The belief that children and money will bring people happiness is one of life’s abiding illusions, a Sydney conference attended by 2000 seekers of happiness was told yesterday.

The scientific evidence shows people are very bad at predicting what will make them happy, said Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of the book Stumbling On Happiness. He said people’s happiness goes into steep decline after they have children, and never recovers its old level until the children leave home. As a source of pleasure, playing with one’s offspring rates just above doing housework but below talking with friends, eating, or watching TV, research has shown.

Yet people invest so much time and money in their children, and focus on the fleeting moments of joy they bring, rather than on the long periods of boredom and irritation, that most continue to believe children will bring them happiness, Professor Gilbert said.

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Happiness for most people begins with the thought: “This is how things ought to be!” Suffering comes with the opposite thought: “Things ought not to be as they are”.

However, we tend to fall into the habit of thinking that we know already how things ought to be or ought not to be.

We identify happiness with fixity instead of accepting life’s natural flow. We become “psychological antiques” — wanting nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing even improved. The stability comes to mean permanence. Permanence, however, is something the soul can have only in God.

Happiness is bliss outwardly directed towards the senses and their world of relativity and change. Bliss is eternal, but happiness is man’s attempt to project bliss into a fleeting and alien environment. In that projection, he forms attachments to things temporal. Happiness, in its pretence of permanence, becomes simply another counterfeit, like pleasure.

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For an in-depth study of all things happy, check out this entry on “Pleasure” from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. While it isn’t exactly what most people would call light reading, the entry is a fascinating and comprehensive discussion of pleasure and happiness.  You will find a multitude of philosophies regarding what pleasure and happiness truly mean to the human experience we all share.

Pleasure, in the inclusive usages most important in moral psychology, ethical theory, and the studies of mind, includes all joy and gladness — all our feeling good, or happy…