"People who have it are happier"

You've got evidence, and it isn't only your own imagination. You know people who've got the next thing. The friend on the coast seems calmer. The colleague who went to the bigger company posts about it. The couple with the house with the kitchen you want seem, when you're at their table, to be living the life you're forecasting. If the if-only is a forecast, then those people are the data, and the data look good.

Two problems with the data. The first is the sample. You see people with the next thing at their best, at their table, on the occasions when you're invited, and what you're looking at is an occasion. Another book in this series, You only saw the good bits, is about that and I won't repeat it here. The second problem is more interesting, and it's that even when researchers get a proper look at people who have the thing, the thing turns out to be doing less than it looks.

Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone put it plainly in a paper in 2006 whose title is a question, "Would you be happier if you were richer?" Their answer was that the belief is widespread and mostly illusory. People with above-average incomes were, when asked to rate their lives, relatively satisfied. But when their actual moment-to-moment experience was measured, they were barely happier than anyone else. They tended to be more tense. They didn't spend more of their time doing things that were particularly enjoyable. And the effect of income on satisfaction, the authors said, seemed to be transient, which is the season again.

So the friend on the coast will, if you ask, say her life is good. She's rating her life, and rating your life is exactly where the next thing does show up, because you look at the outline and the outline has a coast in it. But her Thursday afternoon, the part where the hum lives, is a Thursday afternoon. The paper's explanation for the gap is the same focusing illusion as the last chapter. When people evaluate a life, their own or someone else's, they focus on the conventional achievements, and the achievements are visible while the Thursdays aren't.

I'm not saying the friend is secretly miserable. I'm saying that the thing you're measuring when you look at her, the calm, is mostly an outline you're filling in, and that the research which has looked inside those outlines finds the days to be more ordinary than the outlines. That's good news, in a way. The gap between you and her is smaller than the listings make it look, and the part of it that's real is not the coast.