“I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.” 

So wrote Karl Wilhelm von Humboldt, an Enlightenment philosopher whose 1810 work “On the Limits of State Action” foreshadowed John Stuart Mill’s famous essay “On Liberty.” Humboldt, a Prussian linguist and diplomat, argued that state power should be reduced to insure freedom for individual self-cultivation. 

Some two centuries later, Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, writes that circumstances such as income, health, marital status, geography and many of the things we consider most important to our happiness actually play a relatively small role in our well-being – as little as 10 percent, she estimates in her new book, “The How of Happiness.” 

Why? Because we adapt to our fate, and tend to return to a baseline of happiness (see my Jan. 24 Yahoo!Finance column for a book review). “It is astonishing to a lot of people how low the number is,” she told me in an interview. “It comes from many studies of correlations between happiness and other factors – health, age, where you live, how much money you make, whether you’re married or not, etc.” 

Consider this story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about Joe Logan, a Richland, New Jersey retiree who became a multi-millionaire, although he never made more than $11 an hour during his years in the workforce.  

Logan grew up in poverty during the Depression and went to work in local mills at age 16. He served in the army for two years and lived with his sister until he saved $6,500 to buy a two-family house. He lived off the rental income and continued to save his salary, investing in real estate and stocks. He never wanted the stress of moving up the corporate ladder (“salaried people are committed 24 hours a day,” he said). He never married (a girl he loved as a teen died tragically) and has no children. 

• Check Out This Happiness Blog
• A Happy Appy
• A Brit’s View of Money and Happiness
• Why Do Savings and a Rich Life Have to Be Mutually Exclusive?
• Great Reader Comments on Banks, Happiness

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under Money & Happiness, charity, saving, setting goals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.