10x happiness increases are possible, and this is an underrated fact

Bland informational post

I used to believe that lifetime happiness was more or less static. I'd heard rumors of this sort from psychological research: that your happiness set point is largely heritable, that happiness is a personality factor, not a product of the outside world. This had a large influence on me for a few years. At the time, I was pretty miserable: depressed, self-hating, barely scraping by financially, not taking care of myself physically. Rather than hope for better, I valorized my misery. All of my favorite writers were sadness specialists—Beckett, Plath, et cetera—and I treasured them for being wise enough to be hopeless.

Then, I got much happier, multiple times. Many little factors contributed to my happiness, but the following things were the larger factors:

• I was medicated for bipolar disorder, and I responded well to the medication.

• My writing career started to materialize.

• I started lifting weights and doing combat sports.

• I left Toronto and traveled somewhat widely, which was good for both peak experiences and perspective. Eventually I moved to California, which suits me better.

• I made more friends from more diverse cultural segments, many of whom expanded my view of what is possible in life.

• I got good enough at coaching, writing, and sales that I'm not worried about finances—I know that I can always market myself more vigorously if I want to drum up a little cash.

• I grew a social media following which is not huge, but large enough that I have a significantly increased amount of social access.

• I had a powerful series of therapeutic experiences that massively reduced my level of self-criticism, to an extent I wouldn't have thought possible.

• I took up serious meditation, the kind where you question the nature of self, and this changed the nature of my psychology, again to an extent I wouldn't have thought possible.

• I got married a second time, and am now discovering what a really good relationship looks like. 

Now, it's not like everything is perfect. I don't walk around in a state of complete bliss all the time. Mental states are still transient, I get insecure and frustrated. Life still refuses to conform to my expectations completely, tragedy exists. 

But at the same time I am maybe 10x happier than I used to be, and I think I’m much, much happier than average. There are a couple of ways I could express this:

• What I'd consider a 7/10 day now would've been an unbelievably good day before, easily a 10/10. During the average meditation session, or while walking around and getting absorbed in my surroundings, I have what I would've previously considered a mystical experience. I still consider it a mystical experience, but this is now an everyday thing I have on tap.

• Due to increased confidence, better social skills, and a peer group I'm lucky to have, maybe once a week I have a really good, honest, connective, unpredictable conversation, of the kind that I would’ve been lucky to have three times a year previously.

• If you said to me, "Okay here's the deal, you can have a year of this life you're living now, and then die, or live for ten years the way you used to live," I'd choose the former in an instant.

• Occasionally, while driving over a bridge, I think about what I would feel if the bridge collapsed and I drowned. And while I want to live more, I’m pretty sure that as my car sailed into the ocean, I would think, “It’s okay, I’ve had a good life.”

This did take some effort—specifically, the meditation and therapy parts required me to thoroughly investigate my psychology and confront my insecurity and insanity. This was also a prerequisite for becoming a better romantic partner. But it was not a heroic effort, and I am now an existence proof that happiness can be massively plastic.

I am not the only one! I asked my Twitter followers for similar stories, and I was bombarded with dozens, many similar to my own. Plenty of my followers had extremely large increases in happiness that they'd describe as 5-10x increases. Some common factors in large happiness boosts I heard:

• Moving close to friends, or to a more exciting/suitable place

• Ending a bad relationship and/or starting a good one

• Positive psychedelic experiences

• Positive therapeutic experiences

• Spiritual practice, specifically experiences of non-duality and/or a positive relationship with a personal God

• Improved finances

• Improved agency

• Better sleep

• More sunshine

• Better physical condition

• Starting a family (this one is high-variance, however…)

So what explains the view, which I think is fairly widespread, that massive happiness increases are rare (or impossible)? Changes like this aren't available to everyone, but they're not that exotic. So it seems really bad that people don’t think they can be much happier—it denies them the option.

I can think of four reasons why the alternate view prevails.

1. Stupid, but maybe plausible: our data on lifetime happiness comes from surveys that measure happiness out of some number, say, 10, or 100. This is asking people to measure their happiness against what they consider possible. But when you become much happier, what you consider possible changes. As a result of this, the data is skewed because outliers like me don’t look outlier-ish enough.

2. The “static happiness” view is a reaction to a stupid view of happiness, which is that with enough positive thinking, you can always be completely happy, be grateful for everything, always have your shit together, et cetera. I agree that this view is stupid and counterproductive: for most people, an important component of being happier is accepting and embracing the full range of emotions. Another is being more honest in your relationships, which is not all happy happy joy joy. Another is having something to strive for, which entails some degree of stress. Also, happiness tends to become elusive if you demand its existence, rather than engineer the conditions for its emergence. 

3. If you believe happiness is not particularly static, then the world becomes both a more hopeful and a more depressing place. If massive increases in happiness are possible, then we can’t just shrug at misery around us and say, “oh well, it’s the human condition, life sucks for almost everyone.” We have to admit that many people could live massively better lives.

4. People promote the alternate view, or don’t think much about increasing happiness, because they believe life shouldn’t be about happiness—like, happiness shouldn’t be the goal. This is reasonable, but I would opine that it seems good to massively increase your happiness regardless. In my experience, happiness translates into capacity. Happy people tend to make other people happy, tend to have more emotional endurance and more flexibility, et cetera—the effects are prosocial.

Photo credit goes to Robert Frank.