We’ll preface this story by saying you should always take one-off studies with a grain of salt; but we found the results of this one, conducted recently by the Paris School of Economics, compelling enough to share. According to the report (and just in time for Valentine’s Day to remind us that we’ll die alone), long-term relationships have an undeniably positive effect on the people in them, but having kids, surprisingly, does not. Instead, new parents saw a spike in happiness directly after their babies were born, but their bliss quotient returned to pre-child levels after around two years. In other words, if you think having a baby is the answer to life’s big questions, you may want to reconsider. The findings may simply serve as further evidence that we all have a happiness set point, determined by genetics and personality traits, that hovers around the same level throughout life despite temporary bumps from good fortune. In other words, nothing and nobody can make you happy but you—not even a fat, gurgling human bundle of joy.
