The Mathematical Pursuit Of Happiness

As a person of science, sometimes it feels as if my life revolves around formulas. Sure, we all know that at the core of those formulas, there’s nothing but a fundamental principle that can easily be figured out, but it just seems easier the basic structure of the ‘formula’ instead. Yeah, the momentum principle leads to the distance over time being equal to velocity, but it’s just so much easier to skip all the mumbo-jumbo in the middle and just memorize Δd/Δt?

I was never one of those people who recognized those fundamental principles, which led me to become one of those people who failed physics (twice) (one of them was an AP test, okay). However, my academics weren’t the only things in which I neglected to understand beyond.

One of my favorite authors of all time is Jodi Picoult. Her books simply feel realistic; like at any point, your life could be turned around in the way that any of her characters’ lives do. She is able to take even mundane, every day experiences and transmit the feelings of those events so well through paper.

A particular favorite of mine is her novel, Nineteen Minutes. While I won’t get into the specifics of why I love it so much (you would fall asleep by the 4th page, unless you’ve read it and understand), there is one element of the book that has really stuck with me.

One of the characters, an economist, reduces happiness down to one simple formula:

Happiness = Reality / Expectations

In order to increase your happiness, you must either better your reality or lower your expectations.

I wrote about my ever-persistent struggles with too high expectations previously, but all those words could be summed up so easily with this formula. The pursuit of happiness, the thing hundreds have written about, thousands have sung about, millions have dreamed about; it can all be summed up in a two-part equation.

You may think that there is more to this, there has to be more to it. What happens when you can’t control your reality, but you expect so much of yourself? There has to be another factor that influences happiness in some way. And maybe there is. However, mulling over this has changed my mind about what I have thought of myself in the past. A happier me is waiting for this change, waiting for this constant state of fugue to end.

Like any other fundamental principle, happiness is an easy, unrelenting statement at it’s core. It’s a matter of how complex you want to make your life, how deep you want to expand that statement and apply it that is the choice you have. But for all of the other happiness novices like me out there, let’s start slow and simple. We have 2 choices in front of us and we have to pick on or the other.

Which one do you choose?

Header picture: Georgia Tech College of Computing Sky-Bridge