Discover Why Happiness Is Not Equal For Everyone

Researchers have discovered that the sources of happiness vary from person to person. By analyzing data from thousands of people over more than 30 years, they showed that while some people feel that satisfaction in specific areas of their life (such as work or health) affects their overall happiness, others have different patterns. The study highlights that understanding happiness in a personalized way is more accurate than using models that treat everyone the same way.

What makes us happy? This is a question that science has been trying to answer for a long time. Modern studies show that happiness does not come from a single source, but rather from a combination of factors.

On one side is the “big picture” of our life, how we think we are doing overall (for example, are we satisfied with our life as a whole?). On the other side are the more specific aspects, our satisfaction with areas such as work, relationships, health or finances.

These two types of satisfaction influence each other: our overall view of life can affect how we feel about work, for example, and vice versa.

But do these factors work the same way for everyone? This study proposed that they don’t. The researchers introduced a new way of looking at happiness called “personalized happiness.”

This idea holds that the pathways to happiness vary from person to person. Rather than assuming that everyone is happy for the same reasons, this approach looks at how different factors impact each individual in unique ways.

To test this hypothesis, the scientists analyzed data from more than 40,000 people from five countries (Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Australia) over a period of up to 33 years.

This data included information on how satisfied people were with their lives in general, as well as details about specific areas such as work, relationships, health, and leisure. The scientists applied sophisticated statistical analysis to see how these different types of satisfaction related over time, both across the population and at the individual level.

This allowed them to compare average patterns (i.e. common trends across all people) with individual patterns (how each individual was affected by different aspects of life). This allowed them to better understand whether the sources of happiness vary across people and to what extent traditional models are able to capture these differences.

They looked at how satisfaction with different areas of life influenced overall happiness and found that for most people, this influence was in one direction only (e.g. from work to happiness, but not vice versa). Only a minority showed a two-way relationship between specific areas and overall life outlook.

Furthermore, individual results did not always match the “average” results of the population, meaning that conclusions based on large groups do not capture the nuances of each person well. This shows how important it is to study happiness in a more personalized way, respecting the differences between individuals.

The authors conclude that, although individual patterns are consistent, it is still difficult to separate what is truly a personal pattern from what may just be a coincidence. Therefore, they advocate more studies and new forms of research to better understand how each person builds their own happiness.

READ MORE:

Towards a personalized happiness approach to capturing change in satisfaction

Emorie D. Beck, Felix Cheung, Stuti Thapa & Joshua J. Jackson  

Nature Human Behaviour (2025)

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02171-z

Abstract:

Contemporary approaches examining the determinants of happiness have posited that happiness is determined bidirectionally by both top-down, global life satisfaction and bottom-up, domain satisfaction processes. We propose a personalized happiness perspective, suggesting that the determinants and consequences of happiness are idiographic (that is, specific) to each individual rather than assumed to be the same for all. We showed the utility of a personalized happiness approach by testing associations between life and domain satisfaction at both the population and personalized levels using nationally representative data of 40,074 German, British, Swiss, Dutch and Australian participants tracked for up to 33 years. The majority of participants (41.4–50.8%) showed primarily unidirectional associations between domain satisfactions and life satisfaction, and only 19.3–25.9% of participants showed primarily bidirectional associations. Moreover, the population models differed from personalized models, suggesting that aggregated, population-level research fails to capture individual differences in personalized happiness, showing the importance of a personalized happiness approach. Patterns of individual differences are robust, yet distinguishing between individual-level patterns and random error is challenging, highlighting the need for future work and innovative approaches to study personalized happiness.