You Might Be the Happiest Person You Know

An honest deep dive into 2,500 years of searching for happiness: from a fabulously rich king to the longest study ever conducted, and three places that change the question forever.

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Anyone who works in a hospital sees two worlds come through the same revolving door every day.

People walking in with flowers and a knot in their stomach. And people walking out with test results that came back fine, pausing on the sidewalk for a moment, as if the air suddenly smells different.

Apparently, we often already have happiness. We just don’t notice it.

Happiness is like breathing. You do it all day, thousands of times. You never think about it, until your nose is blocked. Then breathing is suddenly the only thing on your mind.

Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

The richest man in the world asked the question first

Twenty-five centuries ago, so the Greek historian Herodotus tells us, King Croesus of Lydia received a famous guest: the wise Solon of Athens. Croesus was so wealthy that his name still lives in our language: as rich as Croesus.¹

He showed Solon all his gold. Everything a human being can possess.

And then he asked the question he had really invited him for: who is the happiest person you have ever met?

You can feel which answer he expected.

Solon named an unknown man: Tellus. Not a king. Just someone with a good, simple life, who watched his children and grandchildren grow up. Croesus, irritated, asked about second place, and again heard no king’s name.

Solon’s message was radical, then and now: you cannot read someone’s happiness from a snapshot of their possessions. You have to look at the whole life. Call no one happy before the end.

Herodotus gives the story a bitter ending. Years later, defeated and awaiting his execution, Croesus is said to have cried out one name, three times: “Solon. Solon. Solon.”¹

Honesty first: historians doubt this meeting ever actually took place, because the dates don’t quite line up. It is probably a parable. But I find exactly that revealing. The question “does wealth make us happy, or does something else?” was already so urgent 2,500 years ago that people told stories about kings to answer it.

Solon had just one problem: he couldn’t prove it. To do that, you would have to follow people through their entire lives, from youth to old age.

Someone simply had to do it.

The study that lasted a whole lifetime

In 1938, a group of researchers at Harvard began doing exactly that. They selected 724 young men. Half of them students, half of them boys from the poorest neighborhoods of Boston. And they made an unheard-of promise: we will follow you for the rest of your lives.²

They kept their word. The study is still running today, after more than 85 years. Every few years, the same questions: how is your work, your family, your health? Plus blood tests, medical records, and later even brain scans. Everything passed through it: war, careers, divorces, illness, loss.

The researchers wanted to know one thing. What predicts who grows old healthy and happy?

The answer was not money. Not fame. Not a high IQ, not a big career.

The answer was: the people you love.

Put very simply: those who, at fifty, were satisfied with their relationships with partner, family and friends, were the healthiest at eighty. That satisfaction predicted their health even better than cholesterol did. Not how many people you know, but whether there are a few people with whom you feel truly safe.²

And now the part I love most.

Seventy-five years of research. Twenty million dollars. Thousands of lives, followed from beginning to end. And George Vaillant, the man who led the study for more than three decades, summed up the entire outcome in five words:

“Happiness is love. Full stop.”³

George Vaillant

Some critics found that too simple. Surely you didn’t need a 75-year study for that? Didn’t your grandmother know as much?

But that is precisely the point. Your grandmother was right. She just couldn’t prove it, and now it has been proven. Sometimes the truth is simply simple. One honest footnote belongs here too: the study began with only men, from a single city. A narrow group. But the core finding has since been confirmed again and again in much broader studies, with women and in other countries.

And Solon, 2,500 years earlier, without a single measuring instrument? He came astonishingly close.

But what if I won the lottery?

“Yes, but,” says a voice in your head, “what if I won big…”

That voice has been studied too. In 1978, researchers compared people who had recently won large lottery prizes with ordinary people. The result? The winners were not happier. Worse: they enjoyed everyday things even less: breakfast, a conversation, a beautiful day. After that enormous peak, the rest of life felt paler.⁴

How is that possible? Through something called hedonic adaptation. A difficult term for something you have known all your life: getting used to things.

Your brain adapts to everything good. The new car becomes just your car. The new house becomes just home. Like breathing: whatever is always there, you stop feeling.

The philosopher Epicurus saw this more than two thousand years ago, and immediately supplied the medicine:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”⁵

Epicurus

Read that sentence once more, slowly. The life you are living now: chances are a younger version of you once fervently hoped for it.

And what about the famous salary threshold?

Does all this mean money does not matter? No. And here I want to be precise, because this is a place where science corrected itself.

For years, a famous finding by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman held sway: more income makes your daily life feel better, but above roughly $75,000 a year, the effect stops. The salary threshold of happiness. You still find it quoted everywhere.⁶

Then researcher Matthew Killingsworth came along with a smarter measurement: he asked tens of thousands of people, via their phones, in the middle of the day, how they felt at that moment. Millions of answers. His conclusion: there is no threshold at all. It just kept rising.⁷

Two top scientists, two opposite answers. And then they did something rare: instead of fighting, they sat down together and worked it out jointly.

Their shared answer (2023), put very simply:

For most people, more money helps a little, and keeps helping a little. But for people who are unhappy, it stops around $100,000. Above that, money no longer solves their real problem. Because money is good at exactly one thing: taking worries away. The fear of a bill you cannot pay, of a washing machine breaking down. Money buys the absence of misery. But buying happiness, that it can hardly do.⁸

Or, as a Roman philosopher wrote to a friend twenty centuries ago:

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”⁹

Seneca

The question that chases happiness away

There is one more strange thing about happiness. The philosopher John Stuart Mill discovered it in himself:

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”¹⁰

John Stuart Mill

Sounds odd, but you know the feeling. In the middle of a good conversation, thinking “what a good conversation this is”, and something is already gone. Happiness does not like having a measuring stick held next to it.

Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps and lost almost everyone he loved there, drew from that the lesson that carries his entire work: happiness cannot be pursued. It ensues, as a by-product of a life that is about something, of caring for something or someone beyond yourself.¹¹

But that leaves us with a riddle.

Chasing doesn’t work. Measuring chases it away. Winning wears off.

What is left?

Three places

Recently, in a video, I heard someone say something that stayed with me. It is not science, but it struck like an old truth:

Whoever has never seen a hospital, a prison, and a cemetery cannot yet appreciate their happiness.

And I don’t read that sentence as a warning. I read it as a gift. Because it doesn’t say: be afraid. It says: look.

The hospital shows you what your health is worth: today, while you can simply stand up and walk. The prison shows you what it is worth that in a moment, you decide where you’re going. The cemetery shows you what it is worth that the people you love still pick up the phone when you call.

Three places where you suddenly feel what breathing is.

And even this has been tested by science. It may be my favorite happiness study of all. Researchers had people try two things. The first group thought back gratefully on something good in their lives. The second group did something strange: they had to imagine that something good had never happened at all. What if I had never met my partner? What if I had never come to know that friend?¹²

Guess which group felt happier afterwards.

The second. Not counting what you have, but feeling, for a moment, what it would be like without. That is the moment your nose briefly blocks. And then you breathe again, and finally notice it.

Look, and everything falls into place. Solon said: judge the whole life, not the snapshot. Harvard proved: it lies in your people, not your possessions. Kahneman and Killingsworth calculated: above ordinary comfort, money buys little extra happiness. Epicurus knew it all along: what you have now is what you once hoped for.

So maybe you don’t need to achieve, buy, or win anything new today.

Maybe you only need to notice what is already there. That your body works. That you are free. That someone picks up when you call.

You have been breathing all along.

Tonight, mentally take away one thing you simply have, and then give it back to yourself. Could it be that you, with exactly the life you are already living today, are the happiest person you know?

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This article is meant to inform and to invite reflection; it is not medical or psychological advice. If you are struggling with low moods or questions about your mental health, please talk to your family doctor or a specialist.

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Read next: Happiness isn’t found in what you own, and not in your IQ either. Why the brightest minds sometimes made the biggest mistakes, in Intelligence Is Not Enough. From Harvard to Hiroshima.

Further reading

• Why rest has become unbearable
• Why your brain is never satisfied
• Three gardens
• Yesterday is history: the science of letting go

Sources

The numbers in the text refer to this list.

1. Herodotus. (1920). The histories (A. D. Godley, Trans.). Harvard University Press. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0126 (Original work written in the 5th century BCE)
2. Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Good-Life/Robert-Waldinger/9781982166700
3. Vaillant, G. E. (2012). Triumphs of experience: The men of the Harvard Grant Study. Harvard University Press. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674503816
4. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.36.8.917
5. Epicurus. (2010). Vatican sayings (P. Saint-Andre, Trans.). Monadnock Valley Press. https://monadnock.net/epicurus/vatican-sayings.html (Saying 35; original work written in the 3rd century BCE)
6. Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), 16489–16493. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1011492107
7. Killingsworth, M. A. (2021). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4), Article e2016976118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016976118
8. Killingsworth, M. A., Kahneman, D., & Mellers, B. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), Article e2208661120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
9. Seneca, L. A. (1917). Ad Lucilium epistulae morales: Volume I (R. M. Gummere, Trans.). Harvard University Press. https://archive.org/details/adluciliumepistu01seneuoft (Letter 2; original work written in the 1st century CE)
10. Mill, J. S. (1873). Autobiography [E-book]. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10378
11. Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. https://www.beacon.org/Mans-Search-for-Meaning-P602.aspx (Original work published 1946)
12. Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008). It’s a wonderful life: Mentally subtracting positive events improves people’s affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1217–1224. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013316

Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →