I'm in the study and the long-term tracking surveys they send us periodically have many questions designed to ferret out different aspects and indicators of happiness and success in different dimensions of life.
I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life.
I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an appropriate fraction of that, all for doing things that I'd pretty much happily do for free if I could afford to do so.
I seem to recall reading general summaries of the survey that suggest that we are, on the whole, happier than the average for our respective age groups, but I don't have any of those report summaries handy nor could I readily find them online.
Thanks for the comment. I have a sincere question for you, if you didn't have a great healthy family, and you had a shitty career or whatever, would you still be happy?
I tend to be fairly optimistic and see the good in even bad situations, so I'd probably OK with even a worse set of circumstances (once that was the steady-state normal).
IOW, if I suddenly lost my wife or we split up, I'd be unhappy as hell for a while. In a counterfactual where I never met her or even ended up single, I'd probably still be happy because I'd shape my world and interpret my world in a way that made me happy. Likewise, a career that paid me the local median wage, I'd probably find a way to be happy.
I don't claim this to be a super-human strength of mine, but just a choice. I have friends and friends-of-friends who seem miserable despite no particularly devastating circumstances. They just choose to focus on the bad rather than the good. I have no idea if that's correlated with anything SMPY-related or not, just one guy's life experience.
I can't imagine how I could be much happier in life.
I have a great, healthy family, great career in a field that allows me to use my brain to create tons of business value for my company, take home an appropriate fraction of that, all for doing things that I'd pretty much happily do for free if I could afford to do so.
I seem to recall reading general summaries of the survey that suggest that we are, on the whole, happier than the average for our respective age groups, but I don't have any of those report summaries handy nor could I readily find them online.