Are 10x happiness boosts possible?
10% happier vs 10x happier
Can you massively increase your happiness? Like, boost it by 10x?
In a thought-provoking post, Sasha Chapin argues “yes”:
I am maybe 10x happier than I used to be […] There are a couple of ways I could express this:
What I'd consider a 7/10 day now would've been an unbelievably good day before, easily a 10/10. […]
Due to increased confidence, better social skills, and a peer group I'm lucky to have, maybe once a week I have a really good, honest, connective, unpredictable conversation, of the kind that I would’ve been lucky to have three times a year previously.
If you said to me, "Okay here's the deal, you can have a year of this life you're living now, and then die, or live for ten years the way you used to live," I'd choose the former in an instant.
My first reaction to Sasha’s post was, “That can’t be right.” 10x-ing your happiness sounds way too good to be true. I’ve done my share of meditation, therapy, and self-help to know that improving your mental state is hard. If pressed to put a number on it, I’d follow Dan Harris and say you can become 10% happier. 10% is a lot less than 10x.
Upon reflection, though, my knee-jerk response was probably wrong.
I am now lucky to be happily married, surrounded by family and friends, and enjoying some professional success. 10x-ing that would be like reaching permanent nirvana. But I’ve also been to darker emotional places. If you’re in a dark place, moving to something more average—not permanent nirvana, just a reasonably happy existence—can be a 10x improvement.
Suppose we draw the distribution of happiness across all people. Let’s say it looks like a bell-shaped curve:
In this graph, most people fall in the middle range of happiness, with fewer people at the extreme ends of the spectrum.
My claim is that if you’re somewhere in the middle, you might see a 10% improvement:
However, if you’re in a bad emotional place, moving to “average” can qualify as a 10x boost:
These graphs take a static, point-in-time view of happiness. But in reality, “bad” states seem to last a lot longer than “good” states. That’s true almost by definition: If you’re “depressed” for two days, that’s not depression; clinical depression requires the bad state to persist. That’s another reason why moving from a “bad” to an “average” state can have a 10x effect: Not only do you get an immediate boost, but this improvement accumulates over time.
So, is it 10x happier or 10% happier? Well, both.
In the end, however, maybe the precise answer doesn’t really matter. The key insight is that you can grow, and that insight provides hope. Thank you, Sasha, for this ever-important reminder.
P.S. I came across Sasha via The Browser’s recommendation of his “50 things I know”. Check that brilliant essay out if you haven’t.
