假設會魔法的精靈出現在在你桌上，可以滿足你三個愿望，你會許什么愿？將 “希望未來能滿足無窮無盡的愿望”這種自作聰明的回答排除在外，做這個小測試的數千位研究對象大部分都給出了意料之中的答案，比如財富、名譽、健康、真愛、職業成功和權力。

但也有出人意料的：雖然大多數人在生活中都很看重幸福（常常排在首位），可幾乎沒人請求精靈讓自己快樂。

為什么？

對這個問題，新近面世的《如果你非常聰明，為什么你不快樂？》（If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?）一書提出了不少很有趣的見解。這本書的作者拉吉?洛格納汗是德克薩斯大學麥庫姆斯商學院教授。過去五年，他一直在教授有關快樂的工商管理學碩士課程（開放課程教育平臺Coursera上現已有這門課），他研究快樂的時間要長得多。根據洛格納汗長期研究結果，以及書中附錄引用的數百項其他研究，他找出了聰明人和成功人士（書中簡寫為“S-與-S型人”）沒有普通人快樂的七個基本原因。

顯然，聰明人和成功人士太計較得失了。首先，聰明人很可能會“貶低”快樂的價值。人人都想快樂，可被問及為何不求假想中的精靈讓自己快樂時，成功人士很可能會回答，擔心快樂讓人變懶，或者快樂是稍縱即逝的。洛格納汗在書中寫道，最能說明問題的是，聰明人經常說，快樂“太抽象，特別是同金錢、名利和地位相比。”

許多學者研究人們如何盡可能追求快樂之后，有些解釋還挺有趣，說“人拼了命地追求金錢”或者名譽、威望或是其他東西，“有時反倒忘記最初去追求的原因。”

S-與-S型人凡事計較付出多少代價、獲得多少好處，往往忽視了真正能讓自己快樂的東西，面對選擇時還會故意避免感性。

洛格納汗指出，在某些方面這么做沒錯，比如做投資，如果應用到生活中其他方面就不太好了。以芝加哥大學的一項實驗為例，實驗對象在兩種巧克力挑一種，其中一種巧克力的塊頭是另一種的四倍，不過大塊巧克力外形像一只大昆蟲，小塊巧克力大小和外形都跟正常巧克力一樣。

洛格納汗寫道：“當然，并不存在統一的正確答案。如果看到大塊巧克力會聯想到吃蟲子感覺惡心，就應該選看上去更正常的小巧克力。”然而，68%的S-與-S型人決定做“理性的”選擇，不受情感影響，最后吞下了蟲子形狀的大巧克力。洛格納汗補充道：“不必說，他們吃得不太開心。”

《如果你非常聰明，為什么你不快樂？》仔細觀察了S-與-S型人大部分最終選擇昆蟲形狀巧克力的七種不同方式。幸運的是，書中也提供了七種“讓人開心的習慣”，幫助人們停止無意中折磨自己。洛格納汗承認，改變個人習慣絕非易事，因為多數人“從孩提時起就學著貶低快樂，” S-與-S型人只是比多數人記得更牢。

S-與-S型人當了父母之后，也很難教導后代拋棄蟲形巧克力選擇小塊巧克力。洛格納汗發現這點是因為發現小兒子沒有玩昂貴的玩具卻在玩裝玩具的大紙板箱時，感覺很生氣。他說：“我意識到，問題的原因恰恰就是我們在告訴孩子什么重要——金錢，看重金錢、性價比、地位、美貌、權力等。孩子學會對真正讓自己快樂的東西視而不見。”

于是，洛格納汗什么都沒說，由著兒子繼續玩紙箱。（財富中文網）

譯者：Pessy

審校：夏林

Suppose a magic genie appeared on your desk right now and offered to grant you three wishes. What would you ask for? With smarty-pants answers like “I wish for an infinite number of future wishes” ruled out, the thousands of research subjects who have taken this simple quiz have mostly come up with the answers you’d expect, like wealth, fame, health, true love, career success, and power.

But here’s a surprise: Despite the fact that happiness ranks high on most people’s lists of what they want from life (often in the No. 1 spot), almost no one ever asks the genie for it.

Why not?

A new book, If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy?, offers some fascinating insights into that question, among others. Author Raj Raghunathan, a professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, has been teaching an MBA course in happiness for the past five years (and now an online Coursera version), but he’s been studying it for much longer. Based on his own research, and hundreds of other happiness studies cited in the book’s appendix, Ragunathan has identified seven basic reasons why the smart and successful, which he abbreviates as “the S-and-S,” are likely to be even less happy than the average person.

Apparently, they’re too smart for their own good. For one thing, people with above-average intelligence are most likely to “devalue” happiness. Everyone wants it, but when they were asked why they didn’t ask the hypothetical genie for it, high achievers were most likely to say that they feared happiness would make them lazy, or that it is fleeting. Most tellingly, smart people often said that happiness is “too abstract, particularly when compared with money, fame, or status,” Ragunathan writes.

Yet reams of studies on how people seek to maximize happiness, some of them entertainingly detailed here, “suggest that people can get so caught up in chasing money” — or fame, or prestige, or fill in the blank — “that they forget why they wanted [it] in the first place.”

The S-and-S tend to lose sight of what would really make them happy by subjecting every situation to a cost-benefit analysis, while deliberately squashing any emotional response to the available choices.

That’s fine for, say, picking investments, Ragunathan notes, but elsewhere in life, not so much. Consider, for example, an experiment at the University of Chicago, where people were asked to pick between two chocolates. One of the chocolates was four times the size of the other, but with a catch: It was shaped like a huge insect. The smaller one was the same size and shape as a typical chocolate.

“There is no universally correct answer, of course, but to the extent that one finds the idea of eating a bug to be revolting, one should choose the smaller, better-looking chocolate,” writes Ragunathan. Nonetheless, determined to make a “rational” decision, as opposed to one more influenced by emotion, 68% of the S-and-S group choked down the bigger, bug-shaped candy. “Needless to say,” the author adds, “they didn’t enjoy the chocolate much.”

If You’re So Smart takes a close look at seven different ways the S-and-S most often end up choosing the chocolate bug, so to speak — and, luckily, offers seven “habits of the highly happy” describing how to stop inadvertently making oneself miserable. To his credit, Ragunathan acknowledges that getting out of our own way is not simple or easy. That’s partly because most of us are “conditioned to devalue happiness right from childhood,” he writes, and the S-and-S seem to learn those lessons more thoroughly than most.

It’s especially hard for S-and-S parents not to pass along the chocolate-bug-munching habit to their offspring. Raghunathan discovered this when he started to get annoyed with his small son for playing with a big cardboard box, instead of the expensive toy that had come in it. As he tells it, “I realized that it is precisely because we tell our children what to value — money, value for money, status, beauty, power, etc. — that they learn to lose sight of what truly makes them happy.”

So he kept quiet and let the kid play with the box.