Stumbling on Happiness

A delightful book that defies easy categorization. Most of this book is devoted to answering questions about the future: how will we feel when we have attained a certain goal? when we have lost a loved one? when we have reached a certain age? How will we feel if we develop a severe permanent disability? All of these questions, centering on how we feel, are answered: not as good as we expect, not as bad as we expect.

All of it hinges on our imagination and memory and how they work. And it is a fascinating tale. Our brains operate not at all like a computer when it comes to imagining the future. Or remembering the past. We leave more and more out the farther we are away from either, and what we remember is not an even-handed report; our imagining of the future tends toward a fuzzy glow while our memories of the past focus on the last part of an experience.

This and much more is revealed in this little book. I place the book with others that take a different look at a subject: The Tipping Point, Blink, The Paradox of Choice. These are all little books, and they all take a look at how we see things differently than we thought we did. And how we act differently than we might think we would. If you are interested in the human mind these little guys provide a lot of bang for the buck, and it's so easy to get it.

Are we just being trendy?

Wired magazine publishes a cute graph each month that spells out what's "wired", "tired", or "expired". In the October 2007 issue we have this range:

Expired: Getting smarter
Tired: Becoming happier
Wired: Staying creative

I should have seen this coming.

Certainly there has been a trend. I have noticed an increase in the number of books, magazine articles, and...uh...blogs...that look into the elusive state, "happiness". What I have found intriguing is that much of the research falls in line with my gut feelings - that happiness really is a matter of adjusting your thinking more than anything else. More and more we see what we suspected: more choices do not make happiness; greater material wealth (beyond a middle-level) does not make happiness. In other words, getting there, wherever "there" is, will not bring us nirvana (one of Gretchen's recent posts discusses this matter of how the 'process' of getting there should be the focus rather than the goal itself).

So yeah, it's a trend and we jumped on it here. Does that mean we should jump off and get into "staying creative"? I think not. In fact, creativity for most of us is indeed related to happiness. So let's just stay where we are and make real progress.

Authentic Happiness

Senia, of senia.com, suggested in a comment on my last post that I look at Authentic Happiness, a website by Martin Seligman, of positive psychology fame. There are many self-tests on there.

I'm as much a nut for these tests as anyone else, so I took four of them. The first one is a test for authentic happiness. I scored somewhere in the middle of my age group on that one, which I assume means I am neither happier nor sadder than the average in my group.

I did not like all of the questions, frankly. Even though I realize they come from studies of those who can be termed inordinately happy, still I had difficulty seeing happiness through the lens of so-called "success" or, for that matter, "spirituality" and "purpose in life". For many those may seem like key areas of happiness but for me they are not.

Although I guess I could niggle a little on that "purpose in life". I have a purpose I have defined for myself. I do not see it as something given to me from on high or expected from me by others. And it is true that whether or not I fulfill that purpose does relate to how happy I feel.

The test on my strengths shows me as having many strengths and not many "weaknesses". None were a surprise to me but it was nice to see them laid out like that. It was affirming, you might say.

I expect I will return to that site again, because of its clear focus on being happy. I am sure Gretchen has already been there and back again, and I might look up in her blog to see if she mentions it specifically. It looks like a good place to sort some things out and it may help with my commandments development.