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Archive for the ‘happiness’ Category

happier is not always better?

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In Happiness: Enough Already Newsweek report on research by Ed Diener (et al) that proposes the possibility of being ‘too happy’:

“On a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is extremely happy, 8s were more successful than 9s and 10s, getting more education and earning more. That probably reflects the fact that people who are somewhat discontent, but not so depressed as to be paralyzed, are more motivated to improve both their own lot (thus driving themselves to acquire more education and seek ever-more-challenging jobs) and the lot of their community (causing them to participate more in civic and political life). In contrast, people at the top of the jolliness charts feel no such urgency. “If you’re totally satisfied with your life and with how things are going in the world,” says Diener, “you don’t feel very motivated to work for change. Be wary when people tell you you should be “happier.””

The logic can seem slightly twisted – you’ll be happier if you were a bit less happy?

“Once a moderate level of happiness is achieved, further increases can sometimes be detrimental.”

The report itself uses slightly odd anecdotes to prove their point that being happy may not always be good for you:

“it is not difficult to find anecdotes that could be explained by this account of the detrimental effect of overly
positive evaluations. For instance, an active 77-year-old California woman went out to bike during a deadly heat wave, even though her family begged her not to go. She was later found dead of heat stroke”

There’s a unnerving theme of ‘if you are too happy you might end up dead’ that seems to implicitly rate a long and moderately happy life above a short but insanely happy one.

But as Diener explains:

” Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success

“these proposals implicitly raise the question of how happy nations should be.”

So it’s not about what’s good for the individual at all. Which makes more sense. A very happy populace might damage GDP.

Written by Karen

April 1st, 2008 at 6:56 am

Posted in happiness

book: Enough by John Naish

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I’ve just read John Naish’s Enough. It arrived on my desk at work with it’s dazzling tag-line “ever get the feeling that you’ve had enough?”. Rather apt timing.

At times Enough seemed like a greatest hits of the happiness & modernity movement, featuring Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow), Epicurus, Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness), the jam experiment (also seen in Paradox of Choice), and Stephen Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You). I skipped quite a few bits as a result.

But I really liked the stuff about personal sabbaths. Mine seems to involved baking bread and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch.And it’s got a nice ending. I get very uppity if books don’t end well.

Written by Karen

March 31st, 2008 at 6:47 am

Vernon’s tabloid critique of positive psychology

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In his Comment is Free piece, Happy Talk, Mark Vernon takes Positive Psychology to task. Whilst it’s not clear if he is directly criticising the work of Martin Seligman he opens the article with

“This year marks the 10th anniversary of Martin Seligman coining the term “positive psychology”.

He goes on:

“Its recommendations do not rise above the commonplaces of “work less”, “stay fit”, “think positively”, and so on”

“The fundamental error of the science – and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused – is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion.”

“happiness is not about feeling good, it is about being good. ….Happiness is fundamentally a moral matter not a hedonistic one.”

Which makes it seem that Mark Vernon has never read Martin Seligman’s work. Seligman describes three routes to happiness:

  • the Pleasant Life, consisting in having as many pleasures as possible
  • the Good Life, which consists in knowing what your signature strengths are, and then recrafting your work, love, friendship, leisure and parenting to use those strengths to have more flow in life
  • the Meaningful Life, which consists of using your signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are.

Seligman is always pretty clear about what he values

“The third form of happiness, which is meaning, is again knowing what your highest strengths are and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There’s no shortcut to that. That’s what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it’s unlikely there’ll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And it’s impossible that there’ll be a pharmacology of meaning. ” from Edge: A Talk with Martin Seligman

Vernon says he has read Authentic Happiness and in detail. This is much easier to believe if you read his more considered postings on his own blog. What he seems to object to most is the idea that anything in this space is measurable and therefore worthy of scientific study. That’s a much more interesting and less tabloid debate. Shame he didn’t stick to that point on Comment is Free.

Written by Karen

March 7th, 2008 at 8:09 am

Posted in happiness,psychology