you are the same age. The two of you decide to go on a little intergalactic
adventure, and each of you gets into a separate spaceship. Your spaceship
travels at a pokey 50 kilometers per second, but your twin’s travels at close to
the speed of light—an insane 299,000 kilometers per second. You both agree
to travel around space for a while and find a bunch of cool stuff and then meet
back up after twenty earth years have passed.
When you get home, something shocking has happened. You have aged
twenty years, but your twin has hardly aged at all. Your twin has been “gone”
for twenty earth years, yet on his spaceship, he experienced only about one
year.
Yeah, “What the fuck?” is what I said, too.
As Einstein once said, “Dude, that doesn’t even make sense.” Except it
does (and Einstein never said that).
The Einstein example is important because it shows how our assumption
of what is constant and stable in the universe can be wrong, and those
incorrect assumptions can have massive implications on how we experience
the world. We assume that space and time are universal constants because that
explains how we perceive the world. But it turns out that they are not
universal constants; they are variables to some other, inscrutable, nonobvious
constant. And that changes everything.
I belabor this headache-inducing explanation of relativity because I
believe a similar thing is going on within our own psychology: what we
believe is the universal constant of our experience is, in fact, not constant at
all. And, instead, much of what we assume to be true and real is relative to
our own perception.
Psychologists didn’t always study happiness. In fact, for most of the field’s
history, psychology focused not on the positive, but on what fucked people
up, what caused mental illness and emotional breakdowns, and how people
should cope with their greatest pains.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that a few intrepid academics started asking
themselves, “Wait a second, my job is kind of a downer. What about what
makes people happy? Let’s study that instead!” And there was much
celebration, because soon dozens of “happiness” books would proliferate on
bookshelves, selling in the millions to bored, angsty middle-class people
suffering existential crises.
One of the first things psychologists did when they started to study
happiness was to organize a simple survey.^9 They took large groups of people
and gave them pagers—remember, this was the 1980s and ’90s—and