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Income, health, good marriage and lack of trauma only account for 8 - 15 percent of variance in happiness

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We think we know the ingredients for happiness. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and popular author on the subject of happiness, summarized several reviews of the literature on the elements we commonly consider: “a comfortable income, robust health, a supportive marriage, and lack of tragedy or trauma.” Lyubomirsky noted, however, that “the general conclusion from almost a century of research on the determinants of well-being is that objective circumstances, demographic variables, and life events are correlated with happiness less strongly than intuition and everyday experience tell us they ought to be. By several estimates, all of these variables put together account for no more than 8% to 15% of the variance in happiness.” What accounts for most of the variance in happiness is how we’re doing comparatively. (The breadth and depth of all that research on happiness and its implications is important, but it’s beyond what we need to understand our issue with sorting others’ outcomes. I encourage you to read Lyubomirsky’s work on the subject, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, and Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis, cited in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading.)