Sokanu: The Blog

I am currently about a third of the way through the excellent book The Happiness Hypothesis. The book takes the reader through the different periods in time where people were trying to discover what happiness means.  Some amazing quotes from Bhudda and others really make you think (I am going to have to read it again and take notes). But the point of the book, and happiness study in general, is to find what it is that truly makes people happy.  And we have written previously about building your happiness framework and the difference between a job, career and calling. These both come from this book and its principles.  But the section I'm currently at is far more interesting.  The author actually reveals what is known as the happiness hypothesis, or formula.

Back in the day (not too long ago) happiness researchers believed that they had found not only the equation to happiness, but also to personality in general.  Previous to this discovery, psychologists believed that personality is shaped primarily by childhood environment.  Think back to when you were a child. Did you have CNBC on the TV during breakfast? Did you parents discuss finances in front of you, or did they keep it secret? Were your parents abusive and did they have an addiction that affected how they raised you? What kind of schools did you go to as a child? Were they rich, upper-class schools with top teachers and the best facilities? Or were they the forgotten schools, run-down and poverty stricken? 

Thinking about how you were brought up does make you realize that your environment has a massive impact on your personality, and ultimately, your happiness. But this can't be completely true in every case. I mean, look at the stories where an individual manages to rise from a poverty-stricken area to become a millionaire and blaze their own path. For a great example of this look up Dr. Farrah Gray (he was a millionaire at age 14).

Back to the research that I mentioned above. Their claim that was your environment in fact has very little to do with your personality, rather your genes have preset your personality from the moment that you are born. Imagine a personality preset being fixed into every brain, like a thermostat set forever to a certain temperature. Maybe unhappy people are set at 50 degrees and happy people are set at 70. In this case, the only way to change your level of happiness would be to change one's own internal setting instead of changing one's environment.  What do you think about this claim? Do you agree?

But as research progressed and the understanding of the human genome became more and more clear, a higher level of understanding between nature and nurture began to reveal itself. What researchers found was that genes did have a huge impact on your happiness, but they turn out to be sensitive to environmental conditions. And yes, each person may have a preset level of happiness, but it doesn't happen to be a fixed point, but rather a potential range.  How you operate within this range is up to something called external conditions.

Then along came a man named Martin Seligman, and as we known from our previous posts, he is the founder of positive psychology.  And Dr. Seligman was very good at bringing together groups of people that could tackle specific problems.  And the problem that they set out to solve was the external conditions that affect happiness.  And what they found was really interesting. There are two fundamental different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.  

Conditions are fact's about your life that you can't change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). These are constant over time, or at least during a certain period of your life (half of marriages end in divorce).

Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are things that you choose to do, like meditation, exercise, learning a new skill or taking a vacation.  Because such activities can be chosen, and because most of them take effort and attention, they can't just disappear from your awareness the way that conditions can. These activities, then, offer much greater promise for increasing happiness while avoiding adaptation effects. 

Using this new idea, Seligman along with his team came up with something called the "happiness formula".

H = S + C + V

The level of happiness that you experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) that you do.

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Now there is a lot more in terms of explanation behind how you can change your levels of (V) and (C) in order to get to the top of your "happiness range" but that is for another post. What I wanted to get across, with respect to Sokanu, is that we can use this formula in order to better understand how to find our passion in life.  Remember, we have the fortunate privilege of being able to choose our career path.  And for all the complaining that happens in today's world about the lack of teaching in higher education, the choice is ultimately yours.  You have the ability to choose your external conditions (C) by choosing where to live, what school to go to and who to marry.  

But the main point is that you can choose what career you want to pursue in life. You have the ability to set your happiness point by virtue of the choices that you make early on that affects the rest of your life. But don't worry, that's what Sokanu being built to do, after all.