What Makes People Happy: Wealth, Relationships, and Faith
This paper explores the nature of happiness by examining which individuals tend to report the highest levels of well-being and what factors contribute most meaningfully to a happy life. Drawing on research by David Myers and others, the paper considers how age, gender, race, income, personality traits, close relationships, religious faith, and physical health each play a role in determining happiness. It finds that demographic variables such as wealth and race are surprisingly weak predictors, while psychological traits, strong social networks, meaningful activity, and a sense of purpose prove to be far more reliable indicators of lasting well-being.
- Introduction: Philosophical Roots of Happiness: Philosophers debate happiness through reason, faith, pleasure
- Who Is Happy?: Demographics and control as predictors of happiness
- Happiness and the Level Realizable: The evolved mind, worry, and subjective well-being measures
- Happiness in Relation to Wellness, Money, and Relationships: Income, relationships, faith, and activity as happiness factors
- Conclusion: Internal and relational factors predict happiness best
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper synthesizes findings from multiple credible sources — including peer-reviewed research by David Myers — to build a coherent argument rather than relying on personal opinion alone.
- It effectively challenges common assumptions (e.g., that wealth or demographic status drive happiness) by presenting empirical counterevidence, making the argument more persuasive.
- The conclusion ties together all threads cleanly, reframing happiness as a function of internal and relational factors rather than external circumstances.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the technique of comparative analysis across demographic variables — systematically examining gender, race, age, income, and relationship status — to isolate which factors genuinely predict happiness. This approach, rather than asserting a single cause, allows the argument to build through elimination, arriving at its conclusion with cumulative logical force.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a brief philosophical framing, then poses key research questions about who is happy. It moves into an examination of the evolved human mind and its natural tendencies toward worry, then shifts to empirical findings on wellness, money, and relationships. The conclusion synthesizes all findings into actionable insights about what societies should prioritize to improve human well-being.
Introduction: Philosophical Roots of Happiness
Happiness — its true value and the right means of achieving it — has been pondered by many thinkers, including Plato and Socrates, the Stoics, church fathers, and Aristotelians. Philosophers have advanced different arguments, among them that happiness is a matter of faith, passion, reason, pleasure and/or contentment, or mind and/or body. Some have also argued that happiness is fundamentally a way of being or feeling.
Who Is Happy?
Who are the people who are happy? Does being happy depend on one's age, race, or sex? Does wealth contribute to happiness? Does happiness come from a particular trait or job, from friends, age, or income level? From a spiritual dimension? From an active faith or from close, supportive relationships? (Myers, 56)
Happy people are usually those who feel that they are in control of their lives. Those with little or no control — such as citizens of undemocratic countries, very poor people, nursing home patients, and prisoners — suffer from lower morale. They also have worse health than those who are happy. Happy people are also often optimistic.
In recognition of the fact that the majority of people are reasonably happy, researchers are now trying to find out: Who is the happiest? Does happiness favor people of a particular race, gender, or age? Must one have a particular job, income level, or set of traits to be happy? (Myers, 58) If the conditions of happiness are equally available to people of any race, gender, income level, or age, then who is the happiest? Through the difficulties of life, some people's capacity for happiness is not diminished. In fact, it was found that the people who were happiest in 1973 were still comparatively happy ten years later, despite changes in their family status, residence, or work.
Happiness and the Level Realizable
The human mind, with its capacity to create, plan, analyze, and communicate, has significantly evolved over the last 100,000 years, since Homo sapiens first appeared on earth. However, in spite of these changes, the mind did not evolve to make us feel happy, have more humor, or write love poems and tell people we love them. The mind evolved for a more serious purpose: to help us survive in a dangerous world. With each passing generation, it became more skilled at foreseeing and avoiding threats, and more skilled at analyzing everything and judging whether it was good or bad, helpful or harmful, safe or dangerous.
Such situations include embarrassing ourselves in public, not having the money to pay bills, getting speeding tickets, facing rejection, upsetting the people we care for, losing our jobs, getting terminal diseases, or any of the thousands of other situations that fill us with worry. Consequently, we spend a significant amount of time worrying about things that, most of the time, will not occur.
Psychological evaluations of well-being supplement the determinants of material and physical well-being with assessments of subjective well-being. The indicators of happiness do change with age — for instance, one's satisfaction with health and social relations becomes more significant in older age. Emotional terrain also varies greatly with age; teenagers, unlike adults, often experience shifts in mood in less than sixty minutes. In terms of gender, females are twice as vulnerable as males to displaying anxiety or depression, while men are five times more vulnerable than women to antisocial personality disorder and alcoholism. The more intense sadness women experience in bad circumstances must be viewed in light of their greater capacity for happiness under good circumstances. Even though women report slightly more happiness than men when positive emotions are evaluated, the net result is approximately equal hedonic balance for both sexes. In terms of race, whites and blacks — similar to men and women — score roughly the same on tests of self-esteem, which reflect how happy one is. The same was true of disabled and non-disabled persons (Wallis; Myers, 63).
Conclusion
Knowing one's income, sex, and age hardly provides any clue with regard to his or her level of happiness. Better indicators of happiness are psychological traits, whether the individual has a network of close relationships, whether he or she is engaged in activities about which they are passionate, and whether the individual has a faith that involves purpose, hope, and social support. Happiness depends less on exterior factors than most people think. By researching who is happy, researchers can help societies rethink their priorities and usher in a new era of improved human well-being.
Works Cited
Luscombe, B. "Do We Need $75,000 a Year to Be Happy?" Time, 6 Sept. 2010.
Myers, D. G. "The Funds, Friends, and Faith of Happy People." American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, 2000, pp. 56–67. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.56.
Wallis, C. "The New Science of Happiness." Time Magazine, 2005.
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