> As I heard someone say, happiness is your reality minus your expectations.

I don’t think that’s true, e.g. from my personal experience, I’m far more optimistic than my wife, but even though she has far lower expectations she still takes negative things with far more disappointment than I do when we face the same hardship. So generally I’m a much happier person despite having higher expectations.

This is independent of intellect too for us, she would readily admit I’m more intelligent.

I don’t know whether it’s a innate thing or something learned but the key seems to be that I am always primed to look on the bright side, like my brain automatically weights positives much stronger than negatives, whereas hers does the opposite.

For both of us this seems to be self-reinforcing too because we always have confirmation bias because I’ve focused on the positives and can say “see it wasn’t that bad” and she will be like “see, I thought it would be bad” for the same thing.