This week I’ve been working with my students to discover where our life expectations come from and whether these are healthy.

In many instances, when asked to finish the sentence, “I will be happy when…” students responded with upcoming circumstances:

Get a driver’s license.
See my friends.
Finish school.
Be successful.

Very few, if any, marked they were happy right now. The challenge laid out for them was to give up the pursuit of possessions and see if there’s an alternate route.

We then skimmed the surface of the latest research on what actually drives human happiness and whether our cultural indicators really mean something. It almost seems flaky to study and measure how happy a person could be, but when you consider we measure levels of depression (and other mental health issues), it does seem appropriate.

The most astonishing find is 50% of what makes us happy is genetically determined. In other words, our baseline for happiness is mostly set.

Life circumstances: social status, jobs, possessions, money – things we hyper-focus on – only account for 10%.

The other 40% are intentional actions. There’s a lot that goes into that percentage, but the main idea is we chose every day to take action on our own level of happiness. 

This doesn’t mean we avoid adversity or strive to always be in a state of pleasure (a common symptom of drug abusers) as one of the intentional actions is to overcome adversity. In fact, if we’re not being challenged and avoiding obstacles, it adds to our discontent.

What it does mean is the things we want aren’t going to do us much good when we get them if we can’t get the 90% figured out first. 

**While there is a ton of literature on the research, you can get a brief summary through the documentary: Happy**