My oldest son, Mackenzie, will be starting as a freshman at the University of Chicago on Monday. We moved him to his dorm last weekend and helped him get settled in. It's been years since I'd seen him acting so excited, since I'd seen him approaching one person after another after another, striking up conversations so often that after just 2 days everywhere we walked on campus students were already calling him out by name. All I could think of whenever I saw him interacting with the other students was, "He's going to thrive here!"
I'm still feeling euphoric, still feeling like he's about to start the best years of his life. It also got me thinking about the relationship between your circumstances and your happiness, between your circumstances and whether or not you thrive.
There has been plenty of research suggesting that perhaps 60-70% of your happiness is NOT a function of your objective circumstances. According to Positive Psychology researchers such as Sonya Lyubomirsky, we are born with "Happiness Setpoints" that explain much of the difference between those who are perpetually gloomy and those who are perpetually cheery. Life happens and people may temporarily cheer up or get sad, but they often bounce back to their usual level of happiness. The remaining 30-40% of our happiness is in our control and is affected by things like our social behavior, our activities, and our thought patterns.
So will my son really thrive in Chicago? Is this just the temporary excitement of new circumstances? I don't think so. Sometimes circumstances change in a way in which their impact is usually fleeting. Your girlfriend dumps you. You get a raise at work. You get a new iPhone. But other life changes have a more lasting effect because they help you transform your social behavior, your activities, and your thought patterns. They thus help you transform the 30-40% of your thoughts and actions directly raise or lower your happiness.
For the last 6 years, Mackenzie attended Walnut Hills High School, a school whose outstanding academics attracts students from all over the city. Unfortunately, this creates a circumstance in which it is hard to spend time with the friends that you make at school. It's not like when I went to my neighborhood high school and we could all see each other on weeknights or weekends. At Walnut or any other great city "magnet" school, unless your parents endlessly drive you around, you better hope that many of your best school friends live in walking distance. With very few exceptions, Mackenzie was not so lucky. None of us regret his attending such a fine High School. It's academic strengths are a big reason he was able to get into the prestigious University of Chicago. But I think I see how the circumstances at Walnut may have held him back a bit. I also saw last week how drastically different the social opportunities are for him at University of Chicago. These are his kind of intellectual people, debating politics, philosophy, history--people from all around the world with fascinating backgrounds and cultures. And they live with him in his dorm or within walking distance at other dorms. And I feel how he can't believe his good fortune, how thrilled he is to engage with so many people, and I know that this isn't just something new and exciting. He is going to thrive.
