Natalie Feng

Would you rather be a sad philosopher or a happy pig? I would say it is a funny question, because there is no such a thing as happy pig. On the down side, happiness is not easily attainable by a simple choice, and it is brutal to wake such a Hollywood dream. However, it is worthy of the effort to achieve long lasting happiness.

Margaret Thatcher once said: “Poverty is a personality defect.”, so is happiness. It is helpful to understand the structure of happiness to use it as a blueprint. Long story short, what are the key drivers of happiness? 4 factors –  Level of desire, Level of objective reality, Level of perceived reality and future state expectations. Happiness = (Level of perceived reality –  level of desire) + future state expectation. Objective reality is highly correlated with perceived reality, and this correlation grows with age, until they merge with each other.

Since it gets increasingly hard to keep perceived reality higher than the objective to be happy, the early life dreams usually wake after one reaches adulthood. The major fallout of decreasing perceived reality is that the desire is still high, which increases stress and lowers the happiness. Here is where we circle back to the happy pig question: why not lower desire like a pig, so we can simply be happy? But in reality, it is only natural tendency for desire to increase but not to decrease by itself. It takes great amount of work to truly reduce desire without pretending so. To keep moderate desire, we need to think deeply and meditate mindfully, it is one of those necessary steps towards being happy.

Another possible harm from early life blind optimism is cut throat competition. When I was growing up, there was a common delusion among students that ranking of the university a person enters will be equal to social class in later life. But in fact diploma and ability of achieving are only mildly related, and hardly a causal relation either. Sadly, most people with shiny diploma realized their days in university were actually the peak of their whole life. Why? It is great to have the opportunity to study in prominent universities, the culprit is never good education. Lack of collaboration is to be blamed. Being blindly optimistic at young age can lead us into the tunnel vision that success is achieved by competing against others, which is almost opposite to how successful business runs in reality: we achieve resources by collaborating with others, not solo fly.

Level of happiness is also reckoned as one’s underlying mindset. When we observe others, people’s actual state of mind is hidden behind their social behaviors, which are used as counter measures to prevent others from correctly sizing them. But still, there are a lot telltale clues to profile. For example, a friend as a hiring manager once told me that social network is a handy tool for screening candidates in job market as well. Browsing through a person’s non-commercial online posts, if an individual frequently and deliberately brags about something, or conceals obvious life aspects by acting the opposite, it means a red flag: bragged topics are usually weak points in reality – let’s call it trying too hard.

In a nut shell, being truly happy is not as easy as we assume, but it is definitely achievable by efforts.