On Happiness

[da_lj]

melted_snowball was writing about Daniel Gilbert's interview on Tapestry about happiness.

Gilbert says: paraplegics are just as happy as lottery winners. People raising children are less happy than people who do not have children. These may be true in some sense, and Gilbert does have interesting things to say. melted_snowball disagrees with his premise, that by comparing

Comments

[dawn_guy]

Your musing happened to fall on another friend's note to himself including a link to a poem which I read to be about the pressure to seem happy, to keep up with your neighbour (though the poet takes it rather farther than I feel people's hearts and natures are).

I think "achieving your goals" has a lot more potential as a measure of happiness than "getting what you want". And if you remember anything about the Spice Girls, you'll know my earworm.

[da_lj]

You know, at one point in my adolescence, I would've believed just what she said, about the depths of fakeness. But I think I was very hormonal and fairly depressed at that point; and I believed that other people were just better at hiding how unhappy they were. Thankfully- this passed, and I was able to work out how to be mostly the same on the outside as on the inside; and trust that the world wasn't nearly as depressing as it had in the midst of the hormonal death-match. And life got much easier. (Leading me to think that a definition of happiness that includes "lack of dissonance" might be useful).