Afterword

On Happiness

Happiness, madame, happiness.

—Charles de Gaulle¹

Tolstoy was right: All happy families are alike, and that is true whether the families are rich, poor, or middle class. The characteristics that tend to lead to happiness are simply not wealth dependent. Indeed, science is telling us (we already knew this) that human beings have a genetic predisposition toward being happy or unhappy. We all know people who seem to have every reason to be happy, but who in fact are chronically morose and unpleasant to be around. On the other hand, we all know people who face a mountain of miseries but who are always cheerful and upbeat.

Thus, nothing in this book is intended to suggest that merely being wealthy will inevitably lead to happiness. It won't, any more than merely being poor or merely being middle class will inevitably lead to happiness. Happiness, to the extent that it goes beyond genetically wired predispositions, is almost always earned. We earn it by being productive, by overcoming obstacles that challenge us (but that aren't so daunting that they are impossible to conquer), by living in and helping to create a close and loving family environment, by making and keeping friends and acquaintances. None of this happens without effort, and hence the challenge of being happy is at its essence the same for all socioeconomic levels.

Of course, the specific form each of the challenges takes can be powerfully affected by our level of material well-being and by the social and cultural circumstances of our lives. A welfare mother, possibly barely more than a child herself, living in an urban ghetto or a bleak rural township with her three children, faces a certain set of challenges to her own happiness and that of her family, and those challenges are different from the challenges faced by a suburban soccer mom. The welfare mother's challenges can be so herculean that they will defeat her, leading to misery for herself and her fragile family. But they are not different in kind from those of the soccer mom. The path to happiness for both women is the path we articulated above—work, family, friends.

And the same is true for wealthy families. For this small but crucial group of Americans, the pathway to happiness is the same as it is for everyone else. And, unsurprisingly, the outcomes are about the same as well. The canard about the rich living lives of opulent emptiness is as bigoted—and hopelessly wrong—as the notion that all inner-city Americans are drugged-up gang members or that all suburban families are conformist boors. Happiness among the rich is about as evenly distributed as it is among just about any other group of Americans.