The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

by Jonathan Haidt

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.

So doing anything that is "more than this" bull over getting laid because the "more than this" bull has a bigger picture and a lot of gratitude attached to it (righting wronfs, making myself proud) whereas sex just makes a part of you feel good for a short time. this is all a thought experiment of course, as I have no chances at sex nearly all of the time.

One of the activities was to indulge the senses, as by taking a break for ice cream in the middle of the afternoon, and then savoring the ice cream. This activity was the most enjoyable at the time; but, like all pleasures, it faded quickly.

But its still something to look forward to. And that is worth something I'd say.

The big finding was that people experienced longer-lasting improvements in mood from the kindness and gratitude activities than from those in which they indulged themselves. Even though people were most nervous about doing the kindness and gratitude activities, which required them to violate social norms and risk embarrassment, once they actually did the activities they felt better for the rest of the day. Many students even said their good feelings continued on into the next day—which nobody said about eating ice cream.

to count their blessings regularly for several weeks, find small but sustained increases in happiness.54 So take the initiative!

Journl

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.

I still believe money can bring happiness if you do it right. Improve someone else's life with it, give back, take a trip. Boom. Can't be that hard. Most important thing woulf be to not get attached to it and not lose sight of what you have.

objects often separate us.

Except for playing cards ;)

Buddha, Lao Tzu, and other sages of the East discovered a path to peace and tranquility, the path of letting go. They told us how to follow the path using meditation and stillness.

Try it

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. —JOHN DONNE

This chapter is about that need—the need for other people, for touch,

Amen brother!

Humans are the only creatures on Earth whose young are utterly helpless for years, and heavily dependent on adult care for more than a decade.

Still wild to me

Attachments, particularly sensual and sexual attachments, must be broken to permit spiritual progress. Buddha said, “So long as lustful desire, however small, of man for women is not controlled, so long the mind of man is not free, but is bound like a calf tied to a cow.”

More good meditation stuff

No matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds, and obligations were more likely to kill themselves.

Too much time to think?

when introverts are forced to be more outgoing, they usually enjoy it and find that it boosts their mood.

And I believe it. I'd say I'm an introvert, my mood is generally better when I am alone I think on most cases and I feel like I can think more by myself. On the flip side though, there have been times where being with people brought the good and I think it was jusy because they were the right people and we were doing something fun for all of us and interested me (hiking, board games, poker, etc ." I believe an introvert can become drawn to the other side at least a little when around the right people and also doing the right thing.

Even people who think they don’t want a lot of social contact still benefit from it.

Boom.

We are an ultrasocial species, full of emotions finely tuned for loving, befriending, helping, sharing, and otherwise intertwining our lives with others.

“Hell is other people.”57 But so is heaven.

All depends on who your company is.

The strong version of the hypothesis is more unsettling: It states that people must endure adversity to grow, and that the highest levels of growth and development are only open to those who have faced and overcome great adversity.

Misogi Huckberry. Camp a whole lot morr fool!

Human beings in every culture are fascinated by stories; we create them wherever we can.

That's what I love about us

Adversity may be necessary for growth because it forces you to stop speeding along the road of life, allowing you to notice the paths that were branching off all along, and to think about where you really want to end up.

At the third level of personality, the need for adversity is even more obvious: You need interesting material to write a good story.

I mean the man ain't wrong

And finally, no matter how well or poorly prepared you are when trouble strikes, at some point in the months afterwards, pull out a piece of paper and start writing.

Yes SIR! Nail on the head. I'm all about writing things down. Everything

Second, wise people are able to balance three responses to situations: adaptation (changing the self to fit the environment), shaping (changing the environment), and selection (choosing to move to a new environment).

Even the Epicureans, who thought pleasure was the goal of life, believed that people needed virtues to cultivate pleasures.

That's a good sign of the virtue argument because you wouldn't expect someone who is all about getting pleasure advocating for virtues that much.

When morality is reduced to the opposite of self-interest, however, the virtue hypothesis becomes paradoxical: In modern terms, the virtue hypothesis says that acting against your self-interest is in your self-interest.

Wanting to do good to feel better about oneself instead of genuinely doing good for others. Damn.

The second problem with the turn to moral reasoning is that it relies on bad psychology. Many moral education efforts since the 1970s take the rider off of the elephant and train him to solve problems on his own.

So damn nice. Both the conscious and the sub-conscious automatic parts have to work together on something

I saw the right way and approved it, but followed the wrong, until an emotion came along to provide some force.

To add on to previous note.

You can diagnose yourself by looking at the list below or by taking the strengths test (at www.authentichappiness.org).

For the journl ting mon

In the positive psychology class I teach at the University of Virginia, the final project is to make yourself a better person, using all the tools of psychology, and then prove that you have done so. About half the students each year succeed, and the most successful ones usually either use cognitive behavioral therapy on themselves (it really does work!) or employ a strength, or both. For example, one student lamented her inability to forgive. Her mental life was dominated by ruminations about how those to whom she was closest had hurt her. For her project, she drew on her strength of loving: Each time she found herself spiraling down into thoughts about victimhood, she brought to mind a positive memory about the person in question, which triggered a flash of affection. Each flash cut off her anger and freed her, temporarily, from rumination. In time, this effortful mental process became habitual and she became more forgiving (as she demonstrated using the reports she had filled out each day to chart her progress). The rider had trained the elephant with rewards at each step.

Try this out. Write down parts of you ya don't dig and write them down and plan something like this. All of this with meditation could be freaking wilddd. Try to use strengths to overpower the weaknesses.

Another outstanding project was done by a woman who had just undergone surgery for brain cancer. At the age of twenty-one, Julia faced no better than even odds of surviving. To deal with her fears, she cultivated one of her strengths—zest. She made lists of the activities going on at the university and of the beautiful hikes and parks in the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. She shared these lists with the rest of the class, she took time away from her studies to go on these hikes, and she invited friends and classmates to join her. People often say that adversity makes them want to live each day to the fullest, and when Julia made a conscious effort to cultivate her natural strength of zest, she really did it. (She is still full of zest today.)

Yes! And the fact that she had gotten the right people around her to do the right thing, a lot of good things happened.

When I arrived in Bhubaneswar, I quickly found that the ethic of divinity is not just ancient history.

Going to a completely different region like this to learn would be so awesome.

We ourselves can be gods or demons.

In a chemistry textbook from 1867, after describing methods of synthesizing ethyl alcohol, the author felt compelled to warn his young readers that alcohol has the effect of “dulling the intellectual operations and moral instincts; seeming to pervert and destroy all that is pure and holy in man, while it robs him of his highest attribute—reason.”

Eliade noted that even a person committed to a profane existence has privileged places, qualitatively different from all others—a man’s birth-place, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he visited in his youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique quality; they are the “holy places” of his private universe, as if it were in such spots that he had received the revelation of a reality other than that in which he participates through his ordinary daily life.

but Jefferson justified his unorthodox advice by pointing out that great writing can trigger beneficial emotions: When any . . . act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary, when we see or read of any atrocious deed, we are disgusted with its deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice. Now every emotion of this kind is an exercise of our virtuous dispositions, and dispositions of the mind, like limbs of the body, acquire strength by exercise.

Nail on the head there. Fiction truly can make you feel something I believe.

In my journal I wrote that whilst standing in midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, “it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.” I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the breath of his body.34 The