7 Quotes on Well-Being and Happiness to Inspire Positivity, Altruism and Kindness in Social Interactions

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...