[sethammons]

Not sure where you are going with the free will thing unless you are going for the genetics answer to happiness which I find lacking.

Are some people happy? Yes. Are there people who were not happy who now are? Yes. How? Lots and lots of anecdotes are around changing how they approached life, not how they changed their genetics.

Looking at your linked article, they are going off of a wellness questionnaire first developed 40 years ago. Looking at the broad areas of questions, I feel they also miss what it means to be happy in many cases.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multidimensional_Personality...

Some questions are orthogonal to happiness include living interesting, exciting lives; enjoying being noticed, being the center of attention; being perfectionistic; being victims of false and nasty rumors; having been betrayed and deceived; enjoying scenes of violence (fights, violent movies); liking to plan activities in detail; and more.

[themacguffinman]

There's a lot of fine literature out there that can properly explain better than I can why free will is an incoherent concept, I recommend googling it. Although the philosophy is fairly basic, it's hard to flesh out concisely in the format of social media comments. A one sentence summary might be: we are our physiology and thus bound by the laws of physics and chemistry, we cannot have more free will or more capacity to self-change than the physical particles that comprise us. Honestly I'm not interested in object-level rebuttals to this, the philosophy around this is fairly settled and feels like debating whether the earth is flat.

The genetic heritability finding is not related to the free will argument, it is its own scientific finding. I don't know why the existence of those life-changing anecdotes matters at all, the research has never shown that happiness is 100% determined by genetics, only that the stable component of happiness has a high heritability. I also want to point out that "genetic heritability" doesn't simply mean "you don't got the happy gene, you're fucked", genetic inheritance is not mutually exclusive to environmental influences. Indeed, at least some gene-behavior studies will recommend "positive gene-environment matchmaking" [1] in its conclusions.

No happiness study is going to have a perfect definition of happiness, which scientifically is studied as "subjective well-being" because it's subjective. The study's definition of subjective well-being is reasonable and consistent. If you think that changing the questions will radically change results, I invite you to do or find your own scientific research. We don't exactly have a glut of happiness research, we have some modern meta-studies [1] that flesh out the relationship between genetics and behavior a little more but otherwise upholds existing heritability findings.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9781-6