Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

What about happiness itself? How can a scientist measure something as subjective as subjective well-being? The best way to find out how happy people are is to ask them. Who could be a better judge? An old Saturday Night Live skit has Gilda Radner in a postcoital conversation with a nervous lover (played by Chevy Chase) who is worried she didn’t have an orgasm, and she consoles him by saying, “Sometimes I do and I don’t even know it.” We laugh because when it comes to subjective experience, the experiencer herself is the ultimate authority. But we don’t have to take people’s word for it: self-reports of well-being turn out to correlate with everything else we think of as indicating happiness, including smiles, a buoyant demeanor, activity in the parts of the brain that respond to cute babies, and, Gilda and Chevy notwithstanding, judgments by other people.¹²

Happiness has two sides, an experiential or emotional side, and an evaluative or cognitive side.¹³ The experiential component consists of a balance between positive emotions like elation, joy, pride, and delight, and negative emotions like worry, anger, and sadness. Scientists can sample these experiences in real time by having people wear a beeper that goes off at random times and prompts them to indicate how they are feeling. The ultimate measure of happiness would consist of a lifetime integral or weighted sum of how happy people are feeling and how long they feel that way. Though experience sampling is the most direct way of assessing subjective well-being, it’s laborious and expensive, and there are no good datasets that compare people in different countries or track them over the years. The next best thing is to ask people how they are feeling at the time, or how they remember having felt during the day or week before.

This brings us to the other side of well-being, people’s evaluations of how they are living their lives. People can be asked to reflect on how satisfied they feel “these days” or “as a whole” or “taking all things together,” or to render the almost philosophical judgment of where they stand on a ten-rung ladder ranging from “the worst possible life for you” to “the best possible life for you.” People find these questions hard (not surprisingly, since they are hard), and their responses may be warped by the weather, their current mood, and what they were asked about immediately beforehand (with questions to college students about their dating life, or to anyone about politics, having a reliably depressive effect). Social scientists have become resigned to the fact that happiness, satisfaction, and best-versus-worst-possible life are blurred in people’s minds and that it’s often easiest just to average them together.¹⁴

Emotions and evaluations are, of course, related, though imperfectly: an abundance of happiness makes for a better life, but an absence of worry and sadness does not.¹⁵ And this brings us to the final dimension of a good life, meaning and purpose. This is the quality that, together with happiness, goes into Aristotle’s ideal of eudaemonia or “good spirit.”¹⁶ Happiness isn’t everything. We can make choices that leave us unhappy in the short term but fulfilled over the course of a life, such as raising a child, writing a book, or fighting for a worthy cause.

Though no mortal can stipulate what really makes a life meaningful, the psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues probed for what makes people feel their lives are meaningful. The respondents separately rated how happy and how meaningful their lives were, and they answered a long list of questions about their thoughts, activities, and circumstances. The results suggest that many of the things that make people happy also make their lives meaningful, such as being connected to others, feeling productive, and not being alone or bored. But other things can make lives happier while leaving them no more meaningful or even less so.