Why Sunshine Is (totally) Overrated

Sunshine is great. I love sunshine. I've recently moved to Spain, where I get to enjoy more of it than I normally would in my home country of Germany. And it's healthy too, providing the body with the important Vitamin D, which keeps our bones healthy (among other things). But as humans, we tend to overrate the importance of sunshine (and climate in general) in our lives when it comes to rating our own happiness.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman relates an argument he had with his wife, in which she claimed that people in California are happier than those who live on the East Coast. He tried in vain to convince her that her intuitions about the importance of climate when considering someone's happiness were wrong, citing the Scandinavian countries as an example for some of the happiest people in the world. So what does a psychologist like him do when his wife won't listen to him? Of course, he sets up an experiment so he can prove it to her.


Large samples of students from universities in California, Ohio and Michigan were recruited to complete a questionnaire about their level of satisfaction with life. Here's what happened:

"As expected, the students in the two regions differed greatly in their attitude to their climate: the Californians enjoyed their climate and the Midwesterners despised theirs. But climate was not an important determinant of well-being. Indeed, there was no difference whatsoever between the life satisfaction of students in California and in the Midwest. We also found that my wife was not alone in her belief that Californians enjoy greater well-being than others. The students in both regions shared the same mistaken view, and we were able to trace their error to an exaggerated belief in the importance of climate. We described the error as a focusing illusion." (p. 403)

What this basically means is that we give too much weight to climate and too little to other determinants of well-being. It all depends on what is present in your mind most of the time. What you think about. How happy does your car make you? That depends on how often you drive it and how often you think about it, but probably not as happy as you thought when you bought it. How often are paraplegics in a bad mood? It depends on how often they sit around feeling sorry for themselves, which is not as often as one would think. We humans are very talented at adapting to all kinds of life situations and get used to the circumstances after a while. Or as Kahneman puts it: "If you have been there all your life and do not travel much, living in California is like having ten toes: nice, but not something one thinks much about." (p. 404)

Exactly. So if anyone out there is envious of me living in Spain, let me tell you this: It's nice, but not necessarily nicer than having ten toes... or fingers. Unless I choose to sit around and think about the nice weather here all day. But why would I want to do that? There are so many other great things to reflect on...

"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it." 

(Daniel Kahneman)