Score yourself on the Satisfaction With Life Scale

Rate each of the five statements from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The responses are summed to a single score between 5 and 35, which maps to an interpretive band. The scale names no domain — income, health, relationships — so the weighting is entirely your own.

1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.6
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.5
3. I am satisfied with my life.7
4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.4
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.6
510152025303528
A total of 28 (mean 5.6 per item) places this respondent in the satisfied band. Because the total is a sum, the same score can be built from uniformly moderate ratings or from a mix of extremes — the per-item mean is the cross-check that tells those cases apart.

A windfall fades: the hedonic treadmill

A major life event lifts satisfaction from a baseline set point of 7 to a peak, then the gain decays exponentially as the person adapts. Set how high the event lifts satisfaction and how fast adaptation runs it down, then scan the years. The founding lottery-winner study found exactly this pattern — large gains mostly gone within a couple of years.

Peak satisfaction after the event9 / 10
Adaptation time constant1.5 yr
Time since the event2.0 yr
set point56789100123456years since the event
At 2.0 years, satisfaction has fallen from a peak of 9 to 7.5 — 26% of the 2-point boost still survives, the rest run down by adaptation. A faster adaptation (smaller time constant) erases the gain sooner; the baseline itself is where the person ends up.

Does satisfaction keep rising with income?

Evaluative life satisfaction (what the SWLS measures) rises with the logarithm of income — each doubling adds about the same amount, with no obvious ceiling. The dispute is over experienced emotional well-being: Kahneman and Deaton reported it flattening near $75,000, while Killingsworth’s real-time data found no plateau. Move income and toggle the plateau to see the two hypotheses.

Household income$75k
0.000.250.500.751.00153075150300600household income ($000s, log scale)evaluativeexperienced
At $75k, evaluative satisfaction sits at 0.44 and experienced well-being at 0.44 (scaled 0–1). With no plateau, the two track together — Killingsworth’s finding that experienced well-being keeps rising with income. The 2023 adversarial reanalysis reconciled both: rising for most people, flat for an unhappy minority.