneman, Killingsworth and Mellers’ 2022 adversarial collaboration.

Does it look like average wellbeing increases in the higher income categories? It basically looks like it doesn’t! If you squint, you can just about notice that the bar in the $625,000-a-year band is a tiny bit higher than the bar in the $15,000-a-year band. 

You can only see that logarithmic upwards line if you zoom way in:

Source: our reanalysis of data from Kahneman, Killingsworth and Mellers’ 2022 adversarial collaboration.

Look at the y-axis. In this zoomed-in version, you can see that the lowest point of the curve — the average wellbeing of people making $15,000 a year — is at about 60.9, on a 100-point scale. The highest point — people making $400,000 a year — is 65.8. That is, the difference between the poorest and the wealthiest is only about 5 points, on a 100-point scale!

The takeaway from these hedonic wellbeing studies is often ‘more money makes you happier’. While this isn’t wrong, a more relevant lesson from this research might be that people with vastly different levels of wealth have surprisingly similar levels of emotional wellbeing. 

To put this another way, even if we assume this entire effect is causal (that is, that income is causing all of this increase in emotional well-being), then if you made 25 times more money, taking you from the bottom 10% to well within the top 10% of US incomes, you should only expect to get half a point happier on a 10-point scale (from 6 to 6.5). 

We suspect that many will find the small size of this effect surprising. 

To be fair, the authors of the adversarial collaboration did mention this, but it wasn’t the focus of the paper, and we suspect that many people who looked at the paper briefly would have missed it:

‘[Kahneman and Deaton] reported that the effect of an approximately fourfold difference in income is about equal to the effect of being a caregiver, twice as large as the effect of being married, and less than a third as large as the effect of a headache.’

What is the more interesting finding — that emotional wellbeing goes up logarithmically with income, or that emotional well-being goes up very little with income? We think that the second finding is likely to be the more important one for most people.

Now, of course this result doesn’t mean that you yourself wouldn’t have much higher emotional wellbeing if you were to increase your income substantially — but the link seems weak enough that we should be wary about assuming we’ll feel much happier moment to moment if we make more money. 

Life satisfaction varies much more than hedonic wellbeing 

If hedonic wellbeing varies so little, what about life satisfaction, the variable we discussed at the beginning of this article? The data show that people with greater incomes have higher life satisfaction, on average, but is this difference equally tiny? 

No: if we look again at the within-country data on life satisfaction, we can see that the US line spans more than 1 point on the 10-point scale. What’s more, the difference is even greater if we compare countries: the poorest in India are about 3.5 points less satisfied, on average, than the richest in the US.

Source: “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, NBER Working Paper 18992, April 2013. Reformatted in the Economist

So, life satisfaction, in general, seems to vary much more with income than hedonic wellbeing. 

–

To make a more direct comparison, looking at US data, every doubling in income is associated with an increase of 0.6 on 10-point scale in life satisfaction, and an increase of only 0.1 on a 10-point scale in hedonic wellbeing (or equivalently, 6 points on a 100-point scale for life satisfaction, and just 1 point for hedonic wellbeing).

Another way to understand this difference is to measure the variance from the mean of each measurement, which Killingsworth did in his 2020 study. 

Source: ‘Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year’, Matthew Killingsworth

Note that the x-axis here is logarithmic (with incomes doubling at each division), and the y-axis uses not absolute scores but z-scores, which measure how many standard deviations each participant’s score is from the mean. The blue “life satisfaction” line slopes up more sharply than the red hedonic wellbeing line, meaning that as income goes up, life satisfaction rises faster than experienced well-being (it increases by a greater number of standard deviations).   

This is counter-intuitive: if people’s day-to-day feelings are middling (as they seem to be, on average), shouldn’t this lead to a middling level of life satisfaction? Are people bad at remembering their day-to-day emotions, so that when they answer life satisfaction questions, they overestimate or underestimate how good their life is?Perhaps. But more plausibly, life satisfaction and hedonic wellbeing are different elements of happiness, rather than two different ways to measure a single, unitary trait. Most people value positive emotions, but they also value other things, including career, family, status, material goods, achieving their goals, and money itself. And sometimes, striving to achieve something you aspire to — something that would increase your life satisfaction — will cause more negative emotions in the short run — for example, when you overwork yourself and take on lots of stress to hit a work milestone. 

Key takeaways – Are people, on average, happier when they make more money? 

We’ve learned that:

• Making more money is associated with moderately greater life satisfaction 
• Making more money is associated with a very small increase in hedonic wellbeing 
• …unless we’re talking about is the unhappiest 20% of people who already make $75,000 a year or more in the U.S., in which case additional income was not associated with greater hedonic wellbeing
• In both cases (life satisfaction and hedonic wellbeing), extra income has a greater effect when you start off with less money – or, more precisely, each doubling of income is associated with the same effect.  

So, the link between income and happiness  depends on what you mean by happiness, and how much money we’re talking about. Ultimately, you can make some predictions about the way you might feel if you had more or less money, but like so many scientific questions, the answer is messy, and you’re unlikely to know for certain how things will turn out. Perhaps this is why our cultural clichés give us such mixed signals about this question! 

Building Happiness Habits

You’ve learned how income is related to happiness, but if you’re interested in exploring habits that could help you improve your day-to-day hedonic wellbeing, we encourage you to test Clearer Thinking’s “Building Happiness Habits” interactive tool.

It works by pairing certain happiness techniques – namely mindfulness and gratitude – with everyday activity triggers such as walking or checking social media, thereby cultivating happiness-improving mental habits. 

We tested each technique on hundreds of users and found that they made a positive difference for those who practiced them, in just 3 days.

Each technique is:

• Easy to learn – there’s no need for long, difficult training in order to be able to perform them.
• Simple to apply — there’s just one main thing to do, not a bunch of steps.
• Time-efficient — it takes just a few minutes a day to practice them.

Ready to make your days a little brighter?

According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what’s the truth? 

The truth is that there isn’t a single notion of what makes something the “best.” To explore how great (or not) America is, we’ll start by looking at the question from multiple angles. We’ll see how the U.S. stacks up according to a number of important factors before we decide how great it really is:

 1. Technology 

The U.S. is among the best countries in the world for technology and business innovation. It currently ranks 3rd in the United Nations’ Global Innovation Index. It has the most startups worth over $1 billion (the 3rd most startups per capita) and is the originator of many technologies used globally. It is also considered by many to be the best place to create a tech startup. 

2. Violence

The U.S. is a violent place, given its level of wealth, with the 2nd highest number of gun-related deaths in the world and the 2nd highest rate of firearm-related suicides per capita. Among high-income countries with at least 10 million people, it has the highest number of homicides per capita.

️3. Prisons

The U.S. is a country of many prisoners, with the most people in prison of any country in the world and the 6th highest incarceration rate in the world (and the single highest rate among wealthy countries).

Violent crime charges are the number 1 reason people are locked up in the U.S. (though in some cases, the definitions for “violent” can include actions that don’t cause immediate physical harm, such as purse snatching and drug manufacturing). 

4. Wealth

It’s an extremely wealthy place with the highest nominal GDP in the world, as well as the highest GDP per capita (both nominal and PPP) of any country with over 10 million people. California’s economy alone is large enough that, if California were a country, it would rank 6th in the world by some metrics. And by some metrics, Texas’s economy is larger than Russia’s and would rank 8th.

About 9% of U.S. adults are millionaires, and 39% of ALL millionaires are in or from the U.S. 

5. Inequality

The U.S. is a fairly unequal place in terms of wealth and income, with inequality higher than 63% of countries (the Gini coefficient is 39 vs. a world average of 38). It’s the 5th most unequal among the 37 OECD countries, and the average income of the top 20% of earners is 9.4 times the bottom 20% (though note that inequality figures can be dependent on how taxes and social benefits are handled in the calculations).

The wealth gap in the U.S. is especially pronounced across racial lines, with the median Black household having $24,000 in savings vs. the median white household with $189,000 in savings (almost 8x more). 

6. Science

The U.S. is a very scientifically innovative place, with the most Nobel prizes of any country (the 15th highest per capita). It also has the 2nd highest annual patent applications (which is the 4th highest per capita), many of the world’s top universities, and the most clinical trials worldwide. 

7. Health

The U.S. is an unhealthy place relative to its level of wealth. It has the 10th highest prevalence of obesity (the highest of any wealthy country) and the highest rate of death from illicit drugs of any country where such data is known. Life expectancy in the U.S. is 79 years, which places it 47th highest out of 193 countries (so, it’s roughly in the top 25th percentile). 

8. Entertainment

The U.S. is arguably the most influential country in the world in terms of entertainment production, with the most movies made each year of any country, as well as the largest box office sales and the largest music market size. 

9. Healthcare

Many Americans feel let down by U.S. healthcare despite the U.S. spending the most per capita on healthcare of anywhere in the world. Roughly 48% of Americans rate the healthcare system as excellent or good, 31% as fair, and 21% as poor, which are worse ratings than surveys found in the 2010s.

The U.S. has exceptional top hospitals but bad price transparency (so it’s hard to know what you will end up paying) and inflated prices relative to a lot of the rest of the world. 

10. Desirability

The U.S. is rated the single most desirable place to move to for people worldwide looking to emigrate, though its ratings have declined somewhat. In terms of Americans wanting to leave, during the Bush and Obama eras, about 10% of Americans said they’d like to move to another country, and this jumped to 16% in the Trump era. 

11. Military

The U.S. spends a shocking amount on its military, with about 39% of ALL worldwide defense spending being by the U.S. At times its military power has been a stabilizing force worldwide (e.g., against the Nazis). On the other hand, the U.S. has also initiated a number of disastrous wars. 

12. Happiness

The U.S. is a pretty happy place. When Americans are asked to rate their “general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10”, the average score is a 7 (compared to an OECD average score of 6.7), which places the U.S. 14th highest among 41 OECD countries.

When asked to imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 to 10 at the top, with the top representing the best possible life for you and the bottom the worst possible one,

Americans place themselves at 6.9 on average, which is 16th highest out of 167 countries (i.e., 10th percentile). According to the World Happiness Index, which attempts to evaluate countries’ happiness by combining factors like GPD per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and perceptions of corruption, the U.S. is 16th out of 142 countries (i.e., 11th percentile). ️

13. Ideals

The U.S. has high ideals, some of which are reflected in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It sometimes lives up to these (e.g., through its strong personal freedoms), and sometimes has dramatically failed to live up to them (e.g., in its use of slavery and treatment of Indigenous Americans). 

Reaching a verdict: How great is the U.S., really?

So, is the U.S. one of the greatest countries? One approach to this question is to simply say that it can’t be answered because different countries differ in too many ways to make such comparisons possible. Another approach is to say that just one of the factors above trumps all the others.

Our preferred view, however, is to think of it in terms of your values: depending on what your values are, you will weigh the factors above differently. By some sets of values, the U.S. may arguably be the best country, whereas, by others, it doesn’t even come close.

At our organization, Clearer Thinking, we conducted research to figure out what it is that people value intrinsically (that is, what people value for its own sake – not as a means to other things). We’ve organized the results of that research into 22 different categories of common values:

Once you have a list of your own intrinsic values (which you can find out with our Intrinsic Values Test), then you can start to answer the question of how great the U.S. is.

For instance, if you have strong values related to protecting those who are less fortunate, you may give the U.S. lower marks due to its relatively high levels of inequality, whereas if you place more value on achievement, the U.S. may get higher marks due to being highly innovative in technology, business, and science.

It can be easy to base your judgments, including those about how good the U.S. is, on group identity rather than based on careful consideration of the facts and what you value. As political scientists Patrick Miller and Pamela Johnston Conover have said:

“The behavior of partisans resembles that of sports team members acting to preserve the status of their teams rather than thoughtful citizens participating in the political process for the broader good.” 

Employing a framework like the one outlined above, where you:

1. first attempt to impartially consider the facts,
2. then consider your values, 
3. and use the facts to inform how good or bad the thing is according to your values, can help you ensure that you’re deriving your conclusions thoughtfully and carefully, rather than simply deriving them from a desire (conscious or not) to conform to the expectations of group identities.

Ultimately, whether you conclude that the U.S. is great or not, we suggest basing your judgment on an evaluation of the facts plus careful consideration of your own values, not based on other people’s expectations.

This piece was first published on the Clearer Thinking blog on January 3, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 10, 2024.

This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

In previous posts, I’ve described Valuism – my life philosophy. I’ve also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry.

Valuism and Effective Altruism

Effective Altruism is a community and social movement about “using evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible, and taking action on that basis.”

Effective Altruists often operate from a hedonic utilitarian framework (trying to increase happiness and reduce suffering for all conscious beings). But Effective Altruism can alternatively be approached from a Valuist framework.

You can think of Valuist Effective Altruism as addressing the question of how to effectively increase the production of one’s altruistic intrinsic values within the time, effort, and focus you give to those values (as opposed to your other intrinsic values). If you’re an Effective Altruist, chances are two of your strongest intrinsic values are related to reducing suffering (or increasing happiness) and seeking truth.

For people with certain intrinsic values, Effective Altruism is a natural consequence of Valuism. To see this, consider a Valuist whose two strongest values are the happiness (and/or lack of suffering) of conscious beings and truth-seeking. Such a Valuist would naturally want to increase global happiness (and/or reduce global suffering) in highly effective ways while seeing the world impartially (e.g., by using reason and evidence to guide their understanding). This is extremely aligned with (and similar to) the mission of Effective Altruism.

For more on the relationship between Effective Altruism and Valuism, see this post.

Valuism and existential risk

Potential existential risks (such as threats from nuclear war, bioterrorism, and advanced A.I.) are a major area of focus for many Effective Altruists. According to most people’s intrinsic values, existential risk is also incredibly bad. Existential risks threaten many of the things that humans value (happiness, pleasure, learning, achievement, freedom, longevity, legacy, virtue, and so on). So for most people’s intrinsic values, Valuism is compatible with caring about existential risk reduction (depending on one’s estimates of the relevant probabilities).

Valuism and utopias

Utopias are hard to construct. Sure, we pretty much all want a world without poverty and disease, but it’s hard to agree on the specific details beyond avoiding bad things. If we go all-in on one intrinsic value, we end up with a world that seems like a dystopia to many. For instance, a utopia, according to hedonic utilitarianism, might look like attaching each of our brains to a bliss-generating machine while we do nothing for the rest of our lives, or it might look like or filling the universe with tiny algorithms that experience maximal bliss per unit of energy. Of course, these are horrifying outcomes for many people.

If we maximize utopia according to one or a small set of intrinsic values, it will very likely seem like a dystopia according to someone with other intrinsic values. To construct a utopia that is not a dystopia to many, we should make sure that it includes high levels of a wide range of intrinsic values, keeping these in balance rather than going all-in on a small set of values.

Put another way, if we preserve a wide range of different intrinsic values in our construction of potential utopias, we protect ourselves against various failure modes. For instance:

• The intrinsic value of avoidance of suffering protects us from a world where there is a lot of pain and suffering.
• The intrinsic value of freedom helps protect us from a failure mode of a world of forced wireheading. 
• An intrinsic value of truth helps protect us from a failure mode where we’re all unknowingly in the matrix (e.g., being used for a purpose unknown to us) or living under an authoritarian world government that tries to keep the populace happy through delusion.

Valuism and worldviews

Worldviews usually come with a set of shared intrinsic values. These are the strong intrinsic values that most (though not all) people with that worldview have in common. Of course, in most cases, in addition to these shared intrinsic values, each individual will also have other intrinsic values that are not shared by most people with their worldview. You can learn more about the interface between worldviews and intrinsic values in our essay on worldviews here.

Valuism and mental health 

Mental health may have interesting connections to intrinsic values. For instance, here’s an oversimplified model of anxiety and depression that I find usefully predictive (I developed this in collaboration with my colleague Amanda Metskas):

Anxiety occurs when you think there is a chance that something you intrinsically value may be lost. Anxiety tends to be worse when you perceive the chance of this happening as higher, when you perceive the intrinsic values as more important, or when the potential loss is nearer in time.

Depression occurs when you’re convinced you can’t create sufficient intrinsic value in your future. This could be because you think the things you value most are lost forever, because you see yourself as useless at achieving what you value, or for other reasons.

Valuism and animals

What do animals care about? While some animals (e.g., some insects) may not be conscious (i.e., they may lack something that it’s like to be them), and therefore it may not matter what they care about, for conscious animals, it may be important to understand what they intrinsically value so we know how to treat them ethically.

An intrinsic value perspective on animal ethics is that we should not deprive animals of the things they intrinsically value (and we should help them get the things they intrinsically value, at least when they are easy to provide). So, for instance, we can ask how much a chicken that lives almost its whole life in a small cage (as many chickens raised for food in the U.S. do) is able to have its intrinsic values met. The answer is probably very little.

But what are the sorts of things that animals may intrinsically value? I suspect there are a wide variety of animal intrinsic values and that they depend on species, but here are a few that may be especially common in mammals:

• Pleasure
• Not suffering
• Not experiencing large amounts of fear, stress, and anxiety
• Surviving
• Agency (e.g., the ability to choose)
• Bonding with other animals
• Protection of their offspring

Valuism and economics

Economics often operates under the assumption that each person has a “utility function”: i.e., a function that maps states of the world into how good or bad the person thinks those states are and that describes the choices people make. According to this frame, if a person chooses A over B, that means that their utility function assigns a higher value to A than B. For example, if I buy a Mac rather than a PC, and they are the same price, this must mean that I predict the Mac gives me more utility (according to my utility function). 

Valuism, on the other hand, says that when A is more intrinsically valuable to us than B (and equivalent along other dimensions such as price), we often will choose A over B because A produces more of what we intrinsically value; however, sometimes we choose B over A instead because we confuse instrumental value with intrinsic value, or we have a habit of doing B, we feel social pressure to do B, etc.

In other words, choosing something is not the same as intrinsically valuing something, and ideally, we want to construct a society where people get more of what they intrinsically value, not merely giving people more of what they would choose. 

A classic example where intrinsic value and choice come apart is addictive products like cigarettes or video games with upsells: people sometimes choose to pay for them and use them way past the point of benefit, according to their own intrinsic values.

A similar issue comes up when people slip into treating every dollar of GDP or each unit reduction of “deadweight loss” as though they are equally valuable. Imagine that an influencer gets all the hottest celebrities to start wearing the hair of a rare species of sloth and that buzz convinces millions of people that it’s really cool, so consumers spend billions of dollars buying these sloth hair pieces. Unfortunately, the sloth hair is really aesthetically ugly, uncomfortable, and expensive, and making clothes out of it requires torturing the sloths. This will probably increase GDP, yet (on net) intrinsic value will almost certainly have been destroyed. There is no good reason to care about GDP for its own sake, but intrinsic values are precisely the things we care about for their own sake. While increasing GDP may often be aligned with producing more of what people intrinsically value (both now and potentially in the future), in cases when GDP and the long-term production of intrinsic values are out of alignment, I would argue that GDP is no longer a good measure of societal benefit.

Going back to the sloth hair example, having a free market for this sloth hair would, according to simple economic theory, reduce “deadweight loss” (relative to having restrictions on their sale). And yet, the production of this sloth hair will likely be net destructive to what people intrinsically value. We can imagine a multi-faceted accounting of how society is doing that takes into account productivity and wealth but goes beyond it to consider the extent to which people are creating their intrinsic values; productivity and wealth would be viewed as being in the service of intrinsic value production.

As a complement to GDP, we can think about measuring how well the people of a society get the things that they intrinsic value. For instance, attempting to measure:

• How happy are they? 
• To what extent are they accomplishing their goals? 
• How free are they?
• How meaningful are their relationships? 
• How much are they suffering?

This is related to the Human Development Index, though that index includes items that are not intrinsic values, and it doesn’t cover all intrinsic values.

If we had such an accounting, different people would naturally rank societies differently (in terms of how good they are overall) because they value these intrinsic values to different extents.

As you can see in this post, a Valuist perspective may have something to say about many other topic areas, giving us a different way to look at topics like Effective Altruism, utopia, animal ethics, worldviews, mental health, and economics.

You’ve just finished the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays on my life philosophy, Valuism – here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we’ve summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today. 

How do you think about being truly happy?

You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine your own views of happiness and understand the perspectives that other people take towards living a good life!

For each of these theories, there are lots of different variants with subtle differences – we’ve aimed to capture some central representative ideas that many variants have in common. 

We’ve also included some resources you can use to try and increase your happiness levels by applying these different methodologies!

Positive Psychology

A growing scientific field, positive psychology applies the tools of psychology to the question of what makes life most worth living.

“Gratitude is an antidote to negative emotions, a neutralizer of envy, hostility, worry, and irritation. It is savoring; it is not taking things for granted; it is present-oriented.”

-Sonja Lyubomirsky

How to achieve true happiness: Keep a gratitude list, cultivate positive relationships, find ways to use your strengths/virtues, do activities that get you into a flow state, savor pleasurable things in the moment, anticipate fun things in your future, reminisce about meaningful things in your past, buy more experiences and fewer things, avoid the hedonic treadmill.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools: 

• Building Happiness Habits
• Tactics for Happier Living
• Savor Your Life
• Become a Great Listener

Other resources:

• To be successful, should you focus on your strengths or your weaknesses? (Podcast episode)

Stoicism

Stoicism is an ancient school of philosophical thought from 3rd Century BC Greece and Rome, which is now experiencing a resurgence in popularity.

“Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been.” 

– Marcus Aurelius

How to achieve true happiness: Deeply appreciate what you have now since it all could be gone tomorrow, only try to control what you’re actually able to, remember you’re not entitled to anything, learn to love doing the right thing rather than the pleasant thing, seek value in all that happens. Through these practices, aim for equanimity in the face of any circumstance, no matter how bad.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Reframing Negative Emotions
• Resolving Harmful Situations

Books:

• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
• Stoicism and the Art of Happiness – Donald Robertson

Christianity

Based on biblical scripture and church traditions, many practitioners of Christianity view it as including rules and guidelines for living a good and happy life.

“The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.”

– C.S. Lewis

How to achieve true happiness: Be humble, love God with all your heart, love your neighbor, accept Jesus Christ as your savior, worship God, pray, have faith, be thankful and take joy each day in all that God has given you, be a devoted wife/husband/father/mother/child, obey the Ten Commandments, don’t cast the first stone, avoid lust, greed, wrath, sloth, gluttony, envy, and pride, avoid hell at all costs, live for eternity in heaven with God.

Books:

• Winning the War in Your Mind: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life – Craig Groeschel

Insight Meditation

Vipassanā, or insight meditation, is a Buddhist practice popular before the 10th Century AD, which gained widespread popularity in the late 20th Century, including in the USA. This practice emphasizes mindfulness meditation as a path to gaining insights into the nature of reality.

“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.”

– Buddha

How to achieve true happiness: Follow the eightfold path, train your concentration through meditation until it is stable and precise (e.g., practice maintaining subtle focus on the breath), use your refined concentration to carefully observe the true nature of reality, mind, and self, realize the three marks of existence (impermanence, dissatisfaction, non-self), learn to stabilize your new experience of reality, become free from craving and aversion.

Books:

• The Art of Living: Vipassana Meditation as Taught by S. N. Goenka – William Hart
• Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book – Daniel M Ingram

Other resources:

• Waking Up (meditation app)

Traditional

This set of values may strike you as a familiar blueprint to a traditionally good life.

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”

– Edmund Burke

How to achieve true happiness: Work hard, marry a good person, have multiple children, spend time with family, fit into your role, remember that many others have it worse than you, don’t complain, avoid vices (gambling, excessive drinking, drugs), don’t waste money, achieve stability in life.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• The Relationship Review
• Managing Arguments in Relationships

Common sense

A common-sense approach to happiness focuses on meeting all your needs and making sure you have stable sources of fulfillment. No surprises here!

“Philosophy is common sense with big words.”

– James Madison

How to achieve true happiness: Sleep enough, eat healthy food, exercise, spend your time with people you like, have a pet, seek work that’s enjoyable/challenging/meaningful, make sure your basic needs are met, try to make enough money to achieve financial security, save for retirement, marry someone you love who treats you well, have a fun hobby.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 40 Winks: Better Sleep Made Easy
• Your Greatest Sources of Pleasure
• Career Fulfilment Diagnostic

Other resources:

• Choose a fulfilling life path using these five exercises from “Designing Your Life”

Introspection

Introspective theories say that the path to true happiness is through truly understanding yourself, healing your past trauma, and being authentic with others.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

– C.G. Jung

How to achieve true happiness: Use psychedelics for self-exploration, listen to and get in touch with your body, engage in self-care and self-compassion, investigate and heal your trauma, find a daily practice that works for you (e.g., meditation/yoga/prayer), be vulnerable around the people that you trust, share your true feelings, explore and have compassion for the different “parts” of yourself that are afraid of and desire different things, investigate your “true self” and be true to it, learn to pay attention to your intuition, find a way to look at the world that resonates with you. 

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Life-Changing Questions
• Your Primal World Beliefs
• Defining Emotions

Books:

• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma – Bessel van der Kolk
• Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself – Kristin Neff

Other resources:

• How many minds do you have? (Podcast episode)
• The 10 Most Important Components of Self-Compassion
• Could You Be in One of These 8 Psychological Traps?
• How to Communicate Better with the People in Your Life (podcast episode)
• Exploring your Shadow and Healing your Traumas (podcast episode)

Self-help books

Books advocating techniques for self-improvement have exploded in popularity since the mid 20th Century. Each takes a different angle on how to be happy – here, we have collected some common themes.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

-Thomas Edison

How to achieve true happiness: Repeat affirmations that motivate you, form healthy daily habits, always work on becoming a better version of yourself, try new things, figure out what you really want and then plan to get it, prioritize, set ambitious goals, keep your home organized, think positive thoughts, believe you can do anything that you put your mind to, wake up early, make at least a little progress towards your goals each day, don’t let fear stop you, don’t give up, avoid negative people, surround yourself with people who inspire you and make you a better person.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Daily Ritual: A Habit Creation System
• Design Your Own Self-Experiment
• Achieve Your Goals
• Get Going: Overcome Procrastination

Books:

• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The Motivation Hacker – Nick Winter

Other resources:

• How to Achieve Self-Control Without Self-Control
• How to Hack Your Own Brain (podcast episode)
• The Secrets of Effective Learning (podcast episode)
• By the Book (podcast)

Hedonism

As an approach to life, hedonism is all about doing whatever you can to experience pleasure and avoid pain.

“Don’t worry. Be happy.”

– Bobby McFerrin

How to achieve true happiness: Remember that you get just one life, so you might as well enjoy it, live in the moment (don’t worry about the future), dance, party, seek out cool experiences, do exactly what you feel like, ignore societal pressure, have sex, eat tasty food, do fun drugs, spend money on fun things, don’t let others tell you what to do.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• 2 Minute Mood Boosters

Other resources:

• Atlas Obscura – Curious and Wondrous Destinations
• Happiness and Hedonic Adaptation (podcast episode)
• When is Suffering Good? (podcast episode)

Altruism

An altruistic approach to happiness is about devoting yourself to helping others and making the world a better place – the theory says you can gain fulfillment through knowing that other people are better off thanks to your efforts.

“The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.”

– Nelson Henderson

How to achieve true happiness: Give to charity, volunteer your time, choose a career that lets you help others, become a part of something meaningful (e.g., a cause or movement) that is much bigger than yourself, work hard to be kind, generous, and thoughtful, think hard about how you can do good, help strangers, build communities and projects to improve the world.

Useful Clearer Thinking tools:

• Leaving Your Mark on the World
• Charity Effectiveness Test
• Change Behaviour for the Better
• What Causes Match Your Values?

Books:

• Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help – Larissa MacFarquhar
• Doing Good Better – William MacAskill

Other resources:

• Four ways to have a positive impact on the world right now

Which of these theories resonates most with you?

It might be challenging to decide whether and how to apply each of these different theories of happiness. An experimental approach could be useful – you could explore the resources we’ve linked above, try applying some of the techniques, and see which theories deliver on their promise of true happiness for you. 

We hope that exploring these theories has helped you conceptualize your own approach to happiness. Which theories of happiness have you lived by previously? How did you choose them, or did you pick them up unconsciously from your environment? How could you tweak these theories, combine them with other schools of thought, or replace parts that are unhelpful for you? What other theories of happiness do people live by?

A big thank you goes to Adam Binks for his help with this post!

Note: To help fund the free decision-making tools and programs that we provide, ClearerThinking.org is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program (an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com). If you buy a book using the links in this article, you’ll be supporting ClearerThinking.org in its mission to make free tools that help the world make better decisions.

One way to cut through the noise is to look at the commonalities between the advice that many different highly successful people give (i.e., take the “intersection”), letting the noise and contradictions drop away. If many of them provide the same advice, we can be at least somewhat more confident that it generalizes. Having said that, we should nevertheless remain mindful of selection effects (affecting who we hear advice from), including survivorship bias.

With that in mind, here’s my attempt to “intersect” the repeated advice I’ve read or heard from many different highly successful people who come from a wide range of fields and life circumstances. I expand on each piece of advice by listing common themes I’ve heard around that advice (that I also largely agree with), and then I give a relevant quote.

Ten Repeated Pieces of Advice From Highly Successful People

1. You won’t automatically be happy when you reach your goals.

Achieving goals breeds new ones.

A terrible situation creates misery, but a good situation doesn’t imply you’ll be happy. Happiness takes inner work, and it benefits a lot from gratitude for whatever it is you already have. The good life is a journey, not a destination.

Quote: “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley

2. High levels of accomplishment almost always require hard work over a long time. “Overnight successes” are rare and are often misidentified. If you look closely, usually, the person was practicing for 5-20 years before they were an “overnight success.”

Always be looking for how you can do your work better, and focus on improving in those areas. Compounding improvement over a long period is how people become great at things.

Quote: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

3. Life is unpredictable. When young, people usually don’t know what they’re going to “do with their life.” That’s fine!

Life takes crazy, unexpected twists and turns. Plans are great, but you should expect to modify them. Be adaptable and on the lookout for great, unexpected opportunities.

Quote: “Sometimes, when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.” – Wally Lamb

4. Don’t let fear stop you. Attempting hard things will bring stress, fear, and anxiety. 

If you avoid what you fear (more than is warranted by the level of danger), your potential will be curtailed. Learn to push through your fears to do stressful things that are valuable.

Quote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin

5. Choose who you spend time with wisely. Be thoughtful about who you are friends with, whether you spend enough quality time with your loved ones, etc.

Spending time with the wrong people will waste time or even sap potential. Make enough time for the people that matter most to you.

Quote: “You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” – Jim Rohn

6. Learn to say no. People will ask you many things from you. If you always say “yes,” it will drain energy & focus.

Say “yes” to your loved ones and to requests that are aligned with your deepest values. For others, consider if you realistically have the bandwidth to handle the request without taking away from your most important priorities. If not, give an authentic “no.”

When you’re starting out, it makes sense to say “yes” to more things. The more successful you become, the better you have to get at saying “no” – otherwise, your life will be dictated by other people’s demands.

Make choices based on your own values rather than based on what pleases or impresses others. Be your authentic self.

Quote: “Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” – Josh Billings

7. Take care of your body. Exercise regularly, reduce sugar intake, eat healthy foods that make you feel good, make enough time for sleep, and avoid excessive alcohol/drugs.

Good health has ripple effects and will help you achieve your goals. Your body impacts your mind.

Quote: “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” – Leigh Hunt

8. Take care of your mind. Meditate regularly (or find another practice that refreshes and resets you). Sleep enough. Seek treatment for mental health challenges.

Get out of relationships where people mistreat you. Have compassion for yourself, and treat yourself with kindness.

Know your limits, and keep stress within those limits. Take some time just to relax and have fun with no obligations. Take vacations.

Quote: “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” -Jack Kornfield

9. Expect to fail many times. That’s normal and expected. 

The key is to learn from every failure, pick yourself back up, and keep going. If you’re not willing to fail many times, you aren’t prepared to do hard things.

Quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

10. Leverage habits. Figure out what daily pattern works for you. 

Maybe it’s an hour of writing at 6 am, strong tea in the morning, a carefree walk in nature at noon, or jumping jacks in the early afternoon. Experiment to find what works well for you, and stick to it.

Quote: “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.” – Octavia Butler

This piece was first written on January 26, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 14, 2022.

Many of us might be feeling bad about life at the moment. One approach that may improve your mood is shifting your psychological “baseline” of what you view as normal to reflect the reality you’re currently living in. This blog examines how to accept the state of things as they currently are instead of getting stuck wishing the world looked how you want it to be. This valuable technique, which we describe below, can be applied to many different kinds of setbacks and difficult situations you encounter.

Understanding your psychological baseline

How bad we feel depends on our psychological “baseline” for what we consider normal. For example, if you view the baseline for your finances as having $5000 in the bank, having $3000 is going to make you feel bad. But if you view your baseline as having $1000, then $3000 is going to make you feel good!

Accepting reality as it actually is (letting go of what we call “mental rebelling”) can reset your baseline, which can tremendously improve your outlook in some circumstances. If your baseline reflects the way the world actually is, rather than the way it recently was (before something was lost) or the way you want it to be, reality hurts less. Of course, we can (and should) strive to make reality better than it is. But you can still do this while accepting the facts about the current state of the world. Acceptance doesn’t stop you from taking valuable actions, but it does make it easier to deal with reality.

What does acceptance really mean?

Acceptance is a mental maneuver that is hard to define (we generally lack the vocabulary in English for these kind of mental actions), but it might involve steps like: 

• Noting the facts that actually constitute reality (not how you would like reality to be or what reality recently looked like). 
• Noting that you CAN handle the fact that the state of the world is what it is (unless you literally can’t, which is another matter, but that’s rarely true). 
• Noting that the state of the world does not mean that everything important is lost; there are likely to still be many things of value that exist. 
• Avoiding “mental rebelling.” Mental rebelling might involve thoughts like: “This can’t be happening,” “This is awful,” “I can’t take this,” “This sucks,” or “Why me?” When you notice this kind of thought, acknowledge it (“I just had the thought “this can’t be happening”), but don’t dwell on it. Let it drift out of your mind once you’ve acknowledged it. 
• Reflecting on the real state of the world and trying to feel an emotion of “acceptance” towards it. Feeling this emotion doesn’t mean you like the current state of the world, but it might help you accept the facts of reality instead of trying to resist them. You can accept a situation that you really dislike, and sometimes, it is essential to do so. And, of course, even after accepting it, you probably will want to work to make that situation better (acceptance doesn’t stop you from trying to improve things; it just makes reality easier to handle). 
• Paying the psychological cost of acknowledging that the reality you want doesn’t exist NOW (instead of putting off that cost). This means not trying to delay the sense of loss that you will feel; that would not be productive, since this loss has already occurred (the state of the world isn’t the way you want it to be, and it’s better to acknowledge that now rather than later). It is tempting to avoid acknowledging this because the loss will hurt, but you actually hurt yourself more by delaying the experience. 

An example of acceptance

To give another monetary example, suppose $100 accidentally fell out of your wallet while you were walking, and now it is gone. You’re beating yourself up for having lost it and are continuing to search the streets you walked down for the money even though it’s become abundantly clear you won’t find it, and you’re feeling really bad about it. 

Acceptance in this situation might look like: 

• Fully acknowledging that the $100 is gone 
• Noting any negative self-talk (“I’m such an idiot”) but letting those thoughts drift away without getting stuck in them 
• Experiencing the full psychological loss of the money right NOW (not trying to delay the feeling of loss or deny it) 
• Acknowledging that you can survive without the $100 
• Attempting to move your baseline (the state you were in when you had $100) to be one that doesn’t involve having that $100 (so that not having this money feels normal instead of bad). You want to get yourself to the mental state where suddenly stumbling on the $100 would feel like gaining $100, rather than it feeling like simply restoring you back to the prior baseline! 

 Using gratitude to shift your baseline

Shifting your psychological baseline can also be achieved with gratitude. By reminding yourself that not everyone has the good things you have, that you may never have had what you have now, or that you won’t have it forever, you can move your baseline below the way you currently perceive it. Then, what’s real starts to look like a gift rather than something merely neutral. Your food feels like more of a gift if you remember not everyone has enough food to eat. Your loved ones are more precious when you remember that not everyone is around people they love.

Faulty baselines can bias your decision-making.

Our psychological baselines also play an important role in decision-making (“Prospect Theory” is one example of this). If you just made a lot of money at a casino, your mental baseline may not yet have caught up to having that extra money. Hence, you view that money as above and beyond what’s normal, so you are more willing to gamble it than you would be if you came back to the casino tomorrow (after your baseline has adjusted). A way to reduce this bias is to adjust our baseline to match reality faster (though, in this case, it could have the negative side effect of making you not feel as excited about your winnings). 

There is a related bias that can occur in the opposite situation: if you’ve just lost a lot of money at a casino but not adjusted your baseline to incorporate this new state of affairs, you may take unusually risky gambles to try to win the money back (perhaps in the hopes of not having to incorporate this loss into your view of reality). This is obviously a bad idea in a gambling context, and you’d be better off adjusting your baseline to match reality instead. 

When we fall prey to the “Sunk Cost Fallacy,” we’re also failing to adjust our baselines to reality. This fallacy describes what happens when we continue with a project even when we know the future prospects of the project are bad; we don’t want to have “wasted” (or “sunk”) all the effort and resources we’ve put into it already. But if we accept reality and adjust our baseline to incorporate this loss (which has indeed already occurred), the temptation to engage in the sunk cost fallacy may be reduced (or disappear completely).

How can you use this information to become happier?

If you’re feeling bad about something, try shifting your baseline to reflect your reality by practicing the different forms of acceptance outlined above, and use gratitude to adjust your baseline BELOW reality (so that the state of the world looks better than you might have otherwise thought). 

Consider the state of your psychological baseline when making decisions that will affect your future. Does your baseline reflect the way that reality is in the current moment? Are there any recent changes you might have missed?

We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had with scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (a 5 question scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffin). There are, of course, many personality traits beyond the 18 we measured!

We found that 8 of the 18 personality traits were strongly associated with life satisfaction, in the sense that the relationship held in the same direction whether measured:

(1) as simple correlations between each individual trait and life satisfaction

(2) controlling for all the other personality traits as well as income, age, gender and education (using linear regression), or

(3) controlling only for the other personality traits most strongly associated with life satisfaction (again using linear regression).

We also found a 9th personality trait with a slightly weaker association to life satisfaction; it was statistically significant, at p=0.05, using two of the three methods mentioned above.

The personality traits we found to be most closely associated with life satisfaction are listed below (ordered roughly by strength of association).

While reviewing the results, please keep a few things in mind:

A. The personality traits were reworded (to have the reverse meaning) in cases where there was a negative correlation to life satisfaction, so that all associations are positive.

B. Also, the exact cause of association is somewhat ambiguous so, for each trait, I cited three different speculative theories on why the relationship to life satisfaction may exist. For example, an association between X (e.g. a personality trait) and Y (e.g. life satisfaction) doesn’t necessarily mean that X causes Y (see this for all the meanings a correlation can have).

In the case of any particular association, it could be that:

• (a) the trait CAUSED greater life satisfaction (i.e. X->Y)
• (b) the trait is CAUSED BY greater life satisfaction (i.e. Y->X)
• (c) some other variable or variables increase the value of the trait and SEPARATELY cause greater life satisfaction. In other words, mutual exclusivity (i.e. Z->X and Z->Y).

The 9 personality traits together (in a linear regression without any other variables) explain about 23% of the variance in life satisfaction (i.e. adjusted R^2 = 0.23). Of course, we only studied 18 personality traits in this study, there are many others that exist that we did not investigate in this work.

Personality Traits Most Positively Associated with Life Satisfaction

1. At Ease – Seldom experiencing fear / Seldom worrying

Perhaps because…

• (a) High levels of anxiety cause people to feel unsatisfied with life.
• (b) People become anxious about the fact that they are unsatisfied with life (for instance, worrying because they feel like they “should” feel satisfied and that something must be wrong with them because they don’t)
• (c) Tough life situations (e.g. divorce or job loss) cause both lower life satisfaction and higher anxiety (separately).

Note: Many people learn to reduce their fear and worry. For instance, they may use Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (including Exposure Therapy for specific fears) or Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. I think it’s likely this really does improve life satisfaction for people who don’t naturally feel “At Ease”. If you feel a lot of anxiety, fear, stress, or worry in your life, I recommend trying out our app Mind Ease.

2. Self-Valuing – Feeling of superiority / Feeling equal to others

Perhaps because…

• (a) Feeling inferior to others makes people feel bad about themselves which makes them feel unsatisfied with their lives.
• (b) Being unsatisfied with life causes people to feel inferior to others (e.g. due to blaming themselves for their unsatisfying situation).
• (c) Some commonly occurring bad life events (e.g. being harshly rejected or being put down a lot by family members) cause people both to become unsatisfied with life and to feel inferior to others.

Note: Some people learn not to view themselves as inferior to others by challenging their feelings of inferiority (e.g. using Cognitive Therapy techniques) or learning self-compassion (some have benefited from related literature like “Self-compassion” by Kristin Neff). I expect that for someone low on the trait of Self Valuing, learning to view yourself as equal to others may improve life satisfaction.

3. Warm – Laughing aloud / Expressing happy feelings

Perhaps because…

• (a) Being warm causes others to be drawn to us, this closeness improves life satisfaction.
• (b) Being satisfied with life causes people to feel more relaxed around others, which causes them to openly share positive emotions.
• (c) Having emotionally supportive caregivers growing up causes people to be both more comfortable showing their positive feelings, and more satisfied with life.

Note: People can get better at expressing their positive feelings (e.g. I have!), for instance by consciously channeling positivity when greeting people, consciously smiling when feeling happy (if it doesn’t happen automatically, which it doesn’t for some people), verbally expressing that something has made you feel good, etc. I suspect that for those low on the Warm trait these efforts might cause at least a minor boost to life satisfaction.

Personality Traits A Bit Positively Associated with Life Satisfaction

4. Unselfish – Putting others before oneself

Perhaps because…

• Being unselfish leads to better interpersonal relationships which makes people more satisfied with life.
• Being more satisfied with your life means you have less need to focus on yourself, hence, increased focus on others.
• When bad interpersonal experiences teach people that they shouldn’t trust others, they become less satisfied with life (due to worse social relationships) and become more selfish (because they don’t expect others to be unselfish toward them).

5. Forgiving – Not wanting or seeking revenge

Perhaps because…

• Harboring anger and dwelling on wrongs makes you feel bad about your life.
• Being more satisfied with your life makes it easier to minimize or forget about ways you were wronged by others.
• Growing up around forgiving people makes you both more satisfied with life as an adult and more forgiving of others.

6. Improvisational – Being adaptable or quick on your feet

Perhaps because…

• Being adaptable is often useful in the workplace, leading to increased effectiveness and work satisfaction; this leads to increased life satisfaction.
• When you are unsatisfied with life, that unhappiness causes a cognitive burden that makes it harder to be improvisational
• Negative thinking makes them less satisfied with life, and it also separately makes it harder for them to be think quickly on their feet because it’s distracting.

7. Self-Defending – Not being overly self-critical when things go wrong

Perhaps because…

• Blaming yourself for a lot of things may cause you to become unhappy about your life.
• Having a life that makes you feel satisfied may give you greater self-esteem (if you attribute that good life to your own character), which could prevent you from blaming yourself for problems.
• Being the sort of person that very rarely upsets other people could cause you to be both more satisfied with life (due to better social relationships) and less likely to attribute negative incidents to your own character.

8. Normal – Acting in a socially acceptable way

Perhaps because…

• Behaving normally may allow people to fit in better with their social groups; making them more satisfied with life.
• Being increasingly unsatisfied with life may cause people to engage in increasingly abnormal seeming behavior.
• Being a social outcast may cause people to be both less satisfied with life and less likely to care about their behaviors conforming to what others view as normal.

Personality Trait Possibly Associated with Life Satisfaction

(this final trait was not as consistently associated with life satisfaction as those above)

1. Unfeeling – being indifferent to the feelings of others

Perhaps because…

• Feeling too intensely when others suffer causes one to suffer; leading to lower life satisfaction.
• Being more satisfied with life makes people feel less need for maintaining existing social relationships causing indifference to the feelings of others
• People with a more positive disposition feel less negative emotions (causing more satisfaction with life) and less negative emotion in response to other people’s feelings (hence greater indifference).This fairly weak association could easily be a statistical fluke.

Note that there is some subjectivity in the rank order above because the strength order varied somewhat based on which method was used to measure the associations, and because there is a limit to the precision with which the associations can be measured using our data (which, naturally, depends on the sample size).

Also, since each personality trait was measured using only two questions (and, as a result, each trait was measured only superficially for each person), one might assume that these results fail to capture the true extent of the correlations. On the other hand, since we tested 18 traits and selected the strongest, a regression to the mean effect will be working in the opposite direction to some extent.