Some people with tremendous struggles are happy and some with uncommon good luck are bitter. A lot in the latter group have egos blocking out the sun.

And expectations also matter. They can often be adjusted as we respond to the stimuli we encounter, as we grow to accept a new normal. But there are some things that make us miserable no matter how we look at them. From Tim Harford’s Financial Times piece about so-called “happynomics”:

“It turns out that we grow accustomed to some conditions, happy or unhappy, but not to all.

The study which sparked the idea that we can get used to almost anything was published by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in 1978. It compared the happiness of paraplegic and quadriplegic accident victims to that of lottery winners – and discovered that the disabled people were scarcely less happy than the millionaires. Apparently we can bounce back from some awful experiences. (It is sad and troubling that a few years after making this discovery, Brickman killed himself.)

But how exactly is this apparent process of habituation supposed to work? Here’s where happiness economics has the long-run data to help. Consider bereavement: we cope by paying less attention as time goes by. A friend said to me, months after my mother and his father had both died, ‘You don’t get any less sad when you think about them but you think about them less often.’

The same is true, alas, for the nice things in life: we begin to take them for granted too. But there are experiences – unemployment is one of them; an unhappy marriage another – that depress us for as long as they last. What those experiences seem to have in common is the ability to hold our attention. Commuting, although shorter and less serious, is a classic case – annoying but also stimulating enough that we keep noticing the annoyance.

This suggests that we should look for the opposite of commuting: positive new experiences that are engaging enough to keep being noticed.”