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The research that changed my mind about happiness

Joseph Sarvary · 9 June 2026

I didn’t expect a free online course to fundamentally shift my view of what it means to live a good life. But that’s exactly what happened when I stumbled onto Laurie Santos’s Yale happiness course on Coursera.

At first, it was full of insights I found fascinating but somewhat abstract: our tendency to “miswant” material goods, the ways our brains get happiness wrong, the traps we fall into when chasing status or stuff. But there was one insight, lightly touched on in the course, that hit me like a lightning bolt:

Spending money on others makes you happier than spending it on yourself.

It wasn’t feel-good speculation. This was real, robust science. Researchers like Elizabeth Dunn ran experiments across different countries and income levels and kept finding the same result: giving makes us happier.

Before the research: a false trade-off

Before discovering this work, I carried a quiet burden: the idea that living a moral life, one that gives back, must involve sacrifice.

As someone born into significant privilege, with a loving family, a good education and all the safety nets that come with life in the developed world, I felt the weight of that luck. I believed it was my duty to give back. But in my mind, that duty came at a cost. If I wanted to do good, I’d have to give something up: time, money, comfort, happiness.

What this research showed me was the opposite.

There is no trade-off. Living generously isn’t self-sacrifice. It’s self-integration. It’s aligning who you want to be with how you actually live, and finding joy in that alignment.

As someone who has spent years dabbling in Buddhism and Stoicism, this clicked deeply. Those traditions also teach that happiness comes from purpose, service and perspective. The science just added the data.

The study I can’t shake

There’s one study I still retell all the time. Slightly simplified, but the core insight stands.

A researcher stops you on the street holding two envelopes. Each contains $5. One says: spend this on yourself. The other says: spend this on someone else.

Most people, naturally, would rather have the “spend it on yourself” envelope. A free coffee? A snack? Why not?

But here’s the twist. When the researchers called people back at the end of the day to ask how it went, the people who had spent the money on someone else consistently reported feeling happier than those who had spent it on themselves.

Across cultures. Across income levels. Giving simply made people feel better. Not in a pat-yourself-on-the-back way, but in a deeply felt, uplifted, human way.

That was my lightbulb moment.

The paradox hiding in plain sight

Sit with that result for a moment, because there is a quiet paradox in it.

Almost everything about how we live assumes the opposite. We arrange our days, our careers and very nearly our whole economy around the conviction that the road to feeling good runs through buying things for ourselves. The next purchase, the nicer version, the small treat — we treat self-directed spending as the obvious lever for happiness, and other-directed spending as the cost we reluctantly pay for being decent. The envelope study, repeated across cultures and incomes, says we have the lever backwards. The thing we instinctively reach for delivers less than we expect, and the thing we instinctively skip delivers more.

And it isn’t only a passing mood. The research points to something deeper than a pleasant afterglow. Giving is associated with a stronger sense of meaning — the feeling that your life is about something beyond your own comfort — and that kind of meaning is far more durable than the quick hit of a purchase. There’s also a striking strand of evidence linking generous behaviour to lower rates of depression: the relationship appears to run both ways, with giving and well-being feeding each other over time. We are not just slightly miscalculating which coffee to buy. We are misreading one of the basic sources of a good life.

Once you see that, the question stops being can I afford to give? and becomes can I afford to keep spending as if the paradox weren’t true?

A new way to think about sacrifice

At the same time, I was grappling with Peter Singer’s famous “drowning child” thought experiment. You walk past a shallow pond and see a child drowning. You can save them easily, but your expensive shoes will be ruined.

Of course, you jump in.

Singer’s point is this: every day, we have the power to give up small luxuries to save or transform real lives around the world. We just don’t see the child.

I’ve long agreed with that logic. But I also struggled with it. How much do I give? How far do I go? It’s a slippery slope, and for many people a paralysing one.

That’s where the happiness research offered an unexpected lifeline. It showed me that living generously isn’t about deprivation. It’s about substitution.

Instead of spending a few pounds on a drink that might disrupt my sleep, or another indulgence that barely registers, I could reroute that money to real impact, and feel better as a result.

Over time, this began to reshape how I live. I drink less. I spend more intentionally. I feel more purposeful. And I’m happier for it.

Building EveryDrop: a way to test this for yourself

That’s where the idea for EveryDrop came from.

If giving truly makes us happier, and if we are wired to misjudge what brings happiness, then what we need is a way to test this truth for ourselves. Not just once. Daily.

EveryDrop is a 30-day giving journey. Each day you meet one of the world’s hardest problems and an organisation doing extraordinary work on it, you give a small amount, and a little more of the world comes into focus. It’s designed to make generosity:

This isn’t just about altruism. It’s about noticing, first-hand, that generosity isn’t a sacrifice. It’s a source of joy.

What happens if millions try?

There’s one last study I can’t forget. When people are asked to recall a time they were generous, they become more generous in their next decisions. Generosity begets generosity.

So imagine this: what happens if a million people start their day with a small, intentional act of giving?

I think we’d get a kinder society. One where people are more likely to smile at strangers, hold doors open, or show patience when someone’s having a rough day.

Zoom out further, and I think it could shift how we give at the end of the year, how we choose our careers, even how we think about politics. Giving daily, to strangers, across borders, is a quiet vote for the kind of world we want to live in.

Try it for yourself

You don’t need to take my word for it. Just try it.

Give a small amount each day for a week. See how it feels. Notice what shifts.

This isn’t about being a saint. It’s about being human, and finding joy in it.