What Makes Us Happy?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
It does seem to put more weight on how we deal with adversity as being probably more important, having a range of "strategies" from the more immature to the more advanced, which suggests that they are learned or one can eventually make the leap to the better ways. Also it mentions how physical health as a young adult is a better predictor of mental health later in life, but not so much of physical health. And of course, that warm, deep personal relationships are very important too, not so much quantity, but quality.
Have not watched the TED video suggested by badger7, but I believe there is value in this article too. Do not dismiss it for being too "narrative" or simply long.
"But what does it mean, really, to be happier? For 30 years, Denmark has topped international happiness surveys. But Danes are hardly a sanguine bunch. Ask an American how it’s going, and you will usually hear 'Really good.' Ask a Dane, and you will hear 'Det kunne være værre (It could be worse).'
"'Danes have consistently low (and indubitably realistic) expectations for the year to come,' a team of Danish scholars concluded. 'Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.'"
"Of course, happiness scientists have come up with all kinds of straightforward, and actionable, findings: that money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met; that marriage and faith lead to happiness (or it could be that happy people are more likely to be married and spiritual); that temperamental “set points” for happiness—a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness—account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.) But why do countries with the highest self-reports of subjective well-being also yield the most suicides? How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger)—yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?"
Life consistently sucks, but if you accept that, you can be pleasantly surprised.
In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
“What we do,” Vaillant concluded, “affects how we feel just as much as how we feel affects what we do.”
Endorphins are basically one of two basic mechanisms for "fitting" data in the brain-as-neural-net, with the other being pain: pain is the reinforcement mechanism that trains your neurons to not do that again, while endorphins tell your brain to do please do that again. People are "happy" (have endorphins) when they're doing things that their body encourages them to do. To be happy is simply to be one with your body's material desires (though note that your brain is part of your body, and it has material desires of its own, for things like friendship.)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_...
Long story short: Choice makes us unhappy, yet we believe that it's what will make us happy and so we strive for it. We actively seek out that which will make us unhappy in the search for happiness.
This TED talk, on the other hand, is straight to the point.
Watch it instead.
Yet, even as he takes pleasure in poking holes in an innocent idealism, Vaillant says his hopeful temperament is best summed up by the story of a father who on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, "Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break." The other boy runs to him and says, "Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!"
His study seems to support the idea that the way people react to problems in their lives affects their overall happiness more than the problems themselves.
Articles like this are a good way to hear about studies you want to read about further. I don't have time to keep current on neurology, linguistics, psychology, history, archaeology, epidemiology, etc., etc., etc. journals, and I highly doubt I'm the only one. I'm grateful for authors like Oliver Sacks who write about the material in an approachable manner.
(This same point came up yesterday. Some people here seem eager to jump on psychology as being not science, and all writing about it being fluff.)
If I could teach nerds only one thing about the world, it's that dismissing non-technical forms of communication as useless does not impress anyone with your intellectual skill -- it just makes you annoying and hard to tolerate.
Also, the information bandwidth of social communication is incredibly high. Much of our mental resources are dedicated to social decisions (friend or foe? are they lying?), which computers tend to handle very poorly.
But there's a few simple things article writers can do to improve readability. -Summaries (explain what the reader can expect to get out of the article) -Sideboxes (highlight key passages or points from each paragraph) -Descriptive paragraph headings
This article had none of those, and I felt like it was just trying to keep me hooked so I'd keep clicking to get to the next page and find the good part.
Dude, the magazine has a cover story about Spongebob. (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/spongebob) Perhaps you're being a tiny bit silly in expecting them to "highlight key passages or points from each paragraph" for you?
"You may think that it would be good to feel happy at all times, but we have a word for animals that never feel distress, anxiety, fear, and pain: That word is dinner."
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert06/gilbert06_index.ht...