happiness
You are viewing stuff tagged with happiness.
You are viewing stuff tagged with happiness.
Thought I worked yesterday, and it turned out I didn’t. Before I figured this out, I drove out to both of the places I normally work, then drove home after a tour of the Twin Cities in the still-dark cloudy morning, and had the privilege of reading Christmas stories to Essie. Next, the three of us went out to pick up a gift, wrapped presents, made salt dough ornaments, took a nap (the three of us! Essie woke up first…), and watched two Christmas movies: The Santa Clause and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Philosophy says you can not have good without evil. Which is to say you have no frame of reference, no true way to define “good” if you don’t have it’s opposite. Now, I haven’t the philosophical experience to discuss good’s definition in terms of evil, but I believe it is related to another universal facet of the human experience: joy’s definition in terms of pain.
Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 1990. The number of topics Watterson addresses is striking. A few that caught my attention:
Srikumar Rao gave a talk a few TEDs back (2009) called “Plug into your hard-wired happiness”. I’ve transcribed parts of it in a kind of note format, because it was really interesting:
Since the humidity and heat decided to die down for a day, it has been feeling downright cool outside — 70° with a pleasant breeze. Things smell different — there’s a crispness that isn’t fall but isn’t the oppressive July heat, either.
Halfway through yet another rotation (pediatric dentistry), I’m beginning to realize that there is a point in my life when I’ll be done with dental school. At that point, I’ll have a world of options in front of me. Like a river delta opening into the ocean, my life will have 1000 directions where there once was one. Invigorating, right? Well, I suppose. More on that in a minute. Here’s something I wrote almost four years ago, on the private changelog for my software that powers tumbledry:
The “Regrets of the Dying” have quite a bit of overlap. Let us learn from them now, early, in this lovely piece by Bronnie Ware:
Someday, it is my dream to live on a sunny hilltop where I can see the stars at night. I think I’ll feel content. Right now, I can’t see the stars at night, but I still feel content. I guess it’s not about where you are, but who is there with you.
Why Parents Hate Parenting — New York Magazine is a great summary of the research findings that having kids makes people less happy. However, it teases out exactly what that means. For example, it’s the moment-to-moment happiness that people lose out on when they have kids. They have less freedom to do what they did before. “Small cracks” in their relationship with their spouse (which is integral to happiness) become “huge gulfs” under the pressure of children. What’s more, the later people wait in life, the more autonomy and enjoyment they have experienced from working and socializing, and therefore the more they give up when they do have children. My favorite part, however, was the idea that it isn’t so simple as moment to moment happiness… there’s a larger factor, one of purpose, to consider:
One of the few truly selfish things you can do that doesn’t make you an asshole is to make yourself happy by making someone else happy.
Mykala recorded this one for me a while ago. It’s a comment I made while we were navigating (as we often do): “Goog 411 + GPS = Poor man’s iPhone.”
Anyhow, I think we’re really getting good at navigating… which is to say, we’re getting good at working together. On a whim, we took a day trip to Red Wing this past Sunday, and it was a blast. We took a hike, scouted out some things to do if we visit for a weekend (historical train and boat tour and etc.), admired a wonderful “Bed & Breakfast & Bread” placed called Round Barn Farm, and generally had a blast. The weather was threatening to rain, but was otherwise perfect in temperature. Here’s a picture from the top of Barn Bluff:
“The point is that after my unsuccessful murder I wasn’t unhappy for an entire year.” Turns out you can get stabbed in the throat and come very close to death; and still, despite your immense gratitude at being spared death, return to your baseline happiness in about 12 months. Not a cause for hopelessness, no — but an interesting anecdote to keep in mind.
I’ve saved a bunch of articles from the beginning of the summer, and now I am making my way through them. The first: Advice for High School Graduates from The Conversation Blog at the New York Times. The blog is like sitting around a dinner table with two knowledgeable, witty, opinionated folks: David Brooks and Gail Collins, both columnists at the Times. In this piece, Brooks requests help from Collins, as he will soon make a commencement speech at a high school. He laments some sizable gaps in the education options available:
I think I need to take this quote from a post here in May and print it out:
“What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
Sometimes, in the middle of the supermarket, I stop and look around at column after column of frozen food — any food I can imagine, right there for purchase. Think about that, anything I want to eat, I can. Instantly. Just hop in the heated/cooled automatic transportation machine. Sometimes, I can feel the pressure from the thousands of generations that preceded me — tens of thousands of years of suffering and hardship of our ancestors, attempting to find and grow enough food to live. And it makes me think, I’ve gotta do everything I can with this life. I have to act in such a way that honors the fact that I’ve never known hunger, that my life is unbelievably luxurious compared to 99.9% of those who came before me. I must push my potential, seize this moment, make the most of myself. And yet sometimes, I feel an unhappiness, a profound ennui. And it makes me sad, to feel that unworthy and unappreciative of this gift of ease. So, whenever I run across research about happiness, my interest is invariable piqued. In the parts of the world where the hunger problem has been solved, it has been replaced by a happiness problem — but, of course, the answer to unhappiness is much more complex than the answer to hunger.
I suppose this could be considered another entry in my ‘happiness’ series, but this comes from a very different angle. I just finished a flat-out fantastic article in the New Yorker called The Way We Age Now, by Atul Gawande. What Dr. Gawande did was summarize the steeply declining geriatric profession and link it to anecdotal evidence for necessary changes in medicine’s attitude towards geriatrics.
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.
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
— Abraham Lincoln