Taking a predictive processing perspective, we should expect to see an initial decrease in happiness upon finding oneself living a less expensive lifestyle because it would be a regular “surprise” violating the expected outcome, but then over time for this surprise to go away as daily evidence slowly retrains the brain the to expect less and so have less negative emotional valence around upon perceiving the actual conditions.
However I’d still expect someone who “fell from grace” like this to be somewhat sadder than a person who rose to the same level of wealth or grew up at it because they’d have more sad moments of nostalgia for better times that would be missing from the others, but this would likely be a small effect an not easily detectable (would expect it to be washed out by noise in a study).
Taking a predictive processing perspective, we should expect to see an initial decrease in happiness upon finding oneself living a less expensive lifestyle because it would be a regular “surprise” violating the expected outcome, but then over time for this surprise to go away as daily evidence slowly retrains the brain the to expect less and so have less negative emotional valence around upon perceiving the actual conditions.
However I’d still expect someone who “fell from grace” like this to be somewhat sadder than a person who rose to the same level of wealth or grew up at it because they’d have more sad moments of nostalgia for better times that would be missing from the others, but this would likely be a small effect an not easily detectable (would expect it to be washed out by noise in a study).