To begin with, it would look personal. As your brain constantly remodels itself, it conforms to what you, as a unique individual, want from life. Happiness? You might suppose that this would top the list. But it turns out that the desire for happiness immediately exposes a serious weakness. Although we are designed to be reality makers, most people aren’t especially skilled at making their personal reality a happy one.Only recently, with the rise of a new specialty known as positive psychology, has happiness been closely studied. The findings are mixed. When people are asked to predict what will make them happy, they list things that seem obvious: money, marriage, and children. But the particulars do not bear this out. Taking care of small children is actually a source of high stress for young mothers. Half of marriages end in divorce. Money buys happiness only up to the point where it makes the material things in life secure. Poverty is certainly a source of unhappiness, but so is money, since once people have enough of it to secure the basic necessities, adding extra money doesn’t make them happier—in fact, the added responsibility, along with fear of losing their money, often does the opposite.The overall picture, surprisingly, is that even when people get what they wanted, most of them aren’t as happy as they thought they would be.
