A number of weeks back, I authored a column about Yolo County ranking No. 4 among the state’s 58 counties by the California Legislature’s Select Committee on Happiness.

The committee is the first of its kind nationwide, and focused exclusively on the happiness of California residents. Overall, the report found unhappiness is growing. It’s a particular concern among youth and senior citizens, who are vulnerable to the so-called “epidemic of loneliness.”

Now comes a report by Andy Fell of the UC Davis News Service, which looked at the “Secret to Happiness Lies Within You, Or Society — Or Both.” I think it deserves consideration since we’re seeing more and more negative news about layoffs, the deporting of immigrants and legal residents, and worries that we’re “about to find out why your grandmother or great-grandmother never threw out anything.”

The work was supported in part by grants from the National Institute on Aging, which by now have probably been cut back or eliminated by the Elon’s Department of Government Efficiency.

According to Fell’s reporting, the study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, shows happiness can come from either within or from external influences, from both, or neither — and which is true differs across people.

“We have to understand the sources of happiness to build effective interventions,” said Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at UCD, and first author on the paper, according to Fell.

There are two major models of happiness. The “bottom-up” perspective holds that overall happiness comes from our satisfaction with domains of our life, such as wealth, enjoyable work and satisfying relationships.

Surveys such as the World Happiness Report tend to follow this model, suggesting that we improve happiness at a societal level, for example through policies that improve people’s income or environmental quality, rather than by targeting factors intrinsic to an individual.

“But we all know people in our lives who experience traumatic events yet seem to be happy,” Beck said.

Surveys have shown that across populations, only part of the happiness gap between groups of people can be assigned to factors such as wealth and life expectancy.

This suggests a “top-down” perspective, where happiness comes not from external circumstances, but from personal attitudes and qualities, implying that we can improve happiness by improving our mental states through practices such as mindfulness meditation or therapy, rather than by targeting external factors.

A third model is bidirectional: The bottom-up and top-down influences interact with each other to generate overall happiness. From this perspective, targeting either intrinsic or external factors should improve well-being.

Beck and co-authors looked at what determines individual happiness for a group of over 40,000 people. These were nationally representative panels of respondents who had taken part in separate surveys of life satisfaction in Germany, Britain, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Australia repeatedly for up to 30 years.

Overall, the findings imply that measuring subjective wellbeing at the population level does not really reflect the experience of individuals. If the goal is to improve happiness across society, policies need to address both external factors such as health, income, housing and jobs and also individual qualities such as personal resilience and purpose in life.

The most effective policies will be tailored to the individual themselves, Beck said. Targeting external factors for individuals whose happiness is not determined by them would likely be ineffective.

So, it appears that “happiness” can be an individual choice, sometimes relying on internal and external factors. Or, as one person told me once: “Happiness is what you want it to be.”

Jim Smith is the former editor of The Daily Democrat, retiring in 2021 after a 27-year career at the paper.