I’ve been reading more and more of The New Yorker lately, so I’ve been seeing a lot of their famous one panel comics that have been in their pages for years. These cartoons are selected quite carefully, as shown in a recent article about the cartoon editor of the New Yorker; from what I can tell, the cartoons are selected to be subtle, clever, and not laugh out-loud funny. They are therefore things you can glance at more than once and find entertainment.
So, I present to you my first makeshift cartoon in the style of the New Yorker. It was conceived while brushing my teeth not long ago (please refer to Ze Frank’s Where the %$@# Do Ideas Come From?), and as a first draft idea, has absolutely no quality control applied. You have been warned. I envision two first graders on a playground, in the midst of an altercation, with one saying “A pox, a chicken pox upon both your houses!”
Hot on the heels of my extensive discussion on happiness, I must change topics a bit and point out a 2005 study by the American Chemical Society, specifically, “Senior Research Associate Janel Kasper-Wolfe of ACS’s Department of Member Research & Technology under the general guidance of the ACS Committee on Economic & Professional Affairs.” Fascinating, you say. Read on! So … what in this study could be so interesting, you ask? Well. This is an analysis of the starting salaries received by chemistry graduates in 2005. Possibly an ironic subject matter given my last post? Yes. Interesting? Without a doubt.
The C&EN News website provides the entire article summarizing the salary study (in PDF format) online, but I am interested in only one subset of the data. Above a table on the third page is the provocative heading saying, for those with bachelors degrees, “Title, certification, and grades have little impact on salary.” Grades. Grades have little impact on salary. Those with an ‘A’ GPA earned, on average, $35,700 per year. Those with a ‘C’ GPA earned, on average, $36,000 per year. This fact doesn’t surprise me, and let’s take a journey back in time to see why.
The summer after my junior year in high school, I applied at the local bike shop for my very first job. The employee discount on bikes and accessories, combined with the predominantly young, outdoorsy demographic made the job quite appealing. Attracted by what could be a fun debut in the world of work, I put my best (naive) foot forward to secure an interview by assembling a resume and crafting what I see now as the most embarrassingly formal e-mails I’ve ever read.
As a very responsible student, a fan of biking, and a quick learner, I thought I could get the job. I even referred a friend to this place, thinking we could work together. He got the job. I didn’t. Now, first realize I was happy for him and there were no hard feelings … I mean, it’s a summer job for gosh sakes. But even more importantly, by missing the job, I learned something about the real world: it is all about experience. My friend had some experience taking apart bikes—during my interview, I confessed I had some, but relatively little. This concept of experience is extremely obvious, I know, but consider the mind of a high schooler.
High school kids learn that the be-all and end-all of their existence is the grades they earn and conformity to endless rules and regulations. It is implied that when one successfully navigates these arbitrary obstacles, success in the real world will inevitably follow. This is fantastically false. The bike shop didn’t care about my class rank, or my latest National Honors Society whatever—they cared that I wasn’t on drugs, showed up to work on time, and knew bikes. High school is excellent at teaching lessons of self-discipline and delayed gratification, but it paints a picture of a meritocracy that doesn’t exist anywhere I’ve ever been.
So, somehow I’d like to impart the “think outside the box of high school” idea to future generations, except without all the negative corporate doublespeak that accompanies that particular catch phrase. Maybe it’s just a lesson one must learn own their own.
Mykala directed me to some information that she saw on a recent Oprah show about happiness called “How Happy are You?” She had some good quotes from it.
We have beliefs about ourselves and our lives, and our perception gathers evidence in support of these beliefs. If you believe that your life isn’t satisfying or that you are a failure, you will look around for ways that this is true. If you believe that life is fulfilling and you are a worthy and significant person, you’ll find evidence to prove this case.
So, one of the ideas is that of the self-fulfilling prophecy. One might say that a person is visualizing/forming a mental image of something, which increases the likelihood of that visualization coming true. What’s even more interesting to me, however, is the type of lifestyle that this thinking facilitates:
“It’s always about tomorrow, so you’re chasing ‘more,’ ‘next’ and ‘there,’” [Dr. Holden] says. “You promise yourself that when you get there, you’ll be happy. And I promise you, you won’t, because you’ll always set another destination to go for.”
…
“Destination addiction: you live in the not now. You set all of these goals, destinations, and you say ‘I’ll be happy when I get there.’ But you’re not. You just set the next destination.”
This “go go go” mentality is not unique to the American psyche, but its effects are particularly widespread and potent here in the states (at least from my anecdotal observations). This being the case, the majority is not always in the right, and a reexamination of never-stop-itis can lead us to healthier alternatives in our attitudes. (And when I say “our,” I really mean “my,” but I seem to have gotten stuck with that syntax somewhere earlier in this piece.)
In addition to Dr. Holden’s work, I am even more interested in what a recent Scientific American article about Sonja Lyubomirsky calls “the science of happiness.” Dr. Lyubomirsky’s primary thesis is that the psychological set point of happiness has a rather high amount of inertia. That is, happiness levels are resistant to permanent changes.
We tend to adapt, quickly returning to our usual level of happiness. The classic example of such “hedonic adaptation” comes from a 1970s study of lottery winners, who a year after their windfall ended up no happier than nonwinners. Hedonic adaptation helps to explain why even changes in major life circumstances—such as income, marriage, physical health and where we live—do so little to boost our overall happiness.
What’s particularly interesting is that both of these sources on happiness agree that goals have absolutely nothing to do with happiness (emphasis mine):
“There’s been a tension in the field,” explains Lyubomirsky’s main collaborator, psychologist Kennon M. Sheldon of the University of Missouri-Columbia. “Some people were assuming you can affect happiness if, for example, you picked the right goals, but there was all this literature that suggested it was impossible, that what goes up must come down.”
Good news for us, though: it appears that this happiness set point is plastic, and therefore can be changed. For example, doing good things for others (and being sure to vary what exactly these things are), seems to be a good way to increase one’s happiness. Another tacit implication by that Scientific American article is prioritization on a very grand scale. It discussed a Holocaust surviver, and the attitude of this person was that it was “indecent or inappropriate” to be unhappy about trivial things. That reflects someone who truly has their priorities straight.
And finally, the core of my interest in this Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky is her forthcoming book (2008) called “The How of Happiness,” where these concepts and attitudes are scientifically laid out and defended. This link should point to the book on Amazon, once the book exists.
The best thing to hope for is that in time and with much more effort the work will become transparent to its users, that it will be taken for granted. That’s life with websites.
