Happiness, Self-Help, and Life Under Constraint

Life is hard. Circumstances limit us. What can we do anyway?

Everyone who’s reading this has a range of possible outcomes based on their unique circumstances. The reality is that many, if not most, of those circumstances are based entirely on luck: where and when you were born, who you were born to, and the body you were born into. We’re all dealt a hand of cards at the beginning of the game, and some of those hands are stronger than others.

The constraints we experience based on our unique circumstances have a huge impact on our mental health and happiness. In the world of self-help, the question of how much change is possible given those constraints is the bogeyman. If happiness is mostly based on circumstances, and our circumstances are largely controlled by luck, why is self-help a $13.5 billion/year industry? What’s the point of therapy? What can we actually do?

Five things I’ll be covering over the next few weeks:

1. The impact of circumstances, and how different people respond to the reality of our constrained outcomes.

2. The dominance of a particular kind of (bad) self-help content.

3. What’s actually possible for most people.

4. How our brain makes things hard.

5. What almost anyone can do to improve their lives. And then, what some people can do under the right circumstances.

How much don’t we control?

Famous studies like those from Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky argue that happiness comes down to three primary factors:

1. An individual’s genetically determined happiness set point.

2. Life circumstance.

3. Intentional activities, or “effortful acts” like changing how we think or behave.

The exact split between those three categories is a matter of some debate, but as near as we can tell roughly 40-50% of our happiness finds its roots in heritable factors like our unique genetics. Many personality traits – including our innate lean towards happiness or unhappiness – have a substantial genetic component, addiction and depression are heavily influenced by heritable factors, and genetic differences play a large role in the length and quality of our lives. For example, Dr. Lyubomirsky found that 50% of our happiness is “baked in,” 40% comes from intentional activities, and just 10% arises from life circumstances. If the 10% attributed to life circumstances - which includes everything from getting married to becoming unemployed to having a major falling out with your parents - seems a bit low to you, there are a few big caveats. As Dr. Lyubomirsky clarified during our conversation on Being Well:

“There are some life circumstances that make a huge difference to our happiness. If you live in a war zone in Syria, or you’re in an abusive relationship, or if you live in poverty, that’s going to make you very, very unhappy. The 10% number only applies to people who are already relatively comfortable. Who have pretty good lives, and improving their life circumstance isn’t going to improve their happiness that much.”

This comment echoes the complex, and frequently misunderstood, research on the relationship between money and happiness. Most studies have found that income has a linear but somewhat convex relationship with subjective wellbeing. This means that greater wealth does tend to make people happier, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. This makes intuitive sense, as the more dollars a person has the less important any single dollar becomes, but the exact location of that point of diminishing returns is disputed. Research conducted in 2010 by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that while “life evaluation” continues to increase as income rises, emotional well-being decouples from income at ~$75,000. This study became very famous, and the $75,000 number made its way into the public consciousness.

But efforts to duplicate that study’s findings have been mixed at best, and a high-quality 2021 study found that happiness increases linearly with income, and continues to rise beyond the $80,000/year mark:¹

So, yes, if you’re living a “relatively comfortable” life, circumstances might have a limited impact on your happiness. But if you’re in that position it probably means you were dealt a lucky hand of cards in the first place! Research consistently shows that poverty is the most pernicious mental health factor in the world, in part because it’s closely tied to many of the adverse experiences people go through during childhood. If I could wave a magic wand and change one well-being related factor it wouldn’t be giving everyone lifetime free therapy or focused meditation or whatever other intentional activity is hot right now - it would be addressing poverty.

It’s helpful to keep in mind that studies are usually generalizations from large groups. Across 1,000 people, the average person might have half of the variation of their happiness derive from a genetic set point. But inside that sample there are probably a number of individuals with, for example, unusually low levels of serotonin based on genetic factors. These people are going to have an extra hard time shifting off their set point based on circumstantial factors or intentional activity, so genetics play a larger role than average in their overall experience of subjective happiness. Equally, another person’s happiness when their head hits the pillow at night might be almost entirely based on whether their spouse had a good day at work.

Social science research focuses on what tends to be true for most people, but any one person may or may not be well captured by that broad sample. Put another way, good study design often reduces the impact of outliers…but to that one outlier their experience matters an awful lot. It’s easy to erase the experience of individuals by focusing on what’s true for the middle of the distribution, which is one of the reasons it’s important to represent study data accurately. However you slice it, it’s clear that a big chunk of our overall well-being comes down to factors we have little control over.

How do we respond to constraint?

When people in the mental health world come face-to-face with the reality that, optimistically, over half of our happiness comes down to stuff we don’t control, there are a spectrum of responses with two extremes. On one side are the social change absolutists. These are the people who say that because circumstances have such a huge impact, all that really matters is big-picture societal change. This viewpoint often positions the self-help industry as a bunch of grifters exploiting vulnerable people by selling them a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. “I’m working 60 hours a week in an Amazon warehouse and still can’t pay rent, you’re telling me some mindfulness technique will make me happier? Come on.”²

On the other side of the spectrum are the personal growth evangelicals. They usually give a vague hand wave in the direction of personal circumstance – the mental health equivalent of posting a black square on Instagram back in 2020 – while mostly focusing on everything else. When listening to these people it often sounds like every problem could be solved with a collective commitment to kale, meditation, and zone 2 cardio. If we just get past our limiting beliefs and raise our vibration, anything is possible! #wellnesswednesday [check out my master mind program for more info and smash that like button]³

Between these two extremes are plenty of frustrated “yes, and” folks who appreciate that circumstances constrain what's possible for us, that our agency in changing those circumstances is often limited, and that most people don’t live ideal lives. But it’s because we don’t have much control over our circumstances that it’s so important to develop internal skills that allow us to relate to those circumstances more effectively. We influence what we can influence, accept real limitations, and do our best to find the lotus in the mud. There’s this counterintuitive movement in two directions simultaneously: acceptance of what is alongside commitment to change for the better.

While there’s a wide spectrum here, a huge problem in the mental health space is that most of the books you read, podcasts you listen to, or YouTube videos you watch are created by a self-help evangelical. That viewpoint is massively overrepresented for three reasons:

1. People who get into making self-help content are disproportionately likely to slant that way.

2. Overpromising sells. If they find out you underdelivered, who cares? You already have their money.

3. We’re desperate for a sense of control over our lives.

Life’s hard, our outcomes are constrained, and a lot of days are going to suck regardless of what you do is not exactly compelling marketing copy, particularly when stacked up against “This MASTERMIND PROGRAM will teach you how to MANIFEST HAPPINESS at will!!!” It’s tempting to believe that things work that way; that if we just knew this or did that our lives would totally transform. That kind of content tends to sell the most books and rise to the top of search results.

In addition to its incredible tone-deafness, the problem with this brand of self-help content – and not just the extremists, but anyone who overclaims how much agency we have to solve our problems by doing stuff inside ourselves – is that it turns all problems into problems of effort. You’re still struggling with your depression, anxiety, or OCD because you haven't “done the work” yet. If you’re suffering, you’re probably just not trying hard enough. Put in more effort, walk the path, buy my book, and get back to me. Collective challenges are placed on the individual.

There’s an interesting parallel here from developmental psychology. When children are raised in chaotic environments they have two choices:

1. They can believe their caregivers are unreliable, problematic, or dangerous. Therefore, the caregivers are the problem.

2. They can believe their caregivers are reacting rationally to their own bad behavior. Therefore, the child is the problem.

In the first case there’s nothing the child can do: they’re doomed to suffer until they’re able to escape. In the second case there’s something they can do: exercise agency by altering their behavior. It’s poignant to realize that children are so reliant upon their caregivers for their survival, and so eager for their support, validation, and love, that it’s psychologically safer for them to think they’re the problem in order to exercise an illusory sense of control over their environment.

We can frame extreme self-help content through this lens. People are so desperate for that feeling of agency, so determined to believe that something, anything will give us more control over our circumstances, that they’ll literally turn to magical thinking.

The truth is that what’s possible for someone who was dealt a tough hand of cards might not be possible for someone else. In most personal growth content, it feels like the target is a state of perfect functionality where you have it all dialed in and are living an ideal, totally fulfilled life. This is the vision we’re typically sold on social media, and it’s the mask worn by many people who create content in the space. But the dominance of that target as the aspiration causes us to feel like we’re falling short most of the time, and then makes it a personal failing when we do.

What’s the alternative? What’s actually achievable?

There’s a concept from psychology I love: the “normal neurotic.” This is someone who experiences typical human problems: they’re anxious sometimes, they don’t always do what they should, they experience their fair share of conflict with other people. They’ve got their own neurotic tendencies and internal bullshit. Many days are unpleasant. But they’re reasonably functional, and even very happy, regardless. They’re not sitting on top of a mountain somewhere, they’re making it work during a normal, constrained life.

How to Become a Normal Neurotic probably isn’t a book title that makes publishers swoon, but in a world where we’re constrained by so many things it’s borderline inspiring to have something we know we can do. That’s the achievable target for most people: normal neuroticism. Circumstances are constrained, what can we do even so? What are some of the key skills that help us get there? How can we experience more happiness under constraint?

Let’s talk about that next week.

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Substack is warning me that I’m approaching the length limit for emails, so we’re splitting this one into two parts. Leave a comment down below to let me know what you think, and consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’d like to support my work. The best way to support me is by sharing this post and SMASHING THAT LIK-okay okay, but for real it does help me out.

1. The below image comes from Visual Capitalist Datastream. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-money-can-buy-happiness-after-all/

2. As someone who creates content in this space, I’m haunted by this.

3. To be clear, this is a joke.