Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

by Martin E.P. Seligman

belief in the nation coincided with a breakdown of the family and a decline of belief in God.

A high divorce rate, increased mobility, and twenty years of low birthrate are the culprits in the erosion of family.

Easy mobility—the ability to pick up and move great distances—tends to shatter family cohesion.

Finally, having no siblings or just one—which is the case in so many American families—isolates a person.

So put together the lack of belief that your relationship to God matters, the breakdown of your belief in the benevolent power of your country, and the breakdown of the family. Where can one now turn for identity, for purpose, and for hope?

And the maximal self, stripped of the buffering of any commitment to what is larger in life, is a setup for depression.

growing individualism

In chapters four and five we saw that when individuals face failures they cannot control, they become helpless.

helplessness becomes hopelessness and escalates into full-blown depression when a person explains his failures with permanent, pervasive, and personal causes.

Life is inevitably full of personal failures. We rarely ge...

a person gets scant comfort from society when personal loss occurs. More “primitive” societies go out of their way to nurture the individual when loss occurs,

reciprocity between the individual and the Kaluli tribe prevents depression.

extreme individualism tends to maximize pessimistic explanatory style,

failure is probably my fault—because who else is there but me?

The epidemic of depression stems from the much-noted rise in individualism and the decline in the commitment to the common good.

two ways out: First, changing the balance of individualism

second, exploiting the strengths of the...

as it becomes apparent that individualism produces a tenfold increase in depression, individualism will become a less appealing creed to live by.

A second and perhaps more important factor is meaninglessness.

one necessary condition for meaning is the attachment to something...

The larger the entity you can attach yourself to, the more mea...

The self, to put it another way, is a very poor site for meaning.

something has to give. What? One possibility is that exaggerated individualism will fade away, that the maximal self will change back into the Yankee self.

giving up personal control and concern for the individual.

The current yearning for fundamentalist religion throughout the world appears to be such a response.

its inordinate preoccupation with itself, while gratifying in the short run, is bad for its well-being in the long run.

paradoxical one. Selfishly, as a tactic of self-improvement, it might actually choose to scale down its own importance, in the knowledge that depression and meaninglessness follow from self-preoccupation.

Perhaps we could retain our belief in the importance of the individual but diminish our preoccupation with ...

little daily self-denial is exchanged for long-term self-enhancement.

Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good.

The consequence of preoccupation with our own successes and failures and lack of serious commitment to the commons is increased depression, poor health, and lives without meaning.

Exercise—not physical but moral—may be the antidepressant tactic we need.

Give up some activity which you do regularly for your own pleasure—eating out once a week, watching a rented movie on Tuesday night,

in an activity devoted to the well-being of others or of the community at large: helping in a soup kitchen or a school-board campaign, visiting AIDS patients,

When asked by a homeless person for money, talk to him. Judge as well as you can if he will use the money for nondestructive purposes.

If you think he will, give it to him (give no less than five dollars).

Spend three hours per week doing this.

When you read of particularly heroic or despicable acts, write letters:

letters to people and organizations you detest. Follow up with letters to politicians and o...

Teach your children how to give things away. Have them set aside one-fourth of their allowance to give away. They should discover a needy person or project to give this money to, personally.

It is not necessary to undertake this in a selfless spirit. It is perfectly all right for you to do this because it is good for you,

One might assume that visiting mortally ill AIDS patients once a week would be a surefire recipe for weekly depression.

volunteers, however, report that a major surprise for them has been the lift they derive from their work. They discover, through contact, that the poor and the sick are not monsters but very human beings;

If you engage in activity in service of the commons long enough, it will gain meaning for you. You may find that you get depressed less easily, that you get sick less often, and that you feel better acting for the common good than indulging in solitary pleasures.

Learned Optimism THE SECOND WAY of exploiting the strengths of the maximal self has been the topic of this book.

depression follows from a pessimistic way of thinking about failure and loss.

Learning how to think more optimistically when we fail gives us a permanent skill fo...

A society that views the self as minimal would not be much interested in psychology in the first place.

I do not believe learned optimism alone will stem the tide of depression on a society-wide basis. Optimism is just a useful adjunct to wisdom. By itself it cannot provide meaning. Optimism is a tool to help the individual achieve the goals he has set for himself.

It is in the choice of the goals themselves that meaning—or emptiness—resides.