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

Ironically, what really seems to matter is not absolute wealth, but relative income. Most people would rather make $70,000 at a job where their co-workers average $60,000 than $80,000 at a job where co-workers average $90,000. As a community's overall wealth increases, individual expectations expand; we don't just want to be rich, we want to be richer (than our neighbors). The net result is that many of us seem to be on a happiness treadmill, working harder and harder to maintain essentially the same level of happiness.

One of the most surprising things about happiness is just how poor we are at measuring it. It's not just that no brain scanner or dopamine counter can do a good job, but that we often just don't know — yet another hint of how klugey the whole apparatus of happiness really is.

Are you happy right now, at this very moment, reading this very book? Seriously, how would you rate the experience, on a scale of 1 ("I'd rather being doing the dishes") to 7 ("If this were any more fun, it would be illegal!")? You probably feel that you just "know" or can "intuit" the answer — that you can directly assess how happy you are, in the same way that you can determine whether you're too hot or too cold. But a number of studies suggest that our impression of direct intuition is an illusion.

Think back to that study of undergraduates who answered the question "How happy are you?" after first recounting their recent dating history. We're no different from them. Asking people about their overall happiness just after inquiring into the state of their marriage or their health has a similar effect. These studies tell us that people often don't really know how happy they are. Our subjective sense of happiness is, like so many of our beliefs, fluid, and greatly dependent on context.

Perhaps for that reason, the more we think about how we happy we are, the less happy we become. People who ruminate less upon their own circumstances tend to be happier than those who think about them more, just as Woody Allen implied in Annie Hall. When two attractive yet vacant-looking pedestrians walk by, Allen's character asks them to reveal the secret of their happiness. The woman answers first: "I'm very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say," to which her handsome boyfriend adds, "And I'm exactly the same way." The two stride gaily away. In other words, to paraphrase Mark Twain, dissecting our own happiness may be like dissecting frogs: both tend to die in the process.

Our lack of self-understanding may seem startling at first, but in hindsight it should scarcely seem surprising. Evolution doesn't "care" whether we understand our own internal operations, or even whether we are happy. Happiness, or more properly, the opportunity to pursue it, is little more than a motor that moves us. The happiness treadmill keeps us going: alive, reproducing, taking care of children, surviving for another day. Evolution didn't evolve us to be happy, it evolved us to pursue happiness.

In the battle between us and our genes, the kicker is this: to the extent that we see pleasure as a compass (albeit a flawed one) that tells us where we should be headed, and to the extent that we see happiness as a thermometer that tells us how we are doing, those instruments should, by rights, be instruments we cant fool with. Had our brains been built from scratch, the instruments that evaluated our mental state would no doubt behave a little like the meters electric companies use, which are instruments that we can inspect but not tinker with. No sensible person would buy a thermometer that displayed only the temperature that its owner wanted, rather than the actual temperature. But humans routinely try to outwit their instruments. Not just by seeking new ways of getting pleasure, but by lying to ourselves when we don't like what our happy-o-meter tells us. We "acquire" tastes (in an effort to override our pleasure compass), and, more significantly, when things aren't going well, we try to persuade ourselves that everything is fine. (We do the same thing with pain, every time we pop an Advil or an aspirin.)