Own Your Happiness
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Aug 7, 2026
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Development, the world's longest-running study on happiness.
Started in 1938 with 724 men, it has now expanded to track more than 2,500 people across generations, including spouses and children of the original participants.
Its director, psychiatrist
, has said in interviews and talks that the most consistent finding across eight decades of data is disarmingly simple: it is not money, not career success, but the quality of our relationships that predicts how happy and how healthy we turn out to be.
We are social animals. We need people. That part is not in question.
But there is a cost buried inside that need, one the guru’s line made me reflect on. When we work to strengthen a relationship, we often hand over far more control than is required.
I think of it as giving someone a knife. Not to hurt us, necessarily. Just the right to cut, whenever they feel like it, wherever they feel like it, as much as they feel like it.
We give people the power to decide our mood for an afternoon. Sometimes we give them more: which company we work for, which house we live in, where we go on vacation.
And because we are doing it in the name of love, or in the name of “making this relationship stronger,” it rarely feels like we are giving anything away at all. It feels like devotion.
Then the other person does not reciprocate in kind, and sadness is only the first thing that shows up. Confusion follows, and underneath that, doubt. The relationship rarely goes back to what it was.
Usually we blame the person, or the relationship itself, when the decision that actually created the vulnerability was ours. We handed over the knife. Nobody took it by force.
Psychologists have a term for part of this. Locus of control refers to how much a person believes their outcomes are shaped by their own actions versus by outside forces.
on this, going back to the 1960s, and the decades of research that followed it, found something fairly consistent:
People who feel their happiness is at the mercy of other people or circumstances report more helplessness, more anxiety, and lower life satisfaction than people who feel a stronger sense of ownership over their own outcomes.
Handing someone else the knife is, in a real sense, moving our locus of control outside ourselves.
The same pattern at work
This is not only true of romantic partnerships. It shows up just as clearly at the office. When we love a company, or a boss, we let them dictate not just our schedules but our sense of what is right and wrong for us.
We quietly let go of our own ideas because, without quite noticing, we have decided that whatever is best for the company must also be best for us.
And the skills that go unused- independent judgment, critical thinking, the willingness to disagree- weaken the same way any muscle does when it stops being worked.
Fandom, perhaps the purest version
Take fascination with a sports icon, a film star, or any public figure. We build our schedules, our spending, our travel around someone who has no idea we exist.
Psychologists Lynn McCutcheon and John Maltby mapped this out as a spectrum with something they called the
. At the mild end, it is just a social pastime, chatting about a favourite actor or arguing about an IPL innings with friends.
But their research also describes an “absorption addiction” pattern at the far end, where people pour more and more emotional energy into a celebrity to compensate for something missing closer to home, a shaky sense of identity, or difficulty forming close relationships of their own.
At its most intense, this has been linked to higher depression, higher anxiety, and a loosening grip on what is actually real.
Of all the examples here, this one might be the clearest: a knife handed to someone who will never even know they were given it.
And then, there is addiction
Food, alcohol, drugs, even certain habits, often start exactly the way the guru’s line described love starting: as something we are drawn to, something that feels good.
on the brain’s reward circuitry explains what happens next. Natural rewards- food, social connection, exercise- trigger dopamine release in a measured way. Addictive substances and behaviours flood that same circuitry far beyond what any natural reward would produce.
Over time, the brain dulls its response to ordinary pleasures, which is part of why the substance or behaviour starts to feel necessary just to feel normal. What began as attraction ends up eroding the very control it once seemed to enhance.
A confession from my own life
As an endurance athlete, I can relate to a bit of this myself.
I have signed up for races in far corners of the world for no better reason than that I loved running, only to realise much later, standing at some start line, that the decision to travel there had stopped being a decision at all.
It had turned automatic.
The race itself, when I finally ran it, was not even worth the flight.
And that is the part worth brooding over. If I hand someone my knife, and they hand me theirs back, simply because we are both susceptible to the same pull, nothing gets solved.
There are just two knives in the room instead of one.
That “I do this for you, you do this for me” arrangement is often what makes relationships fragile in the first place, since two people rarely want the same thing at the same time.
That gap, small as it looks on any given day, is usually where the friction starts, and sometimes, where things eventually break.
Control should be shared to some degree, since nothing works between two people without it.
But it might be worth noticing, the next time we feel pulled toward a person, a company, a hobby, or anything else, whether we are sharing control or simply giving it away.
There is a real difference between the two, and most of the time, we are the only ones who can tell.
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