The Happiness Taboo

The one thing the founder of humanistic psychology wrote about — and was too scared to publish — and why saying it now is the most compassionate thing to do.

There’s a finding in the science of well-being that the self-development world has spent twenty-five years tiptoeing around at best and completely ignoring at worst. It isn’t that happiness is impossible to cultivate. It is. It isn’t that positive psychology interventions don’t work. They often do. It’s something else, something the field knows but mentions only in footnotes, and something that — left unsaid — has produced a culture that blames people for the temperament they were born with.

Here it is: a substantial portion of how happy you are is the luck of the genetic draw.

This is the taboo. And the longer we refuse to say it plainly, the more harm the not-saying does.

What Maslow already knew — and didn’t dare publish

Abraham Maslow himself — the founder of humanistic psychology, the architect of the hierarchy of needs, the man whose entire body of work was an argument for human potential — wrote a chapter about exactly this in 1969 and chose not to publish it. When I stumbled upon the headline doing research for my book Transcend, I nearly fell off my chair. Then once I picked myself off the floor I devoured the essay and became totally fascinated by his argument and the implications.

The essay was titled, with his usual willingness to call a thing by its right name, “Biological Injustice and Free Will.” It sat in a drawer for nearly thirty years until it appeared posthumously in Future Visions: The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, edited by Edward Hoffman.

Maslow’s opening line is the one the modern positive psychology orthodoxy will not let itself say:

“It is important to take up the various questions related to individual capability and achievement. Essentially, it is a matter of accepting the reality of biological injustice and unfairness: that some babies are born healthy and others unhealthy, some smart and others stupid, and some beautiful and others ugly. This is a matter of luck, gratuitous grace, fortune, or misfortune. It is not something that we can do anything about. It is determined. It is a limitation on free will.”

He named the thing the field would later spend decades euphemizing. And he understood, in 1969, exactly why nobody would want to talk about it:

“Social injustice is easier to accept psychologically than biological injustice, which is a blank wall about which nothing can be done.”

That sentence is doing extraordinary work. Maslow is observing that we have built a whole moral vocabulary for social unfairness — blame, redress, structural critique, advocacy. We have built almost no vocabulary for biological unfairness, because there is no one to redirect the blame at, no policy to fix the cards. The blank wall is intolerable, and the cultural response has been to pretend the wall isn’t there.

In a companion essay also published posthumously, “Humanistic Biology: Elitist Implications of the Concept of ‘Full-Humanness,’” Maslow makes the silencing explicit:

“I have not even dared to publish my theories or my exploratory data about the topic for fear of their being misused by others. I am afraid that if I raise the problem of the survival of the fittest simply for the sake of discussing it… then many nonscientists will seize on the issue for their own selfish purposes. Indeed, this situation is exactly what happened in the post-Darwin era of the late 19th century.”

So the founder of humanistic psychology, the person with the most credibility to talk about this, deliberately chose silence because he correctly feared what would be done with the material. The taboo isn’t a 21st-century accident. It’s the founder’s drawer — kept closed by everyone who came after.

He had the right fear. He may have had the wrong response. Fifty-seven years of silence has done its own damage, and at this point the cost of not saying it has overtaken the cost of saying it.

What the science actually shows

The empirical line of research that vindicates Maslow’s intuition starts with a 1996 paper by David Lykken and Auke Tellegen titled, with admirable understatement, “Happiness Is a Stochastic Phenomenon”. They studied several thousand middle-aged twins, including identical twins reared apart. The results were striking: Socioeconomic status, education, income, marital status, religious commitment — each accounted for less than 3 percent of the variance in subjective well-being. Each. Meanwhile, 44–52 percent of the variance was associated with genetic variation, and the heritability of the stable component of happiness — your set point, the level you keep returning to — approached 80 percent. That’s right, 80%!

Three decades of follow-up has refined the picture. The most thorough recent meta-analytic review, by Ragnhild Bang Nes and Espen Røysamb in the Journal of Happiness Studies, puts heritability of overall happiness in the 32–40 percent range, and of the stable trait of well-being in the 70–80 percent range. The most current synthesis, in the World Happiness Report 2022, states the conclusion in language Maslow would have recognized: “some people will be born with a set of genetic variants that makes it easier to feel happy, while others are less fortunate.”

Less fortunate. Maslow’s “gratuitous grace” or “misfortune.” Fifty-seven years apart, the same finding in the same moral register.

One nuance that’s almost never emphasized: momentary positive affect — the joy you feel in a particular moment — is almost entirely environmental. Genes don’t determine whether you can feel happy right now. They strongly shape where you keep coming back to.

Depression — the steepest gradient

Nowhere is the genetic gradient steeper, or the cost of pretending it isn’t there higher, than in depression.

The foundational meta-analysis by Sullivan, Neale, and Kendler in The American Journal of Psychiatry put the heritability of major depressive disorder at roughly 37 percent. Subsequent twin work has pushed the estimate higher for women (around 49 percent), for recurrent episodes, and for the severe and chronic forms of the disorder. The contemporary picture is a vast polygenic landscape: the 2019 Nature Neuroscience meta-analysis of 807,553 individuals identified 102 independent genetic variants associated with depression. The most recent trans-ancestry study, published in Cell in 2025 from a sample of 688,808 cases and over four million controls, found 697. The picture is not “a depression gene.” It is hundreds of inherited variants, each of small effect, distributed unevenly across the human population.

What that means in plain English: some brains arrive in the world with a brain chemistry that makes sadness much closer to their resting state than yours is to theirs. They didn’t earn it. They can’t gratitude journal their way out of it. And here is the moral failure of contemporary self-help culture: when their gratitude journaling produces the predictable modest movement and not a transformation, they are obnoxiously told they didn’t do it right.

I have heard from lifelong depressives who have been handed every intervention in the positive psychology toolkit and have been made to feel, by the architecture of how those interventions were offered, that the persistence of their pain was their fault. “Just write in your gratitude journal more.” It is hard to think of a sentence more grating to someone whose temperament was shaped, before they were born, by hundreds of inherited variants pushing against the very response the journal is trying to elicit.

Yes, gratitude practices can help. Medication can help. Therapy can help. Exercise can help. Social connection can help. And for some people, all of these stacked together produce a meaningful but incomplete shift — because they are working against a gradient steeper than the gradient most people work against.

Compassion for that fact isn’t permission to give up. It is the precondition for sustainable effort. Telling someone the truth about their gradient is the only honest way to ask them to keep walking up it.

What the silence does to people

I have spent a lot of years in correspondence with readers and students. A pattern shows up. People who have struggled with happiness their whole lives — through gratitude journals, through meditation apps, through cognitive worksheets, through retreats and supplements and morning routines — eventually arrive at a conclusion about themselves: I must be doing it wrong. Or worse, I must be the kind of person who doesn’t deserve to be happy.

They are not doing it wrong. They are, very often, doing the work conscientiously, and the work is producing the kind of modest movement the science would predict — a few degrees of warmth, not a transformation. The story they were told was that the transformation was available if they just applied themselves. The story was incomplete. The completion includes the part where some people are working uphill against a steeper gradient than others, for reasons that are not their fault and never were.

This is what Maslow’s blank wall does when we pretend it isn’t there. The cruelty is not subtle. We have built a self-help industry that tells people they can choose their happiness, and then blames them when the choice doesn’t take. It is the entrepreneurial-victim-blame version of the prosperity gospel.

Genetic inequality — the conversation we still won’t have

We talk freely about social inequality. We talk about economic inequality. We barely talk about genetic inequality — even though, as Maslow saw clearly, it is just as real and considerably less reparable.

Almost nobody is having that conversation publicly. The exception worth naming is the behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden, whose important book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality argues — from an explicitly progressive frame — that ignoring the genetic contribution to life outcomes doesn’t make the inequality go away; it just lets us blame people for their starting position. The same argument applies to happiness. If your friend has been walking up a five-degree grade and you have been walking up a twenty-five-degree grade, the right response to your slower progress is not try harder. It is an honest reckoning with the grade.

The good news, and it really is good news, is that environmental interventions can significantly compensate for genetic inequality. A recent econometric study found that an additional year of secondary education reduced the gap in obesity-related outcomes between people at high and low genetic risk from 20 percentage points to 6. Social policy can do something that individual willpower can’t: it can make the genetic lottery matter less. The same logic plausibly applies to happiness — interventions and environments designed with the most genetically vulnerable in mind raise the floor for everyone.

What Maslow did with the limit

Maslow named biological injustice as starkly as anyone ever has, and then he refused to surrender to it. From the same 1969 essay:

“Granted the fact that one may be born with good luck or bad luck, yet there remains a great deal of leeway for free will, responsibility, and becoming an active agent rather than a pawn in life… What I do with my genetic endowment and my body is definitely more important than merely the given of my biological inheritance. I had nothing to do with its creation. But what I make of my genetic endowment, my body, and whatever was given to me is my responsibility. And that, in a different sense, is a matter about which I can feel pride, shame, or guilt.”

And:

“In this sense, I can accept both the facts of biological justice and injustice, good luck and bad luck, and also of free will, personal responsibility, and of being an active agent rather than just letting myself drift into becoming a pawn. I am certainly not responsible for having strong lungs, but I am responsible for having made the best of them and not hurting them.”

This is the both/and the contemporary research permits and the contemporary culture has lost. The contemporary research now has a name for what Maslow was intuiting: differential susceptibility, and its sunnier sibling vantage sensitivity. Some of the same genetic variants that confer vulnerability under harsh conditions confer heightened responsiveness to supportive ones. The biology that makes you fragile in the wrong context makes you bloom in the right one. Maslow framed it in his own vocabulary:

“Fate, genetics, and biology indeed set limits for me — limits beyond which I can do nothing. But within those limits, I inhabit a realm in which I can accomplish either a great deal or very little. This is the realm of free will and self-choice and, therefore, of responsibility…”

And:

“I am the caretaker of my talents, capacities, and bodily organs and can do either well or badly with them.”

The caretaker, not the architect.

What compassion actually looks like

In Rise Above, I tried to make a case for what I called honest love — the rejection of both coddling (which doesn’t take a person seriously enough to tell them the truth) and tough love (which doesn’t take a person seriously enough to extend them grace). The happiness taboo is a place where the culture has been doing both at once: coddling people with the promise that their happiness is fully in their hands, then tough-loving them when the promise doesn’t deliver.

Maslow’s honest love version, also from the unpublished chapter, is the most generous formulation I have read of what the genetic gap actually permits:

“Anybody, any person whatsoever, under any circumstances whatsoever, can be a psychological success — at least in the above sense, of doing the best that one can and doing fully what one can — to be himself or herself and to accept the reality of himself or herself.”

And the line that I think should sit at the end of every conversation we have about who is and isn’t allowed to feel okay about their lives:

“The individual does not have to be victorious to be accepted by the gods.”

Read that line again (I’ve already read it a hundred times). Genes contribute substantially to your happiness baseline. If you have been struggling — if you have done the work and the work hasn’t taken — the explanation is partly that you are climbing a gradient your friend isn’t climbing. Not entirely. Partly. That is real, and it is not your fault, and acknowledging it is the beginning of self-respect, not the abandonment of it. And the same research tells us your set point is not a fixed prison. The interventions move it, sometimes meaningfully. The environmental fit you find — your work, your relationships, your physical place in the world — moves it. The slow cultivation of a life that matches your genotype, not the optimized human template the productivity literature is pushing, moves it.

The luck of the genetic draw matters. Maslow knew. He hid the chapter because he was afraid of what would be done with it, and his fear was not unreasonable. But fifty-seven years of silence has done its own damage, and the people paying for it are the ones who needed honesty most.

We can do better. We start by bringing the truth into the light.