On happiness

[exp_err]

Here's a rumination on happiness that I've been meaning to post for a while

Comments

[hawkeye7]

I love the "unnecessary" and "meaningless" axis labels! Also the "not to scale" bit. Gartner never bothers with such niceties.

What puzzles me is: how can you tell if the set point has moved? It appears that you can only know after a reasonably long period of time, but it could move again...

[exp_err]

True. I don't know if you can tell as an individual, short of tracking some metric of your daily subjective well-being and doing some stats.

(Embarrassing to have to ask: who is Gartner?)

Gartner

[hawkeye7]

The Gartner group is a company that produces reports on IT related matters. They see their job as "creating insight". They have popularised the "magic quadrant", a diagram in which companies are rated on "completeness of vision" and "ability to execute". Something so obviously objective needs no scale on the axes! And requires no explanations as to how it is measured! According to the quadrant they are plotted in, companies are rated as a "leader", "challenger", "visionary" or "niche player". Then you get your pointy-headed boss telling you that the company's objective for next quarter is to move one centimetre further to the right on the diagram.

[exp_err]

Thanks :)

[ataxi]

"These tend to be little behavioural habits, rather than big things. Get enough exercise. Each week, write down 3 things that have gone well in the past week or that your are grateful for. Keep a pot plant in your office. Perform 5 acts of kindness in one day."

Interesting post. You've done a good job of articulating a view I've thought about and with which I ultimately concluded I disagreed.

I really don't agree with your "set points", habits and perturbations model, or the idea of measuring happiness in general, much less as a scalar-valued objective function.

I wrote about this a couple of years ago (about a year before my divorce, as it happens) - you can read my thoughts here if you're interested (apologies for the formatting - still sorting the site out of course).

[ataxi]

"Maybe you can move the you of today, that thinks it has that feeling, to a you of tomorrow that thinks it feels even better, and looks back with pity on the you of today, the you it usurped, killed, and consigned to the worm-rotten dustbin of memory. But might that you tomorrow not just be indulging in a clever gloss of reason, a bit like remembering the good old, happy days when it had no money for food, had fleas in its bed and no lover, and always wanted to slash its wrists? When it thought even so that it felt “happier” than it does now?"

[exp_err]

I read that post and do not agree. That happiness is difficult to define and even more difficult to measure does not, to me, mean that it does not exist or is not desirable. I know it when I see it and when people do try to measure and track it, they do find some fairly reliable patterns.

Happiness shouldn't be the central or only goal in life, but it's something that can be worked on alongside other goals.

And if depression is part of your psychological makeup and defeating it means changing your personality, in some sense "killing" your present self and replacing that with a different and happier self, (as your 2nd comment suggests), I don't think that is a lamentable thing. Merely in continuing to live, we inevitably grow into different, changed people. We cannot hang on to our current identity for long, no matter how hard we work at it.

[ataxi]

Sorry, I don't have time (or necessarily the words) at this moment but I find fault with your remarks. I don't agree.

Though I do agree that the malleable, transient nature of the self is not "unfortunate". That wouldn't really make sense.

[planeterry]

Aw - such cute hand drawn graphs (more plz ;-)

I would generally agree with your post. Although I think I would need to win the lotto to test it properly...