Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, says that we are terrible at predicting what makes us happy. In Stumbling on Happiness
Archive for the ‘happiness’ Category
You don’t know what makes you happy
You don’t want money. Really.
You don’t want money. You want the things money can bring. Most likely you want happiness or joy. You want money so that you can do more of the things that bring you happiness or joy.
What would the world look like if we concentrated on what brought us joy instead of what brought us money?
And you don’t really need money to do what brings you joy. If I wanted to go spend a month or a year sailing around the Caribbean , I could make that happen. (Um, once I convinced Frank that is.) If I wanted to be a professional student, I could do that too. (Wait, I already am a lifelong student.)
Pursue what brings you joy, not what brings you money. So if you don’t want money, what do you really want?
Thanks to Steve Pavlina’s podcast for expressing this idea this way.
What makes you happy?
These things make people happy:
- Having friends
- Being healthy
- Not living in poverty
- Being married
Money doesn’t make you happy. (Neither do kids according to many studies!)
Are you happy at work?
According to the Chiumento Happiness at Work Index the top ten things that make us happy at work are (in order):
- Friendly, supportive colleagues
- Enjoyable work
- Good boss or line manager
- Good work/life balance
- Varied work
- Belief that we’re doing something worthwhile
- Feeling that what we do makes a difference
- Being part of a successful team
- Recognition for our achievements
- Competitive salary
I’ve heard that having a best friend at work is the best way to make sure you are happy at work!
Interestingly enough, the things that make us unhappy are not quite the opposite of that:
- Lack of communication from the top
- Uncompetitive salary
- No recognition for achievements
- Poor boss/line manager
- Little personal development
- Ideas being ignored
- Lack of opportunity for good performers
- Lack of benefits Work not enjoyable
- Not feeling that what I do makes a difference
So, for example, making a good salary won’t necessarily make you happy but making a bad salary is likely to make you unhappy. So a good salary is necessary in order to be happy but it doesn’t make you happy in and of itself.
Five Easy Ways to (Maybe) Discover What You Are Meant to Do With Your Life
Pamela from Escape from Cubicle Nation has these five questions she recommends answering to find out what you should do with your life. I answered them for fun and then I debated posting them here as they could be a bit personal but I thought it would be fun to see if you guys can figure out what I’m passionate about by reading them. Your ideas are welcome!
What is your favorite movie? Pelican Brief – she solves a mystery, writes a brief, it gets noticed by important people, she’s in New Orleans – my second favorite city, trying to hide – I like the challenge of how you would hide, trying to right a wrong. My next favorite would be an action movie – any of the Tom Clancy movies with Harrison Ford, or that one where Harrison Ford proves he’s innocent of murdering his wife because a one man arm did it or the Saint or that one where they track nuclear weapons to New York City. Action all the way. With a challenging mystery that the main character solves.
What are your favorite channels on television? Channels? Frank tapes all the shows with the DVR. All I know are the names of my favorite shows – not even what day they come on! ER and Gray’s Anatomy would be my favorites although they tend to get a bit soap opera-ish. I also enjoy watching CSI with Frank. If there’s anything else on … well, I’ll never know if I like it unless Frank tapes it and says I should watch it.
What kind of art museums are you attracted to? Art. Hmm. I liked seeing all the dinosaurs at the Smithsonian. Does that count as art? If I had to pick an art form, it would be photography. There’s a photographer here in Colorado who has studios at the airport and in Broomfield and he takes amazing pictures of wildlife. But I like pictures of people best. They don’t have to be people I know but those are the best ones.
What kind of music do you love? Country music. Time Marches On and Any Man of Mine and the one about the girl (as the boy grows up) are probably my favorites.
What kind of outdoor environment makes you the most happy? Summer. Sitting outside at a restaurant in downtown Fort Collins. Preferably with friends but alone is still fun as long as there’s lots of people around and lots going on. Sitting on the Ramblas in Barcelona rates pretty high too. As does the River Walk in New Orleans. And parts of New York City and San Francisco. Busy, hot cities in the summer.
So what do you think? Do you know what I should do now?
Which would you prefer, more money or more friends?
I just read a very thought provoking article, Why Having More No Longer Makes Us Happy by Bill McKibben. The author argues that pursuing more wealth worked well in the past when we didn’t have much material wealth but now that we are a relatively wealthy nation, pursuing more and more wealth is making us less happy not happier. His main points are:
- We are pursuing more and more wealth because it worked in the past,
- We are spending less and less time with family and friends,
- We are busier and more isolated,
- And it isn’t working anymore.
He points out that if you are rich in relationships and poor, more money might make you happy, but if you are poor in relationships and have plenty of money, a new friend will make you much happier than more money. If you are a peasant in China with lots of relationships and no money, a little money can go a long way towards making you happier but a sixth person living in your house won’t. On the flip side, if you are an American living in a 2000 square foot house, another friend might make you a lot happier than the money for another coffee maker.
He argues that in the pursuit of wealth, we’ve lost our community. We spend less and less time with family and friends and more and more time isolated: commuting, working, watching tv, surfing the internet. And yet studies show that it’s social networks (the real ones, not the virtual ones) that keep us happy and even healthy. Robert E. Lane, a Yale political
science professor writes that "evidence shows that companionship … contributes more to
well-being than does income."
One point he made that really struck me because I can’t tell you how many people told me that college was going to be the best years of my life and I kept asking, "Why? Does it go downhill from there?" Apparently it does if you look at the quality of your relationships.
Why do people so often look back on their college days as the best
years of their lives? Because their classes were so fascinating? Or
because in college, we live more closely and intensely with a community
than most of us ever do before or after?
Something I read recently said that the number of friends we have drops off dramatically after our 20s. Recently, I’ve realized that I really miss the number of friends I had in my teens and 20s. I did things with large groups of friends several times a week if not every day. Now we are lucky if we squeeze something in once a week. And even when you have time (like when I was on maternity leave), your friends likely won’t have time!
So think about it. Increasing the time you spend with your friends and extended family will do more to make you happy than a raise at work. And I’d even argue it’d make you happier than winning the lottery!
You’ll have more patience if you are having fun
Gretchen from the Happiness Project had a great story today that emphasized the truth of her main point:
If you have plenty of fun in your life – if you make time to see
friends, to learn about things that interest you, to do the things you
enjoy, like reading or going to movies or hiking – you have a higher
store of patience and tolerance.On the other hand, when you don’t have much fun in your life, it’s
easy to become preoccupied with the aggravations and frustrations.
There’s nothing to distract you from your bad feelings.
Gretchen was pushing a stroller through ice and snow and didn’t even realize how difficult it was until she got home because she was having so much fun talking to her friend. It’s like a long wait at a restaurant isn’t noticeable if you are catching up with an old friend.
Winning the lottery isn’t all it’s cut out to be
Why do we all play the lottery when it’s been proven that winning the lottery won’t make us any happier? Lottery winners are no happier six months after they win the lottery than they were before they one. Many of them are considerably unhappier.
I wrote a few days ago about how money isn’t evil. The flip side is also true – money won’t solve all your problems. I think we play the lottery because we don’t want to go to work everyday and we think we want a new car, maybe a new house and fancier vacations. The real problem is that we don’t know what we want – we don’t know what would make us happy. While money is certainly an enabler and I believe having money is a good thing, it won’t help you figure out the purpose of your life. Money won’t help you figure out what makes you happy. It won’t tell you how to spend your day.
The key to happiness isn’t winning the lottery, it’s figuring out what makes you happy. I guarantee that if you know what makes you happy, what you enjoy doing every day, you can find a way to do that and pay the bills. But no matter how big the jackpot is, it won’t tell you what to do with the rest of your life.
20 Ways to be Happy
The New York Magazine has a list of 20 ways to be happy. Here are some excerpts:
Decide where to go to college by picking two decent schools and flipping a coin. [...] Those who seize the first option that meets
their standards (which don’t have to be low, just defined) are happier
than those who insist on finding the perfect solution.
So Dad’s way of shopping was best – he always made us buy the first item that fit. (So the strategy was to say that nothing fit until you found the one you liked.)
Don’t go to law school.
Lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to be depressed than members of other
professions, and it’s not just because their jobs are more stressful.
For most people, job stress has little effect on happiness unless it is
accompanied by a lack of control (lawyers, of course, have clients to
listen to) or involves taking something away from somebody else (a
common feature of the legal system).
I know lots of people with law degrees that aren’t lawyers, probably because being a lawyer doesn’t make people happy. People don’t like lawyers either, which probably adds to the unhappiness.
If someone tells you he’s still pining for his ex, ask the ex out.
If somebody else liked him, you are likely to too.
If you can’t decide what TV to buy, walk across the hall and ask your neighbor if he likes his.
[...] Turns out, people are happier following
advice.
This is how I bought my new phone and I really like it. Usually I research all the options forever, don’t really like any one of them and then pick one. This time I asked the t-mobile rep what he would buy if "small" was the most important criteria. And I like it.
But don’t work overtime . . .
[...] lottery winners and Forbes 100 members are no more likely to be satisfied than anyone else.
Just make sure you live next to people that make less than you do. Even if you only make $30K a year, you’ll be happier than if you made $100K and lived next to people that made $150K.
They also said married people are happier and kids don’t make you any happier than you were. I disagree with the kids one because I think families and communities make people happy.
Photo by 油姬.
Challenges in life are fun!
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want to do with my life and I had another ah-hah moment this weekend. I spent the whole weekend with Caleb in the hospital and it didn’t bother me at all – once they figured out that Caleb was going to be ok that is. I did feel extremely grateful that we had health insurance – I might not have been as calm through three days in the hospital without insurance but that’s another topic. So being in the hospital with a sick kid didn’t bother me.
We have also been spending a lot of money and vacation time lately. Some of it planned (like for vacations and treadmills) and some of it unplanned (like for hospital stays and snow storms.) And that didn’t bother me.
And I realized a while ago that if I won the lottery I wouldn’t want to go sit on the beach for the rest of my life. I’d want a few interesting things to do.
While I was thinking about all this, I ran across Steve Pavlina’s Life – The Ultimate Game post. And it made sense. He writes that life is like a video game and you don’t play the game because winning is fun. You want to win, but you don’t play just because you want to win. You also enjoy all the challenges along the way (can you get past that hairy monster or collect all the right objects?) and all the places you explore. Even when you are losing, you might be having a lot of fun. You might play one game for days, weeks or even months without "winning."
That explains why people hike the Appalachian Trail, sky dive or even raise kids. The challenges and the journey are as rewarding as the end goal.
I’m not big into video games, so I’d rather think of life as a game of cards. You start out with the hand you’re dealt and play it the best you can. If you get all top cards, you’ll win fast and it’ll be exciting for a minute, but if you’re dealt a not so good hand and you make it work, it’s so much more satisfying. You prove that you are good, not just lucky. The way I see it I started out with a pretty good hand, my parents added a few good cards (like self-confidence and a college education) and now I’m playing the best I can. When I get a bad card (like a hospital stay or an unexpected bill), I just add it to the mix and see how I can make it work out. [And sometimes you need that low card to get the straight!]
I’m having fun playing and I’m winning! 
