Happiness

Happiness will teach you how our desire for it developed, what its benefits are, why money actually hurts our happiness and where it really comes from, and how Western countries could easily increase their happiness with a few changes.

Think about the last decision you made. Maybe it was to click on the “Read More” button of this summary. Why did you do it?

Let’s say you liked the 1-sentence summary and the quote of the author, so you wanted to learn more.

By knowing more about happiness, you would become a smarter person and therefore, more likely to achieve your goals, whatever they may be – and thus, happier.

All of our decisions ultimately come down to whether the result makes us happier, or not.

Now this is old news, but get this: It wasn’t always this way. Over thousands of years, our brains developed the ability to feel happiness.

Researchers have learned this when taking real-time EEG scans of the brain during different activities. The parts that lit up in states of happiness belonged to the left side of the prefrontal cortex – a fairly new part of the brain, which is also where the neocortex sits.

The fact that this part of the brain has only developed recently in human history, makes happiness an adaptive trait, meaning its partially genetic and a driver of survival.

I knew that stress and fear were survival mechanisms, but now you can add happiness to the tool box, which is crazy.

It makes sense of course, after all, friendships, sex and good food makes us happy and all these things were crucial to the survival of our ancestors.

However, thinking that the drive behind all of our decisions is yet another remaining survival tool from the past is kinda scary, don’t you think?

Surprise surprise, money doesn’t make us happy. While this is old news, there are some interesting facts around it in this summary. First, being in poverty crushes your happiness. Naturally, getting more money until your basic survival is ensured makes you happier. The summary says $20,000 per year, but I assume that figure varies a lot, depending on where you live. Getting out of poverty in Asia requires less money than it does in Europe. $75,000 per year is a common figure for Western countries. But this even varies across states, ranging from $65,000 to $122,000 per year inside the US alone. After that, more money will do no good. Actually, it might hurt. How happy you are about the number on your bank account depends heavily on who your neighbor is. Let’s say you are promoted to a whopping $250,000 per year salary job and move to…