Why there’s more to life than happiness

WEIRD people are obsessed with the concept of happiness. From people on the street to psychological researchers poring through citations, unlocking the secret of true and sustained happiness is a priority for many.

But should 'happiness' really be our goal? 'Psychological science tends to treat subjective wellbeing and happiness synonymously,' write Kuba Krys and colleagues in a recent paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science. However, there's plenty of evidence that in some non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) cultures, happiness is not only a state that few people seek – it isn't even on their radar. As one individual example of this, Krys and colleagues cite the telling testimony example of a Japanese man, who, when asked whether he was happy, replied, 'Um… I never thought about such a thing in my whole life.'

Of course, that doesn't mean that he, and others like him, suffer from terrible psychological wellbeing. And the better we understand what exactly can underpin wellbeing, the better placed we all are, WEIRD or not, to achieve it ourselves.

What is happiness anyway?

One of the problems with research in the field, even on WEIRD populations, is that what people mean by 'happiness' often varies. 

For many researchers, 'happiness' has definite hedonic connotations – feeling plenty of positive emotions, as well as not too many negative ones – and it's also often considered to involve feelings of being pretty satisfaction with life. But happiness isn't always related to these variables. The ever-popular World Happiness Report asks people to rate their happiness by picking a rung on an imaginary ladder, with the 'best possible life' for them being a 10 and the worst being a 0. This work has found that six variables, which include GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, and levels of social support, explain the variation in happiness rankings between countries.

This work also implicitly defines 'being happy' as feeling that you have 'a good life'. As such, while it taps into feelings of life satisfaction, it doesn't take into account positive or negative emotions – or how often people in any given culture typically express them, which could influence the wellbeing of everyone in a social circle.

In a 2022 paper in the Journal of Positive Psychology, a team led by Krys explored the rate and impacts of expression of positive emotions and negative emotions in 49 countries. They found that expressing negative emotions represented a 'double-edged sword', 'where the expression of negative emotions predicted higher life satisfaction for the expresser but lower life satisfaction for society.'

What's the evidence that WEIRD people are focused on happiness?

A number of studies have reached this conclusion, and when Krys and colleagues analysed global data for the recent Perspectives paper, they found that the more a country was characterised by WEIRD factors, the more its inhabitants felt that high levels of happiness were desirable (this was independent of their actual levels of happiness). 'These data provide a compelling case that the relatively strong idealisation of happiness is specific to WEIRD societies,' the team writes.

Shouldn't we all strive for happiness, though? Well, no – at least, not according to the results of numerous studies, including four reported in a 2018 paper by Aekyoung Kim at Rutgers University, US, and Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto, Canada. These researchers found that actively pursuing happiness led participants to think of time as being scarce, which made them unhappy. 'This finding adds depth to the growing body of work suggesting that the pursuit of happiness can ironically undermine wellbeing,' they noted.

This research also revealed that different people have different ideas of how to achieve happiness, with some feeling that buying things could make them happy, while others felt that experiences – and savouring how those experiences felt – was more important. (In respect of this debate, a large-scale 2020 study of American adults led by Amit Kumar at the University of Texas found that they in fact derived more happiness from experiences than from possessions.)

What do non-WEIRD cultures think?

In some cultures, particularly those in which Buddhist teachings are popular, there is caution about the pursuit of happiness, Krys and colleagues note. The concern is that this pursuit could be harmful, because it could lead us to neglect other people, including the people closest to us, and so ultimately harm not only them but also ourselves.

This view could help to explain findings that people in Japan, for example, (which has historically been influenced by Buddhist teachings) are less interested in happiness than they are in the West. (In the US, for example, people feel that failing to appear happy is cause for concern.) 'In fact, some individuals across cultures are averse to various kinds of happiness for several different reasons,' write Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers in a paper titled 'Aversion to happiness across cultures' in the Journal of Happiness Studies. One is what they call a 'fear of happiness'.

In non-Western societies in particular, there is evidence, Joshanloo and Weijers write, of a fear of happiness, with one participant in their study putting it this way, 'I prefer not to be too joyful, because usually joy is followed by sadness'. (Some studies have also found a fear of happiness in WEIRD groups, however – for example, among students at the University of Derby).

But while east Asia is most often highlighted as a region where people are more suspicious of happiness than they are in the West, Joshanloo and Weijers add that Islamic teachings suggest caution, too. 'Generally speaking, Islam is critical of people that are perceived to be very happy (best understood as experiencing regular and intense positive emotions and few, if any, negative emotions),' they write. In Islam, true happiness is often considered to be an inner peace derived from devotion to God, Joshanloo writes in another paper, also in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

Why are WEIRD people so into happiness?

In their Perspectives paper, Krys and her colleagues suggest some intriguing explanations for why, when it comes to wellbeing, WEIRD populations are so focused on happiness. The researchers suggest that it may have something to do with WEIRD cultures developing in 'exceptionally benign' ecological habitats. In other words, regions of the planet that were relatively unaffected by extreme weather or pathogens, for example.

'Societies inhabiting the most convenient ecological habitats can allocate their resources – time, workforce capacities, materials – not only for everyday survival (i.e., 'escape from suffering') but also for joie de vivre. This is, they can afford to idealise happiness maximisation,' the researchers write.

What should we strive for?

Just because happiness isn't prized everywhere, doesn't mean it has no beneficial effects on those from cultures in which it is. In cultures that value happiness, there is some evidence that feeling happy can be associated with better physical health, as well as psychological wellbeing. For other cultures, though, this does not seem to be the case – for Japanese people, for example, happiness isn't associated with better health. For the Americans in a study in Psychological Science, led by Jiah Yoo at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, experiencing higher levels of positive emotions was associated with having a healthier cholesterol profile, so much so, in fact, as to be clinically significant. But there was no such association whatsoever for the Japanese.

But even though WEIRD people value happiness, it's worth looking more closely at research into wellbeing that goes beyond it. Studies have found, for example, that feeling that your life has meaning is important for psychological wellbeing, and physical health. A 2024 study in Psychology and Aging, led by Frank Martela, found that having a purpose in life – over and above ratings of life satisfaction – was even linked to a longer life expectancy.

Psychological 'richness'

Another concept that is gathering more attention is 'psychological richness'. In 2021, US-based psychologists Shigehiro Oshi and Erin Westgate argued in a paper in Psychological Review that work to understand the meaning of a 'good life' had missed a crucial dimension, which they called psychological richness.

A psychologically rich life is characterised by plenty of interesting and perspective-changing events and experiences. These experiences don't necessarily have to feel good at the time; they might even be traumatic.

When the researchers asked participants from nine different WEIRD and non-WEIRD countries (the US, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, India and Angola) which type of life they would go for if they could only choose one out of 'happy', 'meaningful' or 'psychologically rich', most chose 'happy', and 'meaningful' came second, but a substantial minority, ranging from 7 per cent in Singapore to 17 per cent in Germany, said they'd prefer a 'psychologically rich' life.

Oshi and Westgate also asked these participants to describe their ideal life. They found that family, work, and money were common threads across cultures. However, American and Indian participants frequently mentioned freedom, love, and friends as key ingredients of an ideal life, whereas Japanese participants did not. Indian participants, meanwhile, mentioned peace and a peaceful life far more often than Americans did. Japanese participants emphasised a long-term focus on retirement, the self and hobbies. Angolans were especially likely to mention God and stability.

This work clearly supports the idea that, at least to some extent, culture affects what matters most for our individual psychological wellbeing. In other words, different historical, environmental, political and religious influences have helped to shape different idea about what happiness means.

And this means that when it comes to the drivers of wellbeing – or even 'happiness', for that matter – one size will never fit all. What the research certainly also reveals, though, is that what we typically mean by 'happiness' is not all there is to psychological wellbeing – even for WEIRD people.

Find much more on happiness in our archive.