7 Quotes on Well-Being and Happiness to Inspire Positivity, Altruism and Kindness in Social Interactions
The quotes in this post are all by Martin Seligman, from the lecture “Ideas at the House: Martin Seligman – Well-Being and Happiness,” which can be viewed at the bottom of this post. 1) Traditional Psychotherapy Doesn’t Deal with Achieving Happiness, but with Reducing Suffering Freud and Schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable; that the object of human progress, the object of psychotherapy was to reduce suffering to zero. I’m going to argue today that that’s empirically false, it’s morally insidious, and it’s politically a dead end; that there’s much more to life than zero. 2) 30 Years Ago There Was No Way to Measure Happiness. Today There Is 30 years ago, the word “happiness” was a tremendously vague word. It meant very many different things to different people, and it could not be measured. But now, we have good measures of the elements of well-being. 3) There Is Higher Chance of Making Less Happy People Happier, then Already Happy People Even Happier Technically, we call these states “positive affectivity” and they are bell shaped. That means, right now, 50% of the people in the world are not cheerful and merry. They are not smiling. It is highly genetic. It is about 50% heritable and most importantly, the best we can to with smiling, being merry, being cheerful, is to raise it by about 5-15%. In fact, I spent most of my life working on misery and people would ask me: why didn’t I work on happiness? The reason I didn’t, there was a very influential...
How Money, Trust, Generosity, a Sense of Belonging, Perceived Freedom and Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone Affects Your Happiness
Time and time again, we find that people systematically overestimate the impact of material things and underestimate the positive impacts of social connections. –John Helliwell, a University of British Columbia economist who was asked to help the United Nations measure and improve global happiness levels. The following are summaries of 6 main points Helliwell listed as important discoveries in happiness research: 1. More Money Doesn’t Make You Happier Studies found that income does support life satisfaction, but mostly at low income levels, and not as much as people expect. Positive social interactions have a much greater impact on well-being. 2. The Importance of Trust When trust is high, people have the confidence to reach out, whether in the workplace or in the community. 3. A Sense of Belonging Studies show that feelings of belonging at the local community level have twice the impact of those at the national or provincial. As for social media, a Canadian survey found that it is the size of your network of real-time friends, and not the online version, that supports life satisfaction. 4. The Importance of Generosity Donors and volunteers to charities have been found to receive greater personal satisfaction from their philanthropy than recipients. In a recent study, cancer patients who counseled their peers received even larger benefits than those they were counseling. 5. Perceived Freedom to Make One’s Own Life Choices While good health is important, the perceived freedom to make important life choices is also crucial. For example, Denmark, which has the world’s highest self-assessed levels of freedom, also has the highest life satisfaction levels. 6. The Importance of Reaching Outside Your Comfort Zone & Establishing Good...Watch This for a Quick Boost of Joy
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