Axel Deussen

Tom Hiddleston, the guy who plays Loki, sat down on a New York subway bench and casually explained why chasing happiness makes you less happy. Turns out he knows exactly what he's talking about. He has a double first in Classics from Cambridge, where Mary Beard was one of his supervisors, and what he's describing is a 2,300-year-old idea from Aristotle that psychologists have spent the last 20 years backing up. Aristotle split happiness into two things we usually mash together. Hedone was pleasure, like the sunrise feeling Tom talks about. Eudaimonia, which usually gets translated as flourishing, was something you could only judge across a whole life. His line was that one swallow doesn't make a spring, and one good day doesn't make a person happy. Psychologist Iris Mauss tested the chasing part in 2011. Her team had some people read a fake newspaper article about how important happiness is, and then everyone watched a feel-good clip of a figure skater winning gold. The people who'd been told happiness matters came out of that clip feeling worse than everybody else. When the clip was a sad one, both groups felt about the same. Mauss thinks wanting happiness raises the bar for every moment, so even a good one can feel like it fell short. Roy Baumeister went after the lasting part in 2013 with a study of 397 adults. Money and comfort predicted happiness and barely moved meaning at all. Stress and worry actually went along with more meaning, and so did time spent thinking about the past and the future. Raising kids pushed meaning up and happiness down at the same time. Tom's version was "I'm doing it for my kids. I'm doing it for my mom." Daniel Kahneman put real numbers on that trade. He had 909 working women walk back through the day before, hour by hour, and rate how each part felt. Taking care of their kids scored 3.86 out of 6, below watching TV, below cooking, and just a hair above housework. Ask those same women about their lives, though, and they'll tell you their kids are the biggest source of joy they have. I have two kids, and most mornings I can feel both of those answers before breakfast. That's what Aristotle was getting at the whole time, a life that can score pretty badly hour by hour and still add up to something great, and Tom just explained it better on a subway bench than most professors manage in a full lecture.