Some might guess it's individual achievements, like getting a promotion, or individual failures, like failing an exam.
In fact, research suggests that it's the highs and lows of social relationships that provide the highest highs and lowest lows that people experience across their lives.
Dr. Shira Gabriel, whose study this finding is based on, said:
Across a series of studies people were asked about the most positive and negative events in their lives (Jaremka et al., 2010)."Most of us spend much of our time and effort focused on individual achievements such as work, hobbies and schooling.
However this research suggests that the events that end up being most important in our lives, the events that bring us the most happiness and also carry the potential for the most pain, are social events - moments of connecting to others and feeling their connections to us."
College students generally reported intimate moments with their partners as being the happiest of their lives, as did middle-aged people.
For college students and middle-aged people their best non-social moments were academic and work successes respectively.
However, whether people were college students or middle-aged, they consistently reported events that were related to others as providing both the best and worst moments they'd experienced.
Dr. Gabriel explained that these were...
"...the moments when close relationships began or ended; when people fell in love or found a new friend; when a loved one died or broke their hearts.In short, it was the moments of connecting to others that touched peoples' lives the most."
This is why love (and sex) feels so great.
I have never felt anything better than the joy I experience when I feel my own ego or sense of self, become truly immersed in a greater sense of being. It is very dynamic and provocative and utterly haunting. Joy.
The problem always is though, the parasitic or pseudo-control aspect of the ego, an ego, my ego (and while generally completely surrounded by similar egos), demands that it attempt to regulate and attain and maintain similar future experience, mechanically or intellectually or in some other rather paranoid, addicted and clumsy fashion.
And this can't be done. It (the subtle awakening experience of an uncontainable vast joy) becomes a hoax, a bland repetition, an invention and no longer genuine.
ned