Finding Happiness at Work

If your earnings suddenly doubled, would you be happier? What if you were paid the same amount, but allowed to work one fewer day each week? What if your office were in a park with a view of trees and a lake, and you could go for walks between patient appointments?

These may seem like hypothetical questions, but the answers—and the science behind them—are of real value to those who care about improving the quality of people’s lives. That includes the ESCRS BoSS (Building Our Sustainable Society) Working Group, which hosted a session titled “Are you satisfied? From burning out to burning bright” at the 2025 Annual Congress in Copenhagen.

One of the presenters at that session, Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, focused on how to measure personal happiness and well-being. He emphasised happiness is a complex topic with no single defining characteristic and noted that even factors we typically associate with happiness—such as love and stable relationships—have nuances making them less able to predict happiness than we might expect.

“We can see from the data that people who are married are, on average, happier,” he said. “But does that mean we become happy from marriage? Or is it that happy people have an easier time getting married?”

The same is true of money. “Yes, money matters, because going from low income to middle income really moves the needle in terms of life satisfaction,” he said. “But going from middle income to high income? It doesn’t move the needle that much. With money, like everything else, there are diminishing marginal returns.”

These and other subtleties mean that measuring happiness requires looking at several dimensions over time to see how various factors interact to affect well-being. This can be done on a personal level as well as on a larger scale, such as by looking at ethnic groups or entire countries.

“My primary focus at work is looking at societies,” Wiking said. “Why are some societies happier than others? We can actually see that six factors explain the vast majority of happiness differences across countries. Money is one of them—richer countries are, on average, happier. High levels of trust also help explain why some countries are happier than others. But if we follow people over time, ask them daily several times what they are doing right now and how happy they feel, we see these are the top five happiness-inducing activities: exercising, hanging with friends, being in nature, hiking, and fishing.”

Work, on the other hand, tends to make people unhappy. “Being at work usually sucks for most people,” Wiking said. “Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize a few years ago, conducted a study [that showed] the bottom three activities in terms of happiness were driving to work, driving from work, and being at work. Being at work is tough—it’s challenging, it’s stressful. But we also see that people who are unemployed are less satisfied with life than people who are employed. So, not working is not the trick to happiness.”

Finding meaning and joy

What do all these findings mean for ophthalmologists, both on a personal level and as a profession? The answer to this question, Wiking said, may lie in helping people find meaning in what they do.

“Sometimes we include a happiness dimension in our studies called Eudaemonia, from the Greek philosopher Aristotle,” he said. “Aristotle wrote extensively about happiness, finding that relationships matter, that meaning matters. And to Aristotle, the good life was the meaningful life. So the Eudaemonic dimension will cover [the question], do you have a sense of purpose or meaning in your work and life?”

Wiking clarified that meaning is separate from achievement, which may actually diminish your sense of happiness. “There is no one achievement that is going to make you permanently happy,” he said. “You’re just going to set a new goal for three weeks afterwards, three months afterwards, and then you’re going run toward that. From a happiness point of view, that’s not good. We’re not necessarily wired to be happy.”

There is another element to happiness that may also pertain to job satisfaction, and this is joy. “I recently read a study on the three things that matter in job satisfaction and life in general,” Wiking said. “One was purpose, and one was accomplishment. The third one, which I think is a very undervalued dimension, is joy. And I think that’s where we need to focus more as organisations. What brings joy to people at work?”

Wiking suggested that adding joy to workers’ lives may be easier than it seems. “I think one aspect of joy we’re talking about when it comes to work happiness is flexibility,” he said. “For example, am I working from home or having to come to work in a physical space?”

Ultimately, the greatest contribution employers can make is to help workers find joy at work and help them incorporate that joy into their lives. “I don’t think happiness is a choice, but I think to some extent it is a skill,” Wiking said. “What we’ve seen when we follow people within organisations is that management can actually move the needle for their employees, to where we can also see job satisfaction spill over into overall life satisfaction.”

ARE ESCRS MEMBERS HAPPY?

The adage that money cannot buy happiness apparently is true for cataract and refractive surgeons, according to a 2025 survey conducted by the ESCRS.

The ESCRS EyE-CLaSS (European Eye surgeons’ Compensation and Life Satisfaction Survey) was undertaken last year to evaluate “the relationship between remuneration, working patterns, and quality of life within the European ophthalmic community.” Of the 304 responses analysed, 170 (56%) were submitted by men and 134 (44%) by women. More than half of respondents (56%) were between the ages 30 and 49, while 35% were between 50 and 69.

When asked whether they felt “fairly compensated” for their work, three-fourths said no. That finding was amplified by another statistic: 40% of survey respondents said they take on extra work to make more income.

Yet despite their unhappiness with their remuneration, ESCRS members as a whole are reasonably happy. On questions pertaining to satisfaction with life (scale 1–7, with 7 corresponding to highest satisfaction), survey respondents answered as follows:

• Conditions of my life are excellent (4.89)
• So far, I have gotten the important things I want in life (5.34)
• In most ways, my life is close to my ideal (4.85)
• I am satisfied with my life (5.20)

Geographic region was the strongest predictor of a high quality of life (QoL), with respondents in northern Europe more likely to report being happy than respondents in southern and eastern Europe. More years in practice generally were associated with a higher QoL, although mid-career surgeons (30–59 years) reported lower satisfaction with life than all but the youngest group (trainees).

The higher the patient workload, the lower the QoL. Non-Hispanic Black respondents showed the strongest negative associations with satisfaction, especially for future expectations.

More information about the survey is available on escrs.org.