The journey is the destination

One of life’s great paradoxes: Happiness requires purpose; purpose requires a sense of direction; a sense of direction requires goal-setting—but happiness cannot be had by realizing those goals. People believe that achieving big objectives will give them a lot of happiness and then are bitterly disappointed to find that doing so is a letdown. After a big achievement, many people experience depression. True satisfaction comes from progress in the struggle toward the goal. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

Resilient in the face of Trauma

For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events—such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime—must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience them. This assumption has been so deeply embedded in our conventional wisdom that people who don’t have dire reactions to events such as those are sometimes diagnosed as having a pathological condition known as “absent grief.” But recent research suggests that the conventional wisdom is wrong that the absence of grief is quite normal, and that rather than being the fragile flowers that a century of psychologists have made us out to be, most people are surprisingly resilient in the face of trauma. The loss of a parent or spouse is usually sad and often tragic, and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise.

But as one group of researchers noted, “Resilience is often the most commonly observed outcome trajectory following exposure to a potentially traumatic event.” Instead, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience

Why do most of us shake our heads in disbelief when an athlete who has been through several grueling years of chemotherapy tells us that “I wouldn’t change anything,” or when a musician who has become permanently disabled says, “If I had it to do all over again, I would want it to happen the same way,” or when quadriplegics and paraplegics tell us that they are pretty much as happy as everyone else? The claim made by people who have experienced events such as these seem frankly outlandish to those of us who are merely imagining those events—and yet, who are we to argue with the folks who’ve actually been there?

The fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling into Happiness

The Best Moments

Contrary to what we usually believe.. the best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times — although such experiences can also be enjoyable — the best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Struggling to overcome challenges, and then overcoming them, are what people find to be the most enjoyable times in their lives. People typically feel strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities. Find rewards in the events of each moment . . . to enjoy and find meaning in the ongoing stream of experience, in the process of living itself.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

For Today

Do what makes you happiest.

Look upon what gives you joy.

Speak to those who warm your heart.

Listen to that which lifts your spirit.

Surround yourself with sights and sounds and people who give you pleasure.

For all the happiness you give to others all year long, give yourself a perfect day.

And then tomorrow, repeat the process.

Mohan Singh

Living in the Past

Every day I am discovering that people are depressed and defeated because of their past failures and mistakes. They allow their past failures to dominate their present thinking. Because of some past failure, they have convinced themselves that they are no good and they are incapable of doing anything worthwhile. Not only do they doubt their abilities to accomplish anything, but they also down their worth as human beings. Anyone who lives in the past, brooding over past mistakes, will have a difficult time living in the present. If you want to be unhappy, then constantly rethink your past failures. If you want to live victoriously, leave your past failures and disappointments in the past where they belong.

Larry Kennedy, Down with Anxiety!

People prefer the Illusion

People do not want truth; they prefer to believe what makes them happy. People prefer to live in illusions, even though the illusion masks the truth that their condition is one of despair, and they regard anyone who wishes to give them the truth about the condition as their enemy.  -C. Stephen Evans

The decision that most affects your happiness

There are two premises that lead Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, to believe personal company is the most important factor for long-term satisfaction.

The first is that decision-making is tiring. A great deal of research has found that humans have a limited amount of mental energy to devote to making choices. Picking our clothes, where to eat, what to eat when we get there, what music to listen to, whether it should actually be a podcast, and what to do in our free time all demand our brains to exert that energy on a daily basis.

The second premise is that humans falsely believe they are in full control of their happiness by making those choices. So long as we make the right choices, the thinking goes, we'll put ourselves on a path toward life satisfaction.

Cerf rejects that idea. The truth is, decision-making is fraught with biases that cloud our judgment. People misremember bad experiences as good, and vice versa; they let their emotions turn a rational choice into an irrational one; and they use social cues, even subconsciously, to make choices they'd otherwise avoid.

But as Cerf tells his students, that last factor can be harnessed for good.

His neuroscience research has found that when two people are in each other's company, their brain waves will begin to look nearly identical. 

"This means the people you hang out with actually have an impact on your engagement with reality beyond what you can explain. And one of the effects is you become alike."

From those two premises, Cerf's conclusion is that if people want to maximize happiness and minimize stress, they should build a life that requires fewer decisions by surrounding themselves with people who embody the traits they prefer. Over time, they'll naturally pick up those desirable attitudes and behaviors. At the same time, they can avoid the mentally taxing low-level decisions that sap the energy needed for higher-stakes decisions.

Chris Weller writing in Business Insider

Faulty Decision-Making

Imagine that you are preparing to go on a vacation to one of two islands: Moderacia (which has average weather, average beaches, average hotels, and average nightlife) or Extremia (which has beautiful weather and fantastic beaches but crummy hotels and no nightlife). The time has come to make your reservations, so which one would you choose? Most people pick Extremia.

But now imagine that you are already holding tentative reservations for both destinations and the time has come to cancel one of them before they charge your credit card. Which would you cancel? Most people choose to cancel their reservation on Extremia.

Why would people both select and reject Extremia? Because when we are selecting, we consider the positive attributes of our alternatives, and when we are rejecting, we consider the negative attributes.

Extremia has the most positive attributes and the most negative attributes, hence people tend to select it when they are looking for something to select and they reject it when they are looking for something to reject.

Of course, the logical way to select a vacation is to consider both the presence and the absence of positive and negative attributes, but that's not what most of us do.

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Turning happiness into a management tool

A large American health-care provider, Ochsner Health System, introduced a rule that workers must make eye contact and smile whenever they walk within ten feet of another person in the hospital. Pret A Manger sends in mystery shoppers to visit every outlet regularly to see if they are greeted with the requisite degree of joy. Pass the test and the entire staff gets a bonus—a powerful incentive for workers to turn themselves into happiness police. Companies have a right to ask their employees to be polite when they deal with members of the public. They do not have a right to try to regulate their workers’ psychological states and turn happiness into an instrument of corporate control.

Companies would be much better off forgetting wishy-washy goals like encouraging contentment. They should concentrate on eliminating specific annoyances, such as time-wasting meetings and pointless memos. Instead, they are likely to develop ever more sophisticated ways of measuring the emotional state of their employees. Academics are already busy creating smartphone apps that help people keep track of their moods, such as Track Your Happiness and Moodscope. It may not be long before human-resource departments start measuring workplace euphoria via apps, cameras and voice recorders.

Schumpeter in The Economist

Buying Happiness

Not long ago an enterprising professor at the Harvard Business School named Mike Norton persuaded a big investment bank to let him survey the bank’s rich clients. (The poor people in the survey were millionaires.) In a forthcoming paper, Norton and his colleagues track the effects of getting money on the happiness of people who already have a lot of it: a rich person getting even richer experiences zero gain in happiness. That’s not all that surprising; it’s what Norton asked next that led to an interesting insight. He asked these rich people how happy they were at any given moment. Then he asked them how much money they would need to be even happier. “All of them said they needed two to three times more than they had to feel happier,” says Norton.

The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that money, above a certain modest sum, does not have the power to buy happiness, and yet even very rich people continue to believe that it does: the happiness will come from the money they don’t yet have. To the general rule that money, above a certain low level, cannot buy happiness there is one exception. “While spending money upon oneself does nothing for one’s happiness,” says Norton, “spending it on others increases happiness.”

Michael Lewis writing in The New Republic

Think About Your Death and Live Better

We banish death from our thoughts. But this leads us to make choices in life that actually curtail our happiness. People who express more regrets tend to be those who postponed profound activities that yield meaning, such as practicing religion, appreciating beauty, or spending more time with loved ones.

This is probably because they realized too late that they had implicitly assumed life would always go on and on, so there’s always time to do these meaning-filled things. When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in the Atlantic

Manufacturing unhappiness

While riding a train, a minister observed a handsome elderly couple. The wife was dressed in furs and diamonds and was the envy of all the other women on the train, but her disposition did not match her appearance. She constantly complained about everything. She criticized the food, the service, and the railway car.

Her husband, who was striking in appearance, was a calm, considerate man. As his wife raved about the abominable service, he sat calmly, occasionally showing embarrassment at his wife’s attitude. In an attempt to change the tone of the conversation, the husband engaged the minister in a conversation in which they discussed their occupations. Finally the husband said with a grin on his face, “My wife is in the manufacturing business.”

This surprised the minister because the wife certainly did not seem to be the executive type. The minster asked, “What does your wife manufacture?”

“Unhappiness,” her husband replied. “She manufactures her own unhappiness.”

Larry Kennedy, Down With Anxiety

The Past vs. Possibilities

When I encounter a $2.89 cup of coffee, it’s all too easy for me to recall what I paid for coffee the day before and not so easy for me to imagine all the other things I might buy with my money.

Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.

And that is indeed what I ought to be doing because it really doesn’t matter what coffee cost the day before, the week before, or at any time during the Hoover administration. Right now I have absolute dollars to spend and the only questions I need to answer is how to spend them in order to maximize my satisfaction. If an international bean embargo suddenly caused the price of coffee to skyrocket to $10,000 per cup, then the only question I would need to ask myself is:

“What else can I do with ten thousand dollars, and will it bring me more or less satisfaction than a cup of coffee?”

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Choosing the Misery

Force yourself to make a different choice for a short time, for at least an hour. Do something physically hard that, under different circumstances, you can easily do and that you usually enjoy, perhaps a brisk walk or a short hard run. If you can do it with a good friend who is not overly sympathetic, so much the better. While you are walking or running, especially with a friend, you will notice you are not depressing. For a short time, you are not thinking about your unhappy relationship, and you feel much better. But as soon as you finish, you tend to go back to thinking about the relationship that has gone bad, and the feeling comes back. To depress, you have to keep thinking the unhappy thoughts. To stop these thoughts, change what you want or change your behavior. There is no other way.  

William Glasser, Choice Theory

The strongest predictor of men’s well-being

American men (along with their peers in the UK) derive happiness not from traditional notions of power and strength, but from the typically quieter task of doing meaningful work and contributing to the communities around them. That’s the finding of research out of the UK. Leah Fessler has more in Quartz

Futurity

Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment “as to the Lord.” It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

CS Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The Four False Idols

As Arthur Brooks sees it, our brains mislead us into chasing things that feel good but don’t result in sustained happiness. Those things are often what he calls the four false idols: money, power, pleasure, and fame. Like drugs, they tickle our dopamine receptors, but unlike drugs they’re socially acceptable because they’re all markers of success. Yet a success addiction, like a drug addiction, will still leave you unhappy in the long run. “Nobody is ever like, ‘Dude, you did five grams of cocaine today, congratulations on that, that’s a preternaturally high dose!’” Brooks tells me, with gusto. “But ‘You made a billion dollars!’ is sort of the same thing.”

Instead of chasing those idols, Brooks advises that we focus on what he calls the four pillars of our “happiness portfolio”: faith, family, friends, and work. The happiest people, according to Brooks, adhere to a belief system that helps them transcend their narrow perspective and “understand life’s bigger than the boring sitcom that is me, me, me.” They have deep family ties and strong friendships. And they do work that serves others and allows them to earn their success. 

Clay Skipper writing in GQ

Transcending the Present

Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment -- which is perhaps the most important finding of a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning.

Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. "Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life," the researchers write. "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future." That is, people who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their lives, though they were less happy.

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Givers and Takers

"Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others," explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of a study to be published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania.

In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need," the researchers write. What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.

The study participants reported deriving meaning from giving a part of themselves away to others and making a sacrifice on behalf of the overall group. In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the leading psychological scientists alive today, in the meaningful life "you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self."

For instance, having more meaning in one's life was associated with activities like buying presents for others, taking care of kids, and arguing. People whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves, they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children, for example, is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice, but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents, including the ones in this study.

Emily Esfahani Smith writing in The Atlantic

Love and do what you will

In the early fifth century, Saint Augustine summarized all of human ethics in the dictum “Love and do what you will.” The happiest people have lives focused on love: of family, of friends, of others through work that serves, and in some cases of the divine as well. Research on people who wind up happy (and healthy) as they grow old shows that the most important part of life to cultivate is a series of stable, long-term love relationships.

Aquinas defines love as “to will the good of the other.” You can’t choose how much love you will get, but happiness depends more on how much you give. And what you give your love to matters just as much. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic