Happiness

I've become increasingly obsessed with the psychology of 'happiness' in recent months. There is a theory in the relevant psychological fields which (more or less) claims that we have absolutely no clue what makes us happy. People who win lotteries, in the long run (and sometimes even in the short run) end up feeling as happy (or as sad) as they typically felt before they won the lottery. The same is true for people who get shot in the face and survive, who lose a loved one, who marry super-models, who drink plenty of water, who have terminal illnesses, who own Macs, who just won a year's supply of snickerdoodles.

People who've had a devastatingly horrible thing happen to them, learn to deal with it, live with it, and their brain chemistry quickly gets them back up to the same level of happiness they are used to experiencing.

People who've had incredibly uplifting experiences eventually run out of the happy chemicals (quite quickly in fact) and sink back to the same level their body is used to.

In short, based on the books and articles I've been looking at, just about the only element in a person's life which psychologists have found to truly affect the person's base level of happiness for the long term is their level of social interaction. Give a person more or less social interaction than they like (or are used to) and you will change their level of happiness for the duration of that stimuli change and possibly longer. (However, people seem to acclimate better to an increased level of social interaction than a decreased level).

In other words: What really drives our happiness seems to be some internal setting, an equilibrium that actually fights against external stimuli and with the exception of other people, the external stimulus always loses. Without getting too philosophical about life and the pursuit of happiness, I hope that those who have been negatively affected by this week's wild fires in southern california get back to their steady state of happiness.