There’s no simple answer for how to be happy, but many brilliant individuals have dedicated their lives to finding the answer nonetheless.
Matt Killingsworth is one of them. A Harvard-educated psychologist and senior fellow at the esteemed Wharton School, Killingsworth has led numerous studies designed to uncover the secret to happiness. In one of his biggest undertakings, he helped design TrackYourHappiness.org, “a large-scale research project that uses smartphones to collect real-time happiness data from people around the world.”
The findings he’s cultivated over the course of his career are mandatory reading for anyone who wants to maximize the joy they get out of life. Here are just a few takeaways from his body of research:
1. Sometimes money can buy happiness
A groundbreaking 2010 study by the late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and economist Angus Deaton found that money doesn’t buy unlimited day-to-day happiness. Emotional well-being rose with income only up to around $60,000 to $90,000 a year in household income, enough to live comfortably and without many of the hardships associated with poverty. Beyond that point, they found no additional benefit to earning more money when it came to day-to-day happiness, though people’s overall evaluations of their lives kept rising with income.
Killingsworth’s own research disagreed. His 2021 study found “a linear relation between happiness and log(income),” meaning each doubling of income brought a similar boost, with no sign of a plateau.
The two men came together, with psychologist Barbara Mellers as a neutral third author, to reconcile their findings in a 2023 paper titled “Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved.” In the end, they determined that the “flattening” effect applies only to the least happy 20% of people. For that group, happiness rose with income until about $100,000 and then stopped rising. For everyone else it kept climbing, and for the happiest group it climbed faster above $100,000.
In other words, extra income seems to ease unhappiness up to a point, but it doesn’t keep helping the unhappiest people beyond about $100,000, while for most people more resources continue to bring more joy. Other researchers have since questioned whether that $100,000 threshold exists, and Killingsworth and his co-authors have responded.
2. Spend on experiences, not things
It’s hard to say exactly why having more money continues to make most of us happier, but some of Killingsworth’s other research may offer a clue.
Money makes a lot of problems in our lives go away. But as the old saying suggests, having a lot of money also creates new problems. One thing large amounts of money do allow us to do is buy things that can help us experience joy. Well, not necessarily things.
In a 2020 paper with fellow authors Amit Kumar and Thomas Gilovich, Killingsworth finds: “Spending on doing promotes more moment-to-moment happiness than spending on having. Relative to possessions, experiences elicit greater in-the-moment happiness.”
That study looked at moment-to-moment happiness. Taken together with earlier research from the same team, experiences tend to come out ahead of possessions in anticipation, in the moment, and in memory. Vacations, concerts, parties, and adventures are often a better use of your money than cars, clothes, and other material items.
3. The joy is in the waiting
Speaking of anticipation, Killingsworth has found that it is sometimes one of the greatest elicitors of happiness.
In the 2014 paper “Waiting for Merlot,” Killingsworth and his co-authors found, across four studies, that waiting for an experience tends to be more pleasurable and exciting than waiting for a material possession.
Happiness expert and New York Times bestselling author Gretchen Rubin agrees. She writes that there are four keys to maximizing how happy an event makes you. The first is anticipation, but savoring the moment, sharing it with others, and reflecting back on it often round out the magic formula.
“Anticipation is a key stage; by having something to look forward to, no matter what your circumstances, you bring happiness into your life well before the event actually takes place,” she writes. “In fact, sometimes the happiness in anticipation is greater than the happiness actually experienced in the moment. That’s known as ‘rosy prospection.’”
4. Being present is a happiness superpower
In the 2010 Science paper “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth dropped one of the biggest truth bombs of his career. He and his co-author Daniel Gilbert found “that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and … found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.”
In an essay for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, adapted from his 2011 TED talk and written before his 2021 income findings, Killingsworth wrote that many of the other factors involved in happiness are relatively modest in size: “Yes, people are generally happier if they make more money rather than less, or are married instead of single, but the differences are quite modest.”
Our ability to stay present in the moment and take joy in our lives, not what’s already happened, or what’s coming next, is incredibly powerful:
“We found that people are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not, which is unfortunate considering we do it so often. Moreover, the size of this effect is large. How often a person’s mind wanders, and what they think about when it does, is far more predictive of happiness than how much money they make, for example.”
The takeaway: savor the ordinary
It’s no wonder so many scientists, philosophers, and researchers have dedicated their careers to understanding the mysteries of happiness. After all, most people simply want to live a happy life, and a review of more than 160 studies found that happier people tend to be healthier and live longer.
Finding happiness is easier said than done. Killingsworth’s research suggests that being rich and checking things off your bucket list can help in the search, but ultimately the most important part is learning to find joy in the everyday moments.
This article originally appeared in March. It has been updated.
