Again, people skipped around 40 percent of their day, and on average, people were happier during the times they kept than they were unhappy during the times they skipped. Taking both duration and intensity into account, the negative experiences were only bad enough to cancel out 58 percent of people’s positive experiences.

Throughout this book, we’ll be addressing some of the common reasons why people have a hard time finding happiness and satisfaction in life, but there are a couple of general truths that should be acknowledged right off the bat.

The first is this: the good life may be a central concern for most people, but it is not the central concern of most modern societies. Life today is a haze of competing social, political, and cultural priorities, some of which have very little to do with improving people’s lives. The modern world prioritizes many things ahead of the lived experience of human beings.

The second reason is related and even more fundamental: our brains, the most sophisticated and mysterious system in the known universe, often mislead us in our quest for lasting pleasure and satisfaction. We may be capable of extraordinary feats of intellect and creativity, we may have mapped the human genome and walked on the moon, but when it comes to making decisions about our lives, we humans are often bad at knowing what is good for us. Common sense in this area of life is not so sensible. It’s very difficult to figure out what really matters.

These two things—the haze of culture and the mistakes we make in forecasting what will make us happy—are woven together and play a role in our lives every single day. Over the course of a life, they exert significant influence. The culture we live in leads us in particular directions, sometimes without our even noticing, and we follow along, outwardly pretending that we know what we’re doing, but inwardly in a state of low-grade confusion.

As Deaton and Kahneman wrote in their study, “More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain.”

At lower levels of income, money brings tangible benefits that are necessary for survival, safety, and a sense of control. But at slightly higher levels of income (and this needn’t be $75,000) the meaning of money starts to become somewhat more abstract and becomes about other things, like status and pride.

For some people in the study, making the economics work proved relatively easy, whereas for others it proved much more difficult. Family wealth served as a significant means to pursue a hedgehog in only six of the 34 lives we studied, whereas in ten of 34 cases people endured at least one significant phase of scarcity while in pursuit of a hedgehog. Yet whether easy or difficult (or somewhere in between), they committed to focus their inner fire in line with their encodings and they figured out how to make the economics work.

Of course, not all of the 99.999% moments count as joyful bliss.

Welcome to the Stress and Drudgery Tax.

Even when right in the middle of the best hedgehog years of their lives, the people in this study paid what I came to call the Stress and Drudgery Tax. To be clear, the tax is not about stress and drudgery outside doing a hedgehog but about stress and drudgery in doing the actual hedgehog.

Recall Grace Hopper’s exquisite encodings for advancing computer software and the adoption of standard languages, and how she never lost the fire. Yet she found herself paying a tax: the frustration of getting people in bureaucracies to change and embrace new technologies. “I find in general that human beings are allergic to change. They’ve learned something, they’re perfectly satisfied doing it, and you come along and say, you’re going to do it this way. People push it away. . . . The job of changing people’s minds is one of the biggest challenges we have.