Happiness

Happiness and Its Discontents (NY times). What does it mean to be happy? The answer to this question once seemed obvious to me. To be happy is to be satisfied with your life. If you want to find out how happy someone is, you ask him a question like, “Taking all things together, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?” This is an appealing view. But I have come to believe that it is probably wrong. Or at least, it can’t do justice to our everyday concerns about happiness.

How I Measure Happiness by Darius Foroux. Never Rely On Externals For Your Happiness.

The Difference Between Happiness and Joy (NY Times). Happiness is good, but joy is better. It’s smart to enjoy happiness, but it’s smarter still to put yourself in situations where you might experience joy.

Being Happy

How You Can Be Happier in Life by Mark Manson. Research shows that where we drive isn’t what makes us happy in the long run. In fact, what increases our baseline happiness is how much control we feel we have over driving. You may have few possessions, a bad job, but if you feel like you have control over your life and your destiny, then you will be happy.

Stop Trying To Be Happy by Mark Manson. With regards to finding happiness, it seems the best advice is also the simplest: Imagine who you want to be and then step towards it. Dream big and then do something. Anything. The simple act of moving at all will change how you feel about the entire process and serve to inspire you further.

A Formula for Happiness (NY Times). About half of happiness is genetically determined. Up to an additional 40 percent comes from the things that have occurred in our recent past — but that won’t last very long. That leaves just about 12 percent. That might not sound like much, but the good news is that we can bring that 12 percent under our control. It turns out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is genetic and not under our control in any way.

The Secret to Happiness Is Helping Others (time.com). There is a Chinese saying that goes: “If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.” For centuries, the greatest thinkers have suggested the same thing: Happiness is found in helping others…Scientific research provides compelling data to support the anecdotal evidence that giving is a powerful pathway to personal growth and lasting happiness.

How to Be Happy When Everything Goes Wrong by James Clear. We tend to overestimate the length or intensity of happiness that major events will create…There are two primary takeaways from The Impact Bias about how to be happy:

• First, we have a tendency to focus on the thing that changes and forget about the things that don’t change. It will still hurt when we lose a loved one. It will still feel nice to relax on the porch and watch the sunset. We imagine the change, but we forget the things that stay the same.
• Second, a challenge is an impediment to a particular thing, not to you as a person. We overestimate how much negative events will harm our lives for precisely the same reason that we overvalue how much positive events will help our lives. We focus on the thing that occurs (like losing a leg), but forget about all of the other experiences of life.

We know what will make us happy, why do we watch TV instead? (digest.bps.org.uk). Schiffer and Roberts consider this to be a paradox of happiness: we know which kind of activities will bring us lasting happiness, but because we see them as daunting and less enjoyable in the moment, we choose to spend much more of our time doing passive, more immediately pleasant things with our free time. Their advice is to plan ahead “to try to ease the physical transition into flow activities” to make them feel less daunting. For example, they suggest getting your gym clothes and bag ready the night before, and choosing a gym that’s close and convenient; or getting your journal and pen, or easel and paintbrushes, ready in advance.

The Secret to Happiness? Simplify. (outsideonline.com). For centuries, people leaned into the popular (and false) belief that possession—material wealth and stature—was synonymous with happiness. But now minimalism is on the rise, and for good reason: it works. Here’s how.

Happiness May Come With Age, Study Says (NY Times). A large Gallup poll has found that by almost any measure, people get happier as they get older, and researchers are not sure why.

The Cost of Happiness

The Hidden Costs of Happiness by Mark Manson. Anyone who has ever taken an economics class has heard the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” In today’s happiness-obsessed culture, most pursue just the opposite: we want to know how to be happy with no costs, all benefits. We want the rewards without the risks, the gain without the pain. As with anything else, happiness has costs. It is not free.

The Most Important Question of Your Life by Mark Manson. What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The quality of your life is not determined by the quality of your positive experiences but the quality of your negative experiences. And to get good at dealing with negative experiences is to get good at dealing with life.

The downside of being happy (washingtonpost.com). The idea that sadness somehow kindles creativity is a popular and long-lasting one…Creativity, measured by the number of important compositions, is causally attributable to negative moods, in particular to sadness…For one, composers appeared to write more letters in times of negative emotion — especially when they were angry — and fewer when they were happy. 

The Pursuit of Happiness

Why the Best Things in Life Are All Backwards by Mark Manson. Mark offers a valuable perspective for the pursuit of happiness:

• Effort and reward have a linear relationship when the action is mindless and simple.
• Effort and reward have a diminishing returns relationship when the action is complex and multivariate.
• But when the action becomes purely psychological—an experience that exists solely within our own consciousness—the relationship between effort and reward becomes inverted.

Pursuing happiness takes you further away from it. Attempts at greater emotional control only remove us from it. The desire for greater freedom is often what causes us to feel trapped. The need to be loved and accepted prevents us from loving and accepting ourselves.

America is obsessed with happiness — and it’s making us miserable (Vox). Like an attractive man, it seems the more actively happiness is pursued, the more it refuses to call and starts avoiding you at parties. Americans as a whole invest more time and money and emotional energy into the explicit pursuit of happiness than any other nation on Earth, but is all this effort and investment paying off? Is America getting happier and happier? The answer appears to be a pretty clear no. 

The Futile Pursuit of Happiness (NY Times). Gilbert and his collaborator Tim Wilson call the gap between what we predict and what we ultimately experience the ”impact bias” — ”impact” meaning the errors we make in estimating both the intensity and duration of our emotions and ”bias” our tendency to err. The phrase characterizes how we experience the dimming excitement over not just a BMW but also over any object or event that we presume will make us happy. 

Happiness and Money

Everything you need to know about whether money makes you happy (80000hours.org). It’s a cliché that “you can’t buy happiness”, but at the same time, financial security is among most people’s top career priorities. Moreover, when people are asked what would most improve the quality of their lives, the most common answer is more money. What’s going on here? Who is right? The truth seems to lie in the middle: money does make you happy, but only a little. And this has many important implications about trade-offs you face in your life and career.

Fat, Happy, And In Over Your Head by Morgan Housel. Can we ever have “enough”?

There are 2 types of wealth — only one is key to your happiness (businessinsider.com). There are two types of wealth:

• Vertical wealth: The vertically wealthy rush to outshine their neighbors with better Christmas decorations, shinier cars, more handsome pool boys. Then, they move to a richer neighborhood and start all over again.
• Horizontal wealth: It means not letting your increased income dictate your tastes. You like books and now you have money? Buy more books! What happens when a horizontally wealthy person goes from $30,000 a year to $3 million? Nothing, really.

It doesn’t cost a lot to be happy. For a family of three, it can be less than $26,000 a year. Don’t spend your life chasing numbers. Figure out how much you need, get it, and go read a book.

How you can profit from horizontal wealth as opposed to vertical wealth and live a different life (capital.co.uk). To some wealthy people, vertical wealth can be pointless because you either have it, or don’t have it. Whereas with horizontal wealth, the fact that you once had money and used it to learn and grow and derive enjoyment from it, and not care what others thought about it, means it’s not so great a loss.

This is how much money it takes for millionaires to be happy (CNBC). Harvard’s new research reveals that the price of happiness is pretty steep: It seems to be around $8 million to $10 million.

Why Rich People Aren’t as Happy as They Could Be (HBR). Researchers have theorized that wealth makes us less generous because it makes us more isolated – and isolation also has a deleterious effect on happiness.

• When we are wealthy, we don’t need other people to survive the way we did when we were poorer.
• The wealthier we become, the more likely we are to erect boundaries between ourselves and others—for example, by living in a bigger house with a fence around it.

We are an exceedingly—perhaps excruciatingly—social species. We can’t be really happy if we didn’t have at least one meaningful, intimate, relationship. And the richer the social life we enjoy, the happier we are likely to be.

Financial & Emotional Freedom: What Does It Take? by Darius Foroux. Don’t chase money. Even if you think it gives you financial freedom. If it comes at the price of emotional freedom, it’s not worth it. You always need way less than you think. When I was unhappy with my well-paying career, I took a step back. Literally.

The Right Way to Try to Buy Happiness (NY Times). What are some things you can do with money that will make you happier?

Don’t Indulge. Be Happy. (NY Times). But these typical spending tendencies — buying more, and buying for ourselves — are ineffective at turning money into happiness. A decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out). Our own recent research shows that in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

The Odd Relationship Between Money and Happiness (NY Times). I’m not foolish enough to believe that money plays no role in happiness. In my work as a financial planner, I have seen that money can certainly relieve stress, and reduced stress can certainly lead to increased happiness. So there is some correlation, but it seems pretty fuzzy to me. It is way more complex than a simple formula based on income.

Happiness at Work

Managing Yourself: Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want (HBR). A growing body of research suggests that an exercise we call “job crafting” can be a powerful tool for reenergizing and reimagining your work life. It involves redefining your job to incorporate your motives, strengths, and passions. The exercise prompts you to visualize the job, map its elements, and reorganize them to better suit you. In this way, you can put personal touches on how you see and do your job, and you’ll gain a greater sense of control at work—which is especially critical at a time when you’re probably working longer and harder and expecting to retire later. 

Why Are Millennials So Unhappy? Because They Can’t Stop Thinking About This (inc.com). What the Happify data scientists found was that these Millennials were overwhelmingly–and, depending on how you read into the data, perhaps even obsessively–consumed with work. So consumed with work that they don’t place as much value on relationships with friends and family. And it’s making them unhappy.

People’s happiness at work usually dips mid career – now researchers think they know why (digest.bps.org.uk). If you’re in or not far from your thirties, you’re part of the age group that previous research shows is most likely to experience lower workplace wellbeing. A new study suggests the reasons for this midlife dip: a double whammy of more demands on time and less support from co-workers.

How Vacations Affect Your Happiness (NY Times). The study didn’t find any relationship between the length of the vacation and overall happiness. Since most of the happiness boost comes from planning and anticipating a vacation, the study suggests that people may get more out of several small trips a year than one big vacation.

Happiness and Parenting

If being a SAHM is so great, why am I unhappy? (todaysparent.com). The theory is that stay-at-home parents have the best jobs in the world — no corporate boss to answer to and the simple pleasure of watching your children grow up. Somewhere in the last two years I’ve lost that vision because, honestly, the last few weeks I’ve been a real jerk to my family…I would wake up each morning dreading the day ahead — suffocated by the choice I made to quit my job in the city, move to a small town to raise my kids in an itty-bitty cottage in the woods.

I think at the heart of my problem is that I take no time during the day to sit with my kids and enjoy them. I fill my days outside of the house with playdates and errands (to give my work-at-home husband peace and quiet) all of which get done half-heartedly because all I can think about is the amount of work still left to do.

The Key To Raising A Happy Child (NPR). For much of the past half-century, children, adolescents and young adults in the U.S. have been saying they feel as though their lives are increasingly out of their control. At the same time, rates of anxiety and depression have risen steadily. What’s the fix? Feeling in control of your own destiny.

More Reading

The Rap on Happiness (NY Times). Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries — just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. The fashion is to bemoan happiness studies and positive psychology as being the work not of the Devil (the Devil is kind of cool), but of morons.

In Praise of Mediocrity (NY Times). I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time…Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it.

Happiness is Somewhere Between Having Too Much and Having Too Little (pragcap.com). Is happiness really about “having it all”?  It seems to be that “having it all” just brings more burdens in other strange ways.  Instead, it seems that happiness really is somewhere between having too much and having too little.  And when you get that balance right you can start focusing on all those intangible things.  And while you can’t show those intangibles off to your neighbors it’s really those intangibles that will bring more personal happiness in the long-run.

Ancient Wisdom Reveals 6 Rituals That Will Make You Happy (bakadesuyo.com). Here’s how ancient wisdom from the Stoics can help you be happier:

• Events Don’t Upset You. Beliefs Do: Only the end of the world is the end of the world.
• Control What You Can. Ignore The Rest: Worrying never fixed anything.
• Accept Everything. But Don’t Be Passive: Nobody recommends denial. Accept. And then do something.
• Choose Whose Child You Will Be: “What would Batman do in this situation?”
• Morning And Evening Rituals Are Essential: Plan for the day, then reflect on the day.

A Better Kind of Happiness (The New Yorker)

Why We’ll Never All Be Happy Again by Ben Carlson. Today, everyone is too well-informed to be happy. The 24-hour cable news, social media, alerts on your phone, and your interactions with actual human beings in the wild make it seem like things are getting worse…I suppose it’s possible we’ll figure it out someday and strike the right balance between staying informed and keeping things in perspective. But it sure seems like the more informed we are as a species the harder it is for the collective we to be happy.

Should Reality Make Us Glad or Sad? (scientificamerican.com). “The place I think the Buddhists try and get you to,” Ann responded, “is right on the knife edge between the two. That’s where the truth is… The laughing Buddha is your best guide. What the heck is he laughing about? You can’t explain that logically, but you can get into that state. And the final answer you’re looking for is the knife edge, because both exist: that terrible darkness, and that absolute life.”

Happy with a 20% Chance of Sadness (scientificamerican.com). Nock’s trial is one effort to make use of the burgeoning science of mood forecasting: the idea that by continuously recording data from wearable sensors and mobile phones, it will be possible not only to track and perhaps identify signs of mental illness in a person, but even to predict when their well-being is about to dip.

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