Studies suggest that it’s better to be content, in general, than happy. In other words, the guy with the BMW is the first to complain about his faulty air-condition, not the guy in the beat-up Dodge Neon.
The happiest person I’ve ever met is a woman who grew up poor and with one eye. Everyone made fun of her through school even up to college. Her philosophy is this: you begin the day with the assumption that life is hard (the first noble truth), and so if the day doesn’t bring you any hardship, you go to bed with a grateful heart.
That’s sort of the gist of an intriguing story published last week in the “Washington Post.” To read the entire article, “Is Great Happiness Too Much of a Good Thing?” by Shankar Vedantam click here. I’ve excerpted some passages below.

Americans report being generally happier than people from, say, Japan or Korea, but it turns out that, partly as a result, they are less likely to feel good when positive things happen and more likely to feel bad when negative things befall them.
Put another way, a hidden price of being happier on average is that you put your short-term contentment at risk, because being happy raises your expectations about being happy. When good things happen, they don’t count for much because they are what you expect. When bad things happen, you temporarily feel terrible, because you’ve gotten used to being happy.
“I have some friends who are very well off and have great lives,” said Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California at Riverside. “If you ask them, they will say, ‘I am very happy,’ but the most minor negative events will make them unhappy. If they are traveling first class, they get upset if they have to wait in line. They live in a mansion, but a little noise from their neighbors infuriates them, because their expectations are so high. Their overall happiness is high, but they have a lot of daily annoyances.” . . .
The study, in the October issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, offers a new twist on an old idea. Previously, psychologists such as marriage expert John Gottman said that people’s day-to-day satisfaction, whether with themselves or with their intimate relationships, was the sum of the positive and negative things that happened each day.
Researchers had found that people need a certain ratio of positive to negative events to be happy — couples, for example, seem to need about three times as many positive interactions with each other as negative interactions to feel satisfied with the relationship. A variety of therapists have focused on trying to increase the ratio of positive to negative events in their clients’ lives.
But according to the new study, led by University of Virginia psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, people who report a large ratio of positive to negative events also seem to derive diminishing returns from additional happy events — and ever larger adverse effects when they encounter negative events.
By contrast, Oishi found that even though Japanese people were less happy overall than Americans, they needed only one positive event to regain their equilibrium after experiencing a negative event. European Americans needed two positive events on average to regain their emotional footing.
Oishi’s research also provides an intriguing window into why very few people are very happy most of the time. Getting to “very happy” is like climbing an ever steeper mountain. Additional effort — positive events — doesn’t gain you much by way of altitude. Slipping backward, on the other hand, is very easy.