We like to think we know what happiness is. We might not have achieved it yet, but we have an idea of what being happy might look like, and build plans for how to get there.
What if the achievement of happiness is not under our control? That’s the idea contained within the idea of happiness. It’s not something that can be easily explained, much less manufactured at will.
Happy has a history. The name of the emotion comes from the Old Norse word happ, which didn’t refer to feeling content and fulfilled, but to the power of blind chance to direct our futures. Happ is about what happens to occur, aside from everyone’s careful planning. Happ suggests that achieving happiness is about happenstance, rather than merit.
This perspective is backed up by quantitative studies, which consistently find that wealth and power are distributed in a manner that’s more consistent with luck than with skill. People who have gotten lucky like to pretend that they earned their success, minimizing the role of blind chance in their lives.
Money doesn’t buy happiness outright, but money does buy protection from unhappiness. Remembering that happiness is a matter of luck, money can enable us to buy our way out of bad luck, while those people who don’t have money to spare are forced to accept what happiness fate hands them.
