Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Houghton Mifflin; 2008)

* Gilbert has another favorite example: children. Although most people anticipate that having children will increase their net happiness, studies show that people with children are actually less happy on average than those without. Although the highs ("Daddy I wuv you") may be spectacular, on a moment-by-moment basis, most of the time spent taking care of children is just plain work. "Objective" studies that ask people to rate how happy they are at random moments rank raising children — a task with clear adaptive advantage — somewhere between housework and television, well below sex and movies. Luckily, from the perspective of perpetuating the species, people tend to remember the intermittent high points better than the daily grind of diapers and chauffeur duty.

Aspiring assistant professors who think that their future happiness hinges on getting tenure often fail to take into account one of the most deeply hard-wired properties of the mind: the tendency to get used to whatever's going on. The technical term for that is adaptation* For example, the sound of rumbling trucks outside your office may annoy you at first, but over time you learn to block it out

— that's adaptation. Similarly, we can adapt to even more serious annoyances, especially those that are predictable, which is why a boss who acts like a jerk every day can actually be less irritating than a boss who acts like a jerk less often, but at random intervals. As long as something is a constant, we can learn to live with it. Our circumstances do matter, but psychological adaptation means that they often matter less than we might expect.

This is true at both ends of the spectrum. Lottery winners get used to their newfound wealth, and others, people like the late Christopher Reeve, find ways of coping with circumstances most of us would find unimaginable. Don't get me wrong — I'd like to win the lottery and hope that I will never be seriously injured. But as a psychologist I know that winning the lottery wouldn't really change my life. Not only would I have to fend off all the long-lost "friends" who would come out of the woodwork, but also I'd face the inevitable fact of adaptation: the initial rush couldn't last because the brain won't allow it to.

The power of adaptation is one reason why money matters a lot less than most people think. According to literary legend, F. Scott Fitzgerald once said to Ernest Hemingway, "The rich are not like us." Hemingway allegedly brushed him off with the reply "Yes, they have more money," implying that wealth alone might make little difference. Hemingway was right. People above the poverty line are

*The psychological use of the term is, of course, distinct from the evolutionary use. In psychology, adaptation refers to the process of becoming accustomed to something such that it becomes familiar; in evolution, it refers to a trait that is selected over the space of evolutionary time.

happier than people below the poverty line, but the truly wealthy aren't that much happier than the merely rich. One recent study, for example, showed that people making over $90,000 a year were no happier than those in the $50,ooo-$89,999 bracket. A recent New York Times article described a support group for multimillionaires. Another study reported that although average family income in Japan increased by a factor of five from 1958 to 1987, people's self-reports of happiness didn't change at all; all that extra income, but no extra happiness. Similar increases in the standard of living have occurred in the United States, again, with little effect on overall happiness. Study after study has shown that wealth predicts happiness only to a small degree. New material goods often bring tremendous initial pleasure, but we soon get used to them; that new Audi may be a blast to drive at first, but like any other vehicle, eventually it's just transportation.