Re: Happiness is NOT America's Middle Name
cat tail
4/10/2012 11:50:34 AM
I found the Eight Secrets of Happiness -- as shown in the slideshow in this post -- really interesting, especially how they seemed to echo some of the same points in Michael's post below about Time being an Investor's Strongest Ally.
Re: Happiness is NOT America's Middle Name
Noreen Seebacher
4/10/2012 11:21:44 AM
As for resilience and optimism -- @Street Smart -- you say they may have genetic components. Well, I definitely got the resilience. But I think I got short-changed on the optimism.
Re: Happiness is NOT America's Middle Name
Noreen Seebacher
4/10/2012 11:19:52 AM
@Street Smart, that matches a lot of the stuff I've seen and heard too. In fact, I think it's part of the video included in Sherri's post. Anyway, the point was that it is hard to compare happiness across countries because of cultural norms and biases. People in France, for instance, tend to rate themselves as less happy than people in Mexico, even when they have what could be construed as "better" standards of living. In other cultures, people shy away from calling themselves happy because they are religious/superstitious about invoking the wrath of god -- who may take that happiness away.
Happiness is NOT America's Middle Name
Street Smart
4/10/2012 11:12:59 AM
@Sherri, I love this post and with a background in experimental psychology, I love happiness research! Some of the findings are very interesting. Did you know that though money doesn't buy happiness, college-educated people feel they need more money to be happy than those who didn't go to college? Did you know that gratefulness, and keeping a daily journal of things one is grateful for is the number one contributer to reported happiness? (Paging Oprah...who has made a LOT of money off of that idea...) And did you know that a lot of what we think of as being resiliance and optimism have genetic components?
But here's the thing that I think our nation is up against versus oh, say Bhutan. I think our national character is deeply unhappy and prone to be dissatisfied. I don't just mean now either; I mean since the time of the Pilgrims.
Our nation was founded by unhappy people, people who found fault with the status quo in religion, government, opportunity, the weather on the east coast...you name it. Everybody who came to America, or moved west from the original 13 colonies felt some basic unhappiness with what they fled from.
We tend to label that dissatisfaction by different names--drive or optimism or "not settling" but maybe our deeply-rooted push for bigger, better, MORE guarantees that happiness will always be slightly out of reach.
I'm afraid there's a reason why organizations who are seeking social change are called NOT-for-profits. I don't see too many yoga studios going public!
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