If Everything in Life Keeps Getting Better, Why Are Happiness Levels Plummeting?

Counterintuitive Unhappiness

This is really counterintuitive and interesting. Over the last several years, we have seen happiness levels in the United States plummet. They have really declined. It used to be that most people said they were very happy. Now the number of people who say they are very unhappy has surpassed the number of people who say they’re very happy. So, more people claim to be very unhappy compared to those who claim to be very happy.

Just in the last few years, happiness levels have kind of dropped off a cliff in the United States especially, and happiness levels have declined the most among people who have the most education and the most wealth. It’s really interesting because these are the people who have the most resources and probably the most insulation. We might think the buffer between me and unhappiness is bigger if I’m educated, if I’m employed, or if I have wealth or other resources. But those are the people who are the least happy. So, it should make us pause and wonder, With our access to all of these things to make us happy, why are we the most miserable? What is going on here?

When we zoom out and consider it, we realize those things really don’t provide the happiness that we’re looking for. They overpromise and they underdeliver. They promise to make us happy, but they fall short. Psychologists and those who study happiness call this the “hedonic adaptation.”

We adapt to a new level of life—a new lifestyle, a new benefit, a new luxury. We adapt, and then our happiness levels come down again back to baseline. So we just get used to a new way of living.

No matter how wealthy you are or how many resources you have, you get used to the next thing, and then you compare yourself to others, thinking, Well, if I had that job or that house or that career, if I could just move up a little bit, then I would be happy.

We’ve been made by a God who is happy, and we’ve been made in his image.

We’ve all experienced this. You reach that level, and you’re actually not happy. You are for a minute, but then the thing breaks or wears out and you think, Actually, it’s not as awesome as I thought it would be.

We have all had that experience where what we thought would make us happy just really disappoints us. And so this is an example of that hedonic adaptation. We adapt to the new thing. We want these temporary things to deliver us the lasting happiness that we long for, and they just fall woefully short.

We’ve been made by a God who is happy, and we’ve been made in his image. And so it does us no good to search for happiness outside of him. We have to find it in him. He is our designer. He designed us in a specific way, and lasting happiness comes through relationship with him.

Jen Oshman is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Be Happy?

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