From a human perspective, it might seem that happiness should come naturally. However, according to Dr. Laurie Santos, an expert on happiness and a professor of psychology at Yale University, happiness is a skill many of us have to develop because it’s secondary to our basic survival needs.

“Natural selection honestly doesn’t care how we feel—it really just wants us to survive and reproduce. And that doesn’t necessarily involve being happier,” Santos said in a YouTube video for Big Think. “People are less happy than they ever have been. In the United States, around 40% of college students report being too depressed to function most days. We see the same kind of thing in older individuals.”

The ‘annoying features of the mind’

Santos says there are “annoying features of the mind” that deceive us into looking for happiness where it doesn’t exist or cause us to overestimate the joy certain things will bring. Often, our intuitions about what will make us happy are incorrect.

We also tend not to think objectively; instead, we compare what we have to what other people have. As long as someone else is doing better, we feel worse. Further, some things that positively affect our happiness stop working over time, leaving us to chase the same experiences for........

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