I was convinced that people have more problems than it seems. It is hard (for me?) to imagine what people might be struggling with, if they don’t talk about it.
But it isn’t clear to me that this translates to my expectations of people’s happiness. It seems to me that people’s struggles effect their levels of satisfaction, which has to do with with their moments of happiness, which in turn effects their actual happiness, which hopefully effects how happy I perceive them to be.
The translation of struggles into satisfaction is not straight forward—it might depend on the degree to which you chose this challenge, on how much it injects uncertainty into your life, on what other things you have going on, on what the difference between your expectations and your reality is, among other factors.
Then there is how satisfaction translates into moments of happiness. For me, I need to do something that is itself joyous, like playing with my daughter, or stop to “smell the flowers”—that is, to spend time being excited and happy that I succeeded at something.
But how do moments of happiness translate into an overall feeling of happiness? I aspire to spend some time at peace, and some time with the stress and effort of trying to do stuff. I aspire to be happy some of the time, and concentrated or paying genuine attention to other people at other times. I don’t want to be happy all the time. But I do consider myself a happy person, at the moment.
Finally, my perception of a friend’s happiness is has a lot to do with what their personality is like. People who give the impression of high agency, that they are the heroes in their life, or that they (also) have modest goals they care about and are succeeding at, give me the impression of happiness. People who are energetic give the impression of happiness.
And impressions of people are kind of normalized—everybody has problems, most people are not talking about everything going on with them all the time, so you probably get a pretty good sense of how happy people are relative to each other. Sure, compare them to yourself without taking facades into account and you can have imposter syndrome. But I think people do get good impressions of the happiness levels of the people around them.
I was convinced that people have more problems than it seems. It is hard (for me?) to imagine what people might be struggling with, if they don’t talk about it.
But it isn’t clear to me that this translates to my expectations of people’s happiness. It seems to me that people’s struggles effect their levels of satisfaction, which has to do with with their moments of happiness, which in turn effects their actual happiness, which hopefully effects how happy I perceive them to be.
The translation of struggles into satisfaction is not straight forward—it might depend on the degree to which you chose this challenge, on how much it injects uncertainty into your life, on what other things you have going on, on what the difference between your expectations and your reality is, among other factors.
Then there is how satisfaction translates into moments of happiness. For me, I need to do something that is itself joyous, like playing with my daughter, or stop to “smell the flowers”—that is, to spend time being excited and happy that I succeeded at something.
But how do moments of happiness translate into an overall feeling of happiness? I aspire to spend some time at peace, and some time with the stress and effort of trying to do stuff. I aspire to be happy some of the time, and concentrated or paying genuine attention to other people at other times. I don’t want to be happy all the time. But I do consider myself a happy person, at the moment.
Finally, my perception of a friend’s happiness is has a lot to do with what their personality is like. People who give the impression of high agency, that they are the heroes in their life, or that they (also) have modest goals they care about and are succeeding at, give me the impression of happiness. People who are energetic give the impression of happiness.
And impressions of people are kind of normalized—everybody has problems, most people are not talking about everything going on with them all the time, so you probably get a pretty good sense of how happy people are relative to each other. Sure, compare them to yourself without taking facades into account and you can have imposter syndrome. But I think people do get good impressions of the happiness levels of the people around them.