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Showing posts with label happiness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happiness. Show all posts
Monday, April 11, 2011
Longing and Error
"I left Symons's company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to become who we are."-Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Monday, December 20, 2010
Surplus Wealth May Rob You of Your Ability to Savor Small Pleasures
New research by Jordi Quoidbach and colleagues in the journal Psychological Science add to the growing body of literature on money and subjective well being, which indicate that money cannot buy happiness.
The authors of this study conclude that having access to the best things money can buy actually reduces a person's ability to savor small pleasures. Savoring an experience gives you double the pleasure. There is the pleasure of the experience itself, and the experience of remembering it, recounting it, reliving it.
The authors of this study conclude that having access to the best things money can buy actually reduces a person's ability to savor small pleasures. Savoring an experience gives you double the pleasure. There is the pleasure of the experience itself, and the experience of remembering it, recounting it, reliving it.
This study provides the first evidence that money impairs people’s ability to savor everyday positive emotions and experiences. In a sample of working adults, wealthier individuals reported lower savoring ability (the ability to enhance and prolong positive emotional experience). Moreover, the negative impact of wealth on individuals’ ability to savor undermined the positive effects of money on their happiness. We experimentally exposed participants to a reminder of wealth and produced the same deleterious effect on their ability to savor as that produced by actual individual differences in wealth, a result supporting the theory that money has a causal effect on savoring. Moving beyond self-reports, we found that participants exposed to a reminder of wealth spent less time savoring a piece of chocolate and exhibited reduced enjoyment of it compared with participants not exposed to wealth. This article presents evidence supporting the widely held but previously untested belief that having access to the best things in life may actually undercut people’s ability to reap enjoyment from life’s small pleasures.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
The Pursuit of Happiness: Overrated?
"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms-- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.
In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl drew on the experiences of concentration camp prisoners. He found that those who survived were not the ones who pursued happiness as an end in itself, but the ones who had a goal in life. Meaning, not pleasure was the key. This can be a great comfort if you’re facing hard times. It is much easier to find “meaning” in hard times than “happiness.”
Jay McDaniel, a theologian and author of the book Living from the Center, calls happiness a “byproduct not a goal”: “…many people can live very meaningful lives,” he wrote, “pursuing quite worthy goals, without being particularly happy, if ‘happiness’ means pleasant states of consciousness. Consider the person who is deeply compassionate, sharing in the sorrows of others, and who, precisely through her sharing, cannot sleep well at night. In her empathy for others, she knows the happiness of communion with others, but not the happiness of pleasure.”
Would U.S. culture have been different if the authors of the Declaration of Independence had written, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Meaning?”
It is worth thinking about.
In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl drew on the experiences of concentration camp prisoners. He found that those who survived were not the ones who pursued happiness as an end in itself, but the ones who had a goal in life. Meaning, not pleasure was the key. This can be a great comfort if you’re facing hard times. It is much easier to find “meaning” in hard times than “happiness.”
Jay McDaniel, a theologian and author of the book Living from the Center, calls happiness a “byproduct not a goal”: “…many people can live very meaningful lives,” he wrote, “pursuing quite worthy goals, without being particularly happy, if ‘happiness’ means pleasant states of consciousness. Consider the person who is deeply compassionate, sharing in the sorrows of others, and who, precisely through her sharing, cannot sleep well at night. In her empathy for others, she knows the happiness of communion with others, but not the happiness of pleasure.”
Would U.S. culture have been different if the authors of the Declaration of Independence had written, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Meaning?”
It is worth thinking about.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Get off the Hedonic Treadmill
This is an older article, but well worth a read. Who said everything had to be the latest breaking headline anyway?
A 2006 article in The Times reports that the pursuit of wealth may screw up your pursuit of happiness.
Read the full article by following the link above.
A 2006 article in The Times reports that the pursuit of wealth may screw up your pursuit of happiness.
A new report goes further and suggests that chasing wealth might even make you mentally ill. Paranoia, narcissism and attention deficit disorders are just some of the afflictions more likely to dog you if you pursue purely materialistic goals, it says. But more controversial, perhaps, is that this report comes from an investment bank where money, presumably, is God.
Read the full article by following the link above.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Does Happiness Depend on Owning a Dream Home?
Pshaw!San Diego architect Alison Whitelaw told the good folks at Money Magazine (I read about it in USA Today) what types of home upgrades make people happiest, and broke folk will be pleased to know that it is not marble counter tops, scads of designer furniture or a top of the line media center.
Research suggests more modest changes will do wonders in lifting your mood. Follow the links to the articles to learn about how wall color and furniture placement can make everything seem better with life.
"Light and color have a definite impact on people's emotional response," says San Diego architect Alison Whitelaw in a story by Money Magazine. She's vice president of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, which brings scientists and designers together.
CNN Money, which also covered the original Money article notes that:
..people are in danger of wasting money on projects that won't increase their pleasure after all. That's because our survey shows that people aren't always right about what will make them happy in their homes.Just another illustration at how bad we are in general in predicting what will make us happy...
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