August 14, 2005

What is happiness? Research shows that happy people are healthier and live longer. But what makes for happiness? It isn't intelligence. Nor is it good health. Having money doesn't make one happy. It may be that by our nature we are better designed for the pursuit of happiness than for the attainment of it.

Psychologist Martin Seligman thinks he knows what makes people happy. The Dalai Lama knows where happiness comes from. And the King of Bhutan thinks happiness is so important that Bhutan measures its wellbeing by Gross National Happiness (GNH) rather than Gross National Product (GNP).

posted by HawthorneWingo 18 years ago
  • I took a course on this last year. Did you know that people who win the lottery and people who receive severe spinal injuries both have a major change in happiness, but after a relatively short amount of time both go back to their normal level of happiness? There's apparently not a lot of your Subjective Well Being (SWB) that can be modified more than temporarily by circumstance.
  • Great post. Here's a previous post about Bhutan.
  • ))) -- especially enjoyed the link on the Dalai Lama. Thanks, Hawthorne_Wingo. Had a history prof a long time ago who said 'happy is the country least often in the headlines'. Wonder what the results would be if other countries expressed a Gross National Happiness?
  • Ach! Apologies! For fearful invasion of extraneous _!
  • I like Kingwell's take on happiness. "Mark Kingwell wrote that happiness means to feel that one is living a life worth living." http://www.meaning.ca/articles/happiness_elmer_aug03.htm
  • I once read an article (in the pre-internet days) which distinguished between happiness and contentment. The hypothesis was that "happiness" was transitory - an event made one happy - while "contentment" was the result of a longer term good place. I've found the distinction worthwhile, in a way. Others may, as well. ThisGoogle search tell me (without having read any of them) that others make make the same distiction. That "happiness, contentment" appears in so many makes me think that there is a difference, but no one is sure what it is. So, when are you happy, and when are you content?
  • "distinction." Sorry.
  • On the aggregate, it might be true that winning the lottery or enduring a spinal injury will do little to affect happiness in the long run -- although I'm suspicious of that. In a particular case? Maybe not. Certainly no one will be disappointed by the quick cash of a lottery win, and no one wants to be paralyzed. People who are paralyzed don't want to be paralyzed. It's too easy to say, "Well, people don't know what they want. What they really want is..." And what follows, more often than not, is what the speaker wants, (or believes he wants!). I'm wary when I hear people talk about what makes people happy, as if there is some unified essence out there that contains happiness in pure, undiluted form. If only we could get everyone to tap into it, we'd be all the better. This is, basically, the core of Aristotelian eudaimonia: that the good life is the fully rational life -- the intellectual life. Only through it can we be truly happy. Built into this is the assumption that people freely choose what is important to them and that the intellectual life is the means with which people can say what is important to them: to find "meanings." But the decision to persue the intellectual life is itself a choice that needs to be made. Some poeple simply don't want to do it. You can put as much money as you want into education; not everyone will want to bother with it. Forcing people or coercing them is paternalistic and, often enough, counterproductive to the goal. But this is, at bottom, what I believe the article by Polly Toynbee and the ideology it represents promotes.
  • (But good post!)
  • Super post, HW! ... the Buddhist contention that the key to happiness lies in the ability to control what is sometimes called the “monkey mind,” the undisciplined consciousness that scrambles from thought to thought, impelled by negative emotions and impulsive desires. Gawd save me from my monkey mind. Re: contentment vs happiness. I tend to think of happiness as a higher state of being. Contentment to me is the absence of suffering. Whereas happiness is the presence of joy.
  • Great post! This is something I think about a lot. For an extreme view, check out the very extensive hedonistic imperative, where he argues that the only lasting solution to the "happiness problem" will be a technological one. He really rips into Brave New World. Also see The Afflictions of Affluence. ("What do obesity, the 'time crunch' and buyer's remorse all have in common? Well, they're problems of wealthier societies.")
  • Believe happiness lies in a person's losing all sense of the self, in becoming so absorbed in some some activity or some focus of thought as to loose that more typical awareness of ego, of body. Seems to work that way for me, anyhow.
  • Bees, that works for me! Moments of best happiness are when you lose awareness of the passage of time and float along, peaceful like...until that is, the monkey mind attacks!
  • Actually, some of those moments that, looking back, I could label as 'pure happiness', were while under the control of my monkey mind...
  • So maybe we need more words for happiness?
  • Uh...lessee... contentment, ecstacy, joy, bliss, beatitude, serenity, peace, tranquility, felicity.... *drops thesaurus on foot* I guess there's all different sorts of happiness, perhaps?
  • Perhaps we sometimes confuse the pursuit of happiness with the pusuit of pleasure.
  • *ouch* that hurt, islander. Truth always does.
  • Happiness is over-rated. Do we deserve to be happy? Do we even want to be happy? Wanting to be happy all the time would be like wanting to eat only sweet food, or hear only pure harmonies. It's part of the human condition, and not the least worthy part, to be acquainted with grief. Perhaps on that point Isaiah understood something the Buddha never grasped?
  • Buddha never said we have to be happy all the time. In fact he said it is impossible.
  • Yes, but didn't Buddha say we should detach ourselves from the world in order to escape the pain entailed by its changes? No disrespect to Buddha, or Buddhists. I just wanted to speak up for misery.
  • Oh, Buddhists are big fans of misery! :D Buddha recognised that life is full of transient emotional experiences, both good and bad, and because of this, being attached to these experiences causes pain, absolutely. The Buddhist tactics to deal with this situation vary considerably depending on which school you follow. I merely wanted to point out that Buddhism is very realistic about happiness and grief, in fact you express it succinctly. The Zen Yin-Yang symbol also encompasses this; without grief there is no happiness, without darkness light, on every soul a little rain must fall... /starts singing LedZep's 'Rain Song'
  • What I understand about Buddhism is that attachment causes fear of loss; this fear leads to all sorts of negative emotions, such as greed, anger, envy, grief, hate etc.... (wot Yoda said in Ep 2) Nothing in the world is unadulterated good or evil. The most evil person in the world would have done some good in his/her life; the most saintly person in the world would have caused some harm sometime. The most horrific act would have some positive side-effect; the most charitable act some negative consequence. (cf. Chyren's comment on the yin-yang symbol) No one can escape the whole cycle of cause and consequence. Harm someone, and you have incurred a debt that you will have to pay back in some form or effect. (ok, there is a way out - Nirvana is a state where all attachments are finally released, and one is removes oneself from the cycle. At that point, there is no longer the "self", since self-identity is also an attachment) But it's not like there's some great Auditor in the sky toting all this up; it's entirely natural, the way plants grow as they take in sunlight and nutrients, the way some animals eat plants and others other animals.
  • Which reminds me of a joke: my wife and I were in the supermarket today and she asks me: "Can you eat pork?" 15 fucking years and she still has to ask. I said "fuck, it's easy to remember: NO MEAT!" She musta had a mental tic and thought for a second I was Jewish.
  • Hm. I'm more about being aware of the fear of loss, not letting attachment overgrow me, and simply managing the negative emotions that do inevitably crop up out of fear of loss. Considering the wonderful things that attachments bring to my life, this is a much better deal on balance than avoiding all attachments simply to veer clear of the fear of loss. That approaches fear of the fear of loss, if you ask me. Happiness is a combination of peace and knowledge, with and with regard to the world as well as onesself.
  • Plegmund, the first of the Four Noble Truths that the historical Buddha realized is that suffering (duhkha) exists. This understanding is basic to Buddhism as a whole, and from it stems everything else. Crudely over-simplified sketch: In some ways Buddhism may be seen as a sustained study of the way the human mind works. The underlying cause of suffering is deemed to be a perceptual error most succinctly described as dualism. The individual's early severance of experience into me and not-me, etc. -- is a perception which colours subsequent thought and gets in the way of undertstanding the actuual nature of things. Attachment, fear, and confusion are the inevitable consequences.
  • Gotta give a nod to that argument, I mean without attachment of some kind, what are ye?
  • Monkeyfilter: Happiness is over-rated
  • I'd love to be like those Buddhist monks and be "rooted" and serene-like but then hang on, these guys have been practicing meditation for *years*. So part of me thinks these guys are just world-class *loafers*. I mean that in a good way, in order to achieve at anything you really have to work at it. And they are very good indeed. On the other hand, these are not the guys who are going to invent insulin or start Cisco or whatnot. These are the knights who say "OM". Sooo...maybe it's better that we aren't all like them. Otherwise we'd be rooted, but in the Stone Age.
  • Actually, some of those moments that, looking back, I could label as 'pure happiness', were while under the control of my monkey mind... Hey Flagpole, can you give us an example? *sees a possibility to get off the monkey mind treadmill*
  • MonkeyFilter: It's not like there's some great Auditor in the sky toting all this up
  • From the article: Since the days of Freud, the emphasis in consulting rooms has been on talk about negative effects of the past and how they damage people in the present. Seligman names this approach "victimology" and says research shows it to be worthless: "It is difficult to find even small effects of childhood events on adult personality, and there is no evidence at all of large effects." The tragic legacy of Freud is that many are "unduly embittered about their past, and unduly passive about their future", says Seligman. The Age of Freud appears to be rapidly ending...
  • "It is also notable that many of the largest countries in terms of population do quite badly. With China 82nd, India 125th and Russia 167th it is interesting to note that larger populations are not associated with happy countries."
  • Harvard suggests that happiness for those making $100,000+/yr is not necessarly a given, but could be.
  • Bad neuroscientist! Hush, or no more grant money for you!
  • The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard's brain produces a level of gamma waves -- those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory -- "never reported before in the neuroscience literature" Is that the key? Compassion. Actual compassion. Or, as was said, "meditating on compassion"?
  • Well, I'm generally less happy when I'm actually caring about people than when I'm pondering whether I should care about people. But then, I am a selfish ass. (And strangely, rather happy about that.)
  • My theory is that true happiness is achieved through the DGAS effect. DGAS = Don't Give A Shit