I recently attended a meeting on physical health with several epidemiologists, and I was reminded of DALYs - disability-adjusted life years - a World Health Organization metric for gauging disease burden that combines morbidity and mortality into a single score. A long and disease-free life is presumably "better" than one that is short and /or one that is filled with problems.
DALYs are controversial, but my purpose here is to discuss the positive version of these. I tossed out the comment at the meeting that we should create measures that take into account how happy people are during the years that they live. These would be dubbed HALYs - happiness-adjusted life years - and would use a comet as the icon (get it?). We could rate someone's life with one to five comets, write a trade book, and sell t-shirts.
Then someone told me that a version of HALYs already exists, using the acronym HLE, for happiness life-expectancy. As defined by Ruut Veenhoven (1996), the HLE for a given nation is the product of average life expectancy and average happiness (subjective well-being, life satisfaction, whatever) in that nation. In effect, an HLE is a measure of living happily ever after. Nations with higher HLE scores are those in Northern and Western Europe, and they tend to be affluent, educated, tolerant, and free (see my previous blog entry "The Happiness of Most Nations is Increasing").
HLEs describe a nation. So what about an individual? I thought further and realized that as individuals, we all have good years and not-so-good years and that one of the goals of positive psychology should be to characterize these. And if possible, we should try and increase the very good years. Here are some of my ideas about very good years.
When I was seventeen, it was a very good year ...
At least for me, the very good years were not obviously so while I was living them. It is only when I thought back that I could recognize the very good years. For example, when I went away to college, I started to become an adult. That was a very good year.
When I was twenty-one, it was a very good year ...
Again, for me, the very good years were challenging ones, difficult and even unhappy. For example, finishing college meant I had to make choices about my life and acquire the skills needed to make these choices real. College was easy for me, but graduate school was hard, filled with 12 hour days, seven days a week (see my previous blog entry "Happiness Outliers"). Those were very good years.
When I was thirty-five, it was a very good year ...
For me, the past good years laid the foundation for the future good years. I was in my mid-thirties when I took a tenured position at the University of Michigan, where I still am and will be for the duration. My personal and professional life came together. I started to do things that mattered not just to me but to others. That was a very good year.
When I was fifty, it was a very good year ...
Daniel Kahneman's (1999) peak-end theory about what people recollect from hedonic experiences (their peaks and their ends) applies broadly, at least for me. My very good years were densely packed with peaks. I don't mean good meals or exciting vacations (see my earlier blog entry "Happy Days and Happy Times") but rather sustained experiences that were shared with others and could be savored in their company. At age fifty, I took a leave of absence from Michigan to work on a positive psychology project. I did not know how much my life would change as a result. But it did. My research, my teaching, my outreach, and indeed my identity now revolve around positive psychology. It was a very good year.
Now the days grow short ... I'm in the autumn of the year ...
I recently heard a quote attributed to a teenager: "There are two important days in my life - the day I was born, and the day I learned why I was born."
I am slower and much older than this wisdom prodigy, because I learned my purpose in life only in steps and stages. And these required years. The very good ones. I am confident that there are a few more still to come.
References
Kahneman, D. (1999). Objective happiness. In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, & N. Schwarz (Eds.). Well-being: The foundations of hedonic psychology (pp. 3-25). New York: Russel Sage.
Veenhoven, R. (1996). Happy life-expectancy: A comprehensive measure of quality-of-life in nations. Social Indicators Research, 39, 1-58.
