If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy walks you through the seven deadly sins of unhappiness, which will show you how small the correlation between success and happiness truly is and help you avoid chasing the wrong things in your short time here on earth.

Let’s start with the very first of the seven deadly sins: devaluing happiness. Quite frankly, it’s impossible to make progress in something you don’t prioritize – and happiness is one of the things we most commonly put on the back-burner.

Why? Well, it’s a hard-to-grasp concept, so prioritizing things like money, success and fame feels like a more concrete step. After all, these are proxies to happiness to some extent.

When Raj and several other researchers did a study, in which participants should name their three hypothetical wishes to an all-powerful genie, the respondents asked for money, success and great relationships. But when they evaluated peoples’ true goals, happiness was the most important one. Everyone could’ve asked the genie for happiness directly, but most of us don’t prioritize happiness enough and so we end up chasing the wrong things.

Here’s one way to combat that: Ask yourself what emotions you connect to happiness. One way I do this is by answering the question “When did I feel happy today?” every day. Is it love? Inspiration? Excitement?

Only once you what state you’re happy in can you start making time for the activities that will get you into that state. And it doesn’t even take a genie to do that.

In the 1970s and 80s, psychologist Mary Ainsworth started a series of longitudinal studies on children who lacked parental care and affection while growing up. As you would expect, these children turned into adults who landed on the extreme ends of the spectrum of love: they were either extremely needy or totally avoidant. This is the next of the deadly sins: desperately seeking or avoiding love. The avoidant part is explained quickly: If you run at even the thought of intimacy, you’ll have a tough time experiencing its wonderfulness. The needy side is a bit more complex, you’d think needy people are at least very caring, if overbearing. However, like in economics, lots of supply drives down demand and so people who always make themselves available are less interesting to us. But relationships are a crucial part of happiness, so what’s a good way to deal with this? Simple: Be generous. The sense of accomplishment we get from helping others shows us we can spread happiness from within and improves our self-image. Both of these are a lot more conducive to happiness than avoiding love or texting your last date 17 times a day (never…