Lottery winners aren't much happier a year later

A famous 1978 study compared lottery winners with people paralysed in accidents. Within a year or so, both groups had drifted back toward their old baseline of day-to-day happiness. We adapt to almost everything — which is both a curse for windfalls and a mercy for misfortune.

— Philip Brickman, Dan Coates & Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? — Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978