What they've concluded is that
there's more than one kind of happiness and that it's funny.
The Inuit people who are the native people of Alaska live a life
that's surrounded by cold weather and they have many, many names for
what we call ice because in their world there are many different kinds of ice.
And they mean different things and
they have different roles in the lives of the Inuit people.
In the United States, in Western Europe,
in Western countries, we make a lot of this word happiness,
it's in the Declaration of Independence that we're supposed to pursue happiness.
But this one word can often be very confusing, and people think they're
chasing one thing and they don't get it, they think there is something wrong.
So, I think it's important to at least think about
three different kinds of happiness and the research helps us think about this.
If you want to read some more about these and some of these forms of happiness.
Daniel Kahneman, a Noble Prize winning psychologist from Princeton has
a wonderful book called, Thinking Fast and Slow, has a chapter or
two on happiness that distills a lot of this research into
a pretty efficient capsule but we're going to talk about it a little bit here.
So, the first kind of happiness that most people talk about
when they think about the word is what I call momentary happiness.
Now, momentary happiness is an emotion, it's a mood,
it's a moment that comes and where you having a positive feeling.
A good example might be you are at the beach, it's been a pretty hot day,
you go to the boardwalk, there's a soft serve ice cream vendor there.
They have your favorite flavor, you get into the shade, you've ordered
your soft serve ice cream, it's dipped in whatever it is that you love,
as a little covering chocolate or strawberries or something.
And you have that first bite of that ice cream cone and
it just tastes wonderful, that's momentary happiness.
To be the same thing if you're a fan of drinking beer and
it's the same kind of day and they have the favorite beer that you'd like and
you take that first sip of whatever the drink is that you find most enjoyable and
it's just fills you with these feeling of happiness.
So, momentary happiness is great I think the more
it you have, the better your days are but
there's some problems with momentary happiness as a measure of success in life.
The research shows that there are genetic set points that people have,
they go into their emotional make-ups and some people are kind of positive people
and some people are less positive and some people are kind of negative people.
And your mood states swings on a given day or during a given period of time sort of
above that genetic set point when you take that first bite of the ice cream cone.
But then somewhere little later, dips below that set point as you begin feeling
really hot and sweaty on the beach and you wish that the sun weren't so bright, and
now you're not in such a happy mood state.
Maybe somebody comes along, a dog comes along, and
puts sand in your drink on the beach.
Now you're really kind of upset and angry with somebody, so
your genetic set point just tells you, whoops, going down here.
But it is a range, and chances are you're not going to have too many moments when
you're above the highest point of that range, you're not going to have too
many moments when you're below the low point of that range.
And my range is different than yours, my best day,
may be just in the average domain for your day, and you get
to be a lot happier than me because your genetic set point is different.
So if happiness of this kind, this sort of aggregate number of mood states is
set by our genes, it seems sort of unfair to say that you're more successful
than me because you have more positive mood states than I do.
Because you're endowed with a different set of genes than I was.
So there's the problem of kind of