How come some people are happy and others aren’t? That’s pretty much the question that Jonathan Haidt sets out to answer with this book. It explores the ideas of what exactly makes a person happy and looks at some commonly held beliefs about human wellbeing, and then assesses whether or not those perspectives really carry much weight.
Something I enjoyed about this book was the way that it draw from a wide range of sources when exploring what makes people happy, from The Bible and Greek philosophers, through to modern science and psychology. It’s interesting how often it seems that there was a nugget of truth in religious texts and so forth, but the book then goes on to show how they were just ever so slightly wrong, or how the right ideas lead to the wrong conclusions. It is very interesting to see how a lot of general ideas have essentially be right for a long time, and I liked the typically neutral and balanced way that it was all discussed.
But for me, the most interesting thing was what I learned. For instance, the person that most people are closest with and get the most out of confiding in is their mother and those who don’t know the feeling of unconditional love from a parental figure often have trouble forming significant bonds with people later in life, because they haven’t learned that unconditional love exists, and now probably never will.
My favourite parts were all about human relationships really, especially the bits about how having lots of friends can do a lot to help somebody feel generally happy in themselves. Though I was also surprised to learn that those who marry young and stay married are typically happier than those who don’t – I found that to be quite different to my experiences of life. Although funnily enough, the book also goes onto explain that when we read things that conform to our perceptions of life, we find them agreeable, but when we read things that contradict them, we find reasons to discredit them – which goes some way towards explaining the horrible state of politics in the world at the moment. It’s also kind of sad to thing about how we seem hardwired to avoid being logical in what we believe.
My ultimate takeaway from The Happiness Hypothesis was that happiness largely comes down to genes. Each person has a base level of happiness that is determined by their genes, and though there will be peaks and troughs connected to good news and tragedies, people will typically always return to that level. This felt very true to me, and it was interesting to learn about the ways in which people could raise their base level (by living well) or essentially lower it (by being toxic).
About the only real critique I have (which is a side effect of it being about twenty years old) is the lack of intersectionality – but other than that, I think anyone who loves learning about relationships and the human mind will enjoy reading this.
Rating: 8.9/10
