The old saw that when it comes to news, misery sells, has never looked so dubious. Happiness is hitting the headlines everywhere. But every time, it seems the story is different.

So over recent days, the Mail has screamed in painful ecstasy that "S&M enthusiasts are 'healthier and less neurotic' than those with a tamer sex life", while the Telegraph has reported more soberly that "Marriage makes people happier than six-figure salaries and religion". USA Today has told us that, contrary to what you might have been told, increased wealth really does make you happier, while the Mail points to data suggesting well-educated high-earners suffer more stress.

Maybe the answer is just to move to Scandinavia where everyone is happy in social democratic heaven – except that the OECD now says Australia tops the league table of happiest nations.

What makes it more confusing is that each of these reports is based on apparently robust research, from Dutch academics (S&M), the Office for National Statistics (marriage and stress), the Brookings Institution (wealth) and the OECD (Australia).

The temptation is to dismiss the research completely. Happiness and wellbeing are just too nuanced and complex to be illuminated by the soulless data-crunching of arid academics. Who needs it when we all know what makes us happy? Except we don't. Those same oft-ridiculed academics have shown that time and again people are very bad at knowing what will make them happier or more miserable, overestimating the impact of positives such as pay rises and promotions as well as negatives such as disability and chronic illness.

The pointy-heads have a point or two after all. Scratch the surface and you'll find that it's the superficial gloss put on the research that is contradictory, not the data itself. What the Dutch academics found, for example, was not that BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) makes people happy, but that people who choose that lifestyle tend to be less anxious and more outgoing and show no more signs of mental instability than the rest of us. That does not mean that people who are not into it would be happier if they were, and nor does it amount to an overall verdict that life is better for the whip-crackers.

The evidence on wealth is also less contradictory than it seems. First of all, it has been clear for some time that people's overall reported life satisfaction does continue to rise, on average, with wealth. That is not the same as self-reported happiness but it's arguably even more important. Second, the diminishing returns of greater wealth for happiness are largely due to the fact that, as you get richer, pay increases are proportionately less significant. So an extra £10k a year has more impact for someone earning £20k than it does for someone earning £100k, but looked at in another light it should be unsurprising that a 50% pay rise has more impact than a 10% one. When people on £100k a year do get a 50% rise, they are indeed generally made happier.

As for the stress issue, the idea that it is an undiluted bad is just false. There are stresses involved in high-powered work but the rewards are often very rich too, and not just financial.

The general problem is that comparing the research usually means comparing apples with oranges. How happy different kinds of people are is not the same as what causes people to be happy. Happiness is not the same as life satisfaction, while neither are identical to what we might call flourishing. Stress means something different if it is the result of rewarding work rather than struggling to keep the family out of debt. Isolation is awful if unwanted and blissful if sought out.

The good life is complicated and that's why no one survey can capture more than a few aspects of it, and also why the present government's attempts to measure the nation's wellbeing is wrong-headed in its determination to quantify it. That does not mean we have nothing to learn from hard research. Politicians in particular should use it to inform their understanding of what really makes a difference to our lives.

Arguably the pursuit of happiness is always a mistake and we should just pursue what we value most. The mistake is only compounded if we base our own choices too much on what research says makes people tick.