Chicago had 22 inches of snow during a single day last month. In Minot, N.D., it was 29 degrees below zero. In Alaska, it's so cold that the dog sleds are sitting idle.
From Alaska to Maine, people north of the 40th parallel are cursing the wicked winter of 1999.
But before we get too smug here in sunny Southern California (and before you folks in Minneapolis move to Costa Mesa), heed this little piece of advice: The climate you live in has very little to do with how happy you are.
That's the latest lesson to emerge from a body of psychological research on what makes people happy. In a recent article titled "Does Living in California Make People Happy?" psychologists found that the answer is a resounding no.
We've known, of course, for a long time that money can't buy you happiness, but researchers now are starting to understand why.
"Our research suggests a moral and a warning: Nothing that you focus on will make as much difference as you think," says David A. Schkade, a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, and co-author of the study.
Schkade and colleague Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University asked college students in the Midwest and in Southern California questions about their happiness. When rating themselves, the students in both regions were similar in their levels of happiness. But when rating whether people like themselves would be happier living in California or the Midwest, both groups said that Californians would surely be happier.
The fact that the study, published in the September issue of Psychological Science, found that people in the Midwest expected Californians to be happier (largely, because of the weather) shows a common flaw in thinking. Various studies on happiness have found that things like weather, money, marital status, age and beauty do not significantly influence the happiness of most people--although we overwhelmingly think they do.
"We've gotten a lot of reaction to this article from people saying, 'I don't believe you that people in California aren't happier,' " Schkade says. "People are not good judges of the effect of changing circumstances on their own life satisfaction or that of others."
The danger of misunderstanding the true origins of happiness, he says, is that "people might actually move to California in the mistaken belief that this would make them happier."
Or they might do all sorts of other things--change jobs, divorce, buy a Ferrari--thinking such action is the ticket to happiness.
It won't be, agrees psychologist David Lykken, author of a new book called "Happiness" (Golden Books).
"The route to happiness is not winning the gold. You feel grand for a while, but it doesn't last," he says. He's found that genetics play a role in happiness.
Study Results Seemed to Be Counterintuitive
The idea that happiness is not greatly affected by major life circumstances is a somewhat startling notion to some that has emerged only recently.
While the first major study in this area dates back more than 20 years, "it's really only been in the last decade that this whole area of work has begun to take off and gain wider interest," Schkade says.
That study, in 1978, found that people who became paraplegics did not become significantly unhappy because of losing their ability to walk. The same study also found that lottery winners, over time, were not greatly happier because of their new wealth.
"This article is famous because its results are deeply counterintuitive," Schkade says. "An observer would expect paraplegics to be more miserable and lottery winners to be happier than they are in actuality."
Other studies confirmed that changing circumstances don't seem to shake people from their tendencies to be either happy or unhappy. For example, studies show that most people return to their normal levels of happiness within a year after the death of a loved one and that no particular time of life is happier than another. Physically attractive people aren't happier, and people with disabilities aren't sadder, research has found.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that happiness isn't found or earned was published in 1996 in a study from the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. According to Lykken and co-author Auke Tellegen of the University of Minnesota, as much as 50% of a person's tendency to be happy is inherited; that is, people are born upbeat or melancholy.
"There is some substantial component--maybe 50%--of well-being that you can't do anything about and maybe 50% that you can," Schkade says.
The Minneapolis study looked at 254 sets of identical and fraternal twins who were separated at birth and reared apart. The happiness levels of the identical twins were strongly correlated. The researchers then studied a smaller number of the sets of twins and looked at their happiness scores--both the identical and fraternal twins--on two happiness surveys given 10 years apart.
