Operating Point and the Happiness Pyramid: Toward an Integrative Theory of Happiness

This preprint proposes an integrative theory of happiness inspired by the operating point of a transistor in electrical engineering. It joins two models. The Operating Point Theory describes a person's momentary psychological state as a position on a psychological rhythm curve that links thought speed to the felt speed of time, with a normal range, anxiety and depression ranges, a wall before depression and a breakdown threshold. The Happiness Pyramid has three layers, a spiritual base, a material middle and a top of pleasures, each satisfied by what suffices for the person, with approximate weights of 50%, 40% and 10%. The paper formalizes adaptation, the habitual-position principle, addiction and the delay of medication effects, and examines the weights of the pyramid in an exploratory analysis of the first two waves of the Global Flourishing Study (194,653 participants in 23 countries and territories, 113,798 followed over one year). It then extends the theory to a three-dimensional mental space of rhythm, feeling and spiritual depth, and derives results on how people affect one another: coupling and the anchor, good character as a protective envelope, a provocation game in which a conscience cost makes mutual forbearance the unique Nash equilibrium, a downward spiral of exhaustion and provocation with an exact tipping point, competition, power, justice, conscience, and the drift of group standards unless anchored to a fixed reference. Forty-seven falsifiable hypotheses are stated, with measures and study designs. Supplementary File 1 contains the code for all analyses and simulations. Supplementary File 2 contains the measurement instruments, the study protocol and an analysis plan for preregistration. The author collected no data; the empirical analyses use public secondary data.