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August 8 - September 9, 2015
People usually have reasons for committing violence, and those reasons usually involve retaliation for a perceived injustice, or self-defense.
Perpetrators often grossly overreact and misinterpret (using self-serving biases).
The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias, the ultimate form of naive realism.
Having high self-esteem doesn’t directly cause violence, but when someone’s high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality; in reaction to those threats, people—particularly young men—often lash out violently.29
Baumeister questions the usefulness of programs that try raise children’s self-esteem directly instead of by teaching them skills they can be proud of.
idealism—the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the twentieth century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack.30
Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means.
Judgmentalism is indeed a disease of the mind: it leads to anger, torment, and conflict. But it is also the mind’s normal condition—the elephant is always evaluating, always saying “Like it” or “Don’t like it.”
Meditation has been shown to make people calmer, less reactive to the ups and downs and petty provocations of life.35
Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damage so many valuable relationships.
By seeing the log in your own eye you can become less biased, less moralistic, and therefore less inclined toward argument and conflict. You can begin to follow the perfect
Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. —EPICTETUS
Some things are worth striving for, and happiness comes in part from outside of yourself, if you know where to look.
when it comes to goal pursuit, it really is the journey that counts, not the destination. Set for yourself any goal you want. Most of the pleasure will be had along the way, with every step that takes you closer.
We can call this “the progress principle”: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them. Shakespeare captured it perfectly: “Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”
whatever happens, you’re likely to adapt to it, but you don’t realize up front that you will.
We grossly overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions. Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.
This is the adaptation principle at work: People’s judgments about their present state are based on whether it is better or worse than the state to which they have become accustomed.
The second biggest finding in happiness research, after the strong influence of genes upon a person’s average level of happiness, is that most environmental and demographic factors influence happiness very little.
religious people are happier, on average, than nonreligious people.17 This effect arises from the social ties that come with participation in a religious community, as well as from feeling connected to something beyond the self.
done by psychologist Ed Diener,26 is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller.
The rich are happier on average than the middle class, but only by a little, and part of this relationship is reverse correlation: Happy people grow rich faster because, as in the marriage market, they are more appealing to others (such as bosses), and also because their frequent positive emotions help them to commit to projects, to work hard, and to invest in their futures.27
there are two fundamentally different kinds of externals: the conditions of your life and the voluntary activities that you undertake.33 Conditions include facts about your life that you can’t change (race, sex, age, disability) as well as things that you can (wealth, marital status, where you live). Conditions are constant over time, at least during a period in your life, and so they are the sorts of things that you are likely to adapt to. Voluntary activities, on the other hand, are the things that you choose to do, such as meditation, exercise, learning a new skill, or taking a vacation.
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It turns out that there really are some external conditions (C) that matter.
Noise.
Noise, especially noise that is variable or intermittent, interferes with concentration and increases stress.35 It’s worth striving to remove sources of noise in your life.
Commuting.
Even after years of commuting, those whose commutes are traffic-filled still arrive at work with higher levels of stress hormones. (Driving under ideal conditions is, however, often enjoyable and relaxing.)38 It’s worth striving to improve your commute.
Lack of control.
changing an institution’s environment to increase the sense of control among its workers, students, patients, or other users was one of the most effective possible ways to increase their sense of engagement, energy, and happiness.41
Shame.
Relationships.
conflicts in relationships—having an annoying office mate or room-mate, or having chronic conflict with your spouse—is one of the surest ways to reduce your happiness.
People who report the greatest interest in attaining money, fame, or beauty are consistently found to be less happy, and even less healthy, than those who pursue less materialistic goals.47
state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities. It is what people sometimes call “being in the zone.” Csikszentmihalyi called it “flow” because it often feels like effortless movement: Flow happens, and you go with it.
The keys to flow: There’s a clear challenge that fully engages your attention; you have the skills to meet the challenge; and you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step (the progress principle).
In the flow experience, elephant and rider are in perfect harmony.
Seligman proposes a fundamental distinction between pleasures and gratifications. Pleasures are “delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components,”50 such as may be derived from food, sex, backrubs, and cool breezes. Gratifications are activities that engage you fully, draw on your strengths, and allow you to lose self-consciousness. Gratifications can lead to flow.
Pleasure feels good in the moment, but sensual memories fade quickly, and the person is no wiser or stronger afterwards. Even worse, pleasure beckons people back for more, away from activities that might be better for them in the long run. But gratifications are different. Gratifications ask more of us; they challenge us and make us extend ourselves. Gratifications often come from accomplishing something, learning something, or improving something.
Seligman suggests that the key to finding your own gratifications is to know your own strengths.53
So V (voluntary activity) is real, and it’s not just about detachment. You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening connections—helping friends, expressing gratitude to benefactors.
Frank begins with the question of why, as nations rise in wealth, their citizens become no happier, and he considers the possibility that once basic needs are met, money simply cannot buy additional happiness. After a careful review of the evidence, however, Frank concludes that those who think money can’t buy happiness just don’t know where to shop.
Frank wants to know why people are so devoted to spending money on luxuries and other goods, to which they adapt completely, rather than on things that would make them lastingly happier.
Activities connect us to others; objects often separate us.
Stop wasting your money on conspicuous consumption. As a first step, work less, earn less, accumulate less, and “consume” more family time, vacations, and other enjoyable activities.
Unfortunately, letting go of one thing and choosing another is difficult if the elephant wraps his trunk around the “precious thing” and refuses to let go. The elephant was shaped by natural selection to win at the game of life, and part of its strategy is to impress others, gain their admiration, and rise in relative rank. The elephant cares about prestige, not happiness,59 and it looks eternally to others to figure out what is prestigious.
for the next thirty years, Harlow and his students infuriated behaviorists by demonstrating with ever more precision that monkeys are curious, intelligent creatures who like to figure things out. They follow the laws of reinforcement to some degree, as do humans, but there is much more going on in a monkey brain than the brain of a behaviorist could grasp. For example, giving monkeys raisins as a reward for each correct step in solving a puzzle (such as opening a mechanical latch with several moving parts) actually interferes with the solving, because it distracts the monkeys.6 They enjoy the
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Harlow argued that “contact comfort” is a basic need that young mammals have for physical contact with their mother. In the absence of a real mother, young mammals will seek out whatever feels most like a mother.
Bowlby’s grand synthesis is called attachment theory.11
Attachment theory begins with the idea that two basic goals guide children’s behavior: safety and exploration.
