ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what happiness means. Happiness increases when we earn or have something that is better than what we currently have. Unhappy people do not do a good job. This may seem obvious, but there has been a lot of research on the subject, even going so far as to provide a framework for the collapse of slavery. Increment law states that people must always have something better than they had before to feel happier. Accumulation law states that people become unhappy if they even insignificantly lose something which they slowly accumulated before. These theories of increment and accumulation seem to explain the irrational behaviors of many celebrities, politicians, or entrepreneurs. Australian researchers even managed to put a dollar figure on the law of increment and accumulation. Habituation is one of the fundamental mechanisms behind the law of increment, unfortunately, it commonly afflicts members of project teams.
