If you want to observe humanity in its current state then one of the best places to go is to an airport. You will see many people who are rushing around, talking on their mobile phones or interacting with electronic devices.
If you try and seek sanctuary in a bookshop in the airport you will only find many self-help books promising to make you rich, or thin, or happy. The question many people will find themselves asking is whether people who have money are actually happy.
Edward Diener is a psychologist at the University of Illinois in the United States. He has been studying whether wealth makes someone happy and this is something he has been doing for over a quarter of a century. One of the key findings of this study is that despite people in the US having a higher purchasing power than some other nations, they would not rate themselves as happier.
Other countries with lower purchasing power such as Canada, Ireland and Switzerland have more citizens who are satisfied with their life than in the US. Diener states that as long as people have enough money to meet their basic needs then increasing the amount they earn has a relatively little effect on their happiness.
His research shows that most people spend a lot of time focusing on changing their external environment in the belief that it will make them happier but many people who find themselves having successfully changed this are not any happier than they were before.
Another factor that many people assume will make them happy is being successful or good-looking. However, there are countless examples of famously attractive people who’ve had crises and found themselves no happier than anyone else. This is something that can particularly strike when the physical results of ageing set in.
Dr Martin Seligman works at the University of Pennsylvania and is the founder of the Positive Psychology Centre. He states that happiness comes from our internal qualities rather than our external environment and says that character strengths are the key to happiness. He identifies 24 individual strengths which people can thrive on, including such things as kindness, curiosity, hope and creativity.
Psychologists who talk about happiness generally state that happy people are those who are content and have achieved peace of mind. This is something that does not happen from external factors, but happens with an acceptance of our internal states. A great deal of modern thinking is that material objects might bring us happiness in the short-term, but it is not something that will last.
Many people think that they can derive happiness from material objects because society means that we are projecting ourselves into things we own. If we want to be happy then it is important to disconnect from these objects and realise that lasting happiness cannot come from the material possessions we accumulate but that it comes from inside us and this is where the core happiness can be found.
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