Where to get some happiness

Photo by Jaja_1985

My friend Dorie and I met for lunch yesterday. I needed it. Not only were we due for some catching up, I was also hoping some of Dorie’s magic would rub off on me.

You know how you appreciate different friends for different reasons—one is the introspective friend, another is the wry and witty one, and then there’s the one who gets all worked up about politics and injustices. We like being around different people, because who they are does rub off. After spending time together, we find ourselves thinking more critically, or our sense of humor is sharper, or we feel incited to action.

Dorie is my happy, light-hearted friend. I can always count on her to be buoyant, and somehow she manages to be that way without seeming (or being) the least bit fake. What’s even more impressive is that she manages to be genuinely buoyant when everything in her life isn’t perfect. It’s amazing. If you don’t have a friend like her, I highly recommend that you find one.

Or be friends with me and my friends, because I’m friends with her. Apparently happiness has the power to seep through three degrees of separation.

A little research to back it all up

Although we don’t need scientific researchers to tell us that people’s moods and attitudes rub off on us, I found this article, Social Networks and Happiness, really fascinating. The study, by Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard and James H. Fowler of UC-SD, found this:

...social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon…. Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups.

The research also suggests that the same principle applies to online social networks. They traced the pattern on line, in part, by studying the profile photos within a network of friends. (So if you’re looking extra glum in your Facebook or Twitter profile, I might just have to drop you.)

That one thing money can’t buy

I really didn’t need a couple of scientists to tell me you can’t buy happiness. That’s why I married a really happy man rather than a really rich one. Well, I also didn’t know any really rich ones, but Jason’s inherent happiness was very attractive from the moment I met him, and I never looked back.

But what do you think the increased happiness probability is of adding one happy friend to your circle, compared to having an extra $10,000 in income?

Each additional happy friend increases your probability of being happy by about nine percent, the study says, compared with only a two percent increase in probable happiness from the money. (The study used $5,000 in 1984 dollars, which annoyed me, so I found a special inflation calculator to help me translate.)

It makes me feel very rich, indeed, for being married to a happy man. It also makes me not at all surprised that I crave a regular dose of Dorie on the side. Maybe I should try talking her into a weekly lunch. Even if I pay for her lunch, I’ll probably end up with a happiness budget surplus. Let’s see, if I multiply the cost of having lunch with Dorie every week by the extra happiness I’ll gain, and divide that by the lost billable hours…. But wait, when I’m happy I’m more creative and efficient, so that complicates the equation. And math makes me unhappy, so I’ll stop here.

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Tagged as: budget, Dorie, friend, happiness, light-hearted, money, research, social media