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taking a look at whether secular alternatives to religion actually have any measurable impact on happiness.
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Gaelle Encrenaz, at the Universitié Victor Segalen in Bordeaux, France, and colleagues have looked at the suicide rate in France during the Football World Cup of 1998. In that competition, which was held in France, the French team came through against the odds to win an unexpected victory.
They found that the suicide rate decreased significantly as the world cup progressed. In fact, the day after the French team played a match, the suicide rate dropped by 20%. - 2 more annotation(s)...
It’s not that the primates demanded equality — some capuchins collected many more pebbles than others, and that never created a problem — it’s that they couldn’t stand when the inequality was a result of injustice. Humans act the same way. When the rich do something to deserve their riches, nobody complains; that’s just the meritocracy at work. But when those at the bottom don’t understand the unequal distribution of wealth — when it seems as if the winners are getting rewarded for no reason — they get furious. They doubt the integrity of the system and become more sensitive to perceived inequities. They start camping out in parks. They reject the very premise of the game.
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Using the General Social Survey data from 1972 to 2008, we found that Americans were on average happier in the years with less income inequality than in the years with more income inequality. We further demonstrated that the inverse relation between income inequality and happiness was explained by perceived fairness and general trust. That is, Americans trusted others less and perceived others to be less fair in the years with more income inequality than in the years with less income inequality. Americans are happier when national wealth is distributed more evenly than when it is distributed unevenly.
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Empirical surveys can give us a list of the different ideas people have of happiness. But research has shown that when people achieve their ideas of happiness (marriage, children, wealth, fame), they often are still not happy. There’s no reason to think that the ideas of happiness we discover by empirical surveys are sufficiently well thought out to lead us to genuine happiness. For richer and more sensitive conceptions of happiness, we need to turn to philosophers, who, from Plato and Aristotle, through Hume and Mill, to Hegel and Nietzsche, have provided some of the deepest insight into the possible meanings of happiness.
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Even if empirical investigation could discover the full range of possible conceptions of happiness, there would still remain the question of which conception we ought to try to achieve. Here we have a question of values that empirical inquiry alone is unable to decide without appeal to philosophical thinking.
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Religion doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. In countries where there are relatively few religious people, and in which living conditions are generally good, religion doesn't improve well being and religious people may actually be less happy.
And what makes people religious is not their direct experience, but rather the society that they live in.
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Although your own personal circumstances do affect your beliefs a little, what's far more important is the society you live in. In difficult societies everyone - rich and poor alike - are more religious. That's reminiscent of a study I blogged a couple of weeks ago, showing that the inequality actually increases the religiosity of the rich.
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But does religion actually make people happier? Well, on average it does. After controlling for circumstances, religious people have better 'well-being' (covering positive and negative feelings, and overall life evaluation).
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I think one reason gay men are disproportionately unhappy is because, from the moment as teenagers we first gaze upon the frenetic dancing blur of gay culture, we are encouraged to be relentless pleasure-seekers.
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Austrian psychotherapist Viktor Frankl believed that human beings who dedicated themselves primarily to “the pleasure principle” could only ever have a thin and depleted consciousness. Instead, he wrote, all humans have a fundamental “will to meaning” – a need to be able to tell a story about our lives where we are part of something bigger than our own passing whims. He wrote: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task… If an architect wants to strengthen an arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.”
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When some of your formative experiences are of pain and difference, the pursuit of fuck-you-I’m-dancing pleasure is all the more appealing.
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The result is this list of “top five” things people wished they had done differently:1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
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I’m not sure what it means for someone to be true to oneself, but I take it that the notion attempts to get at the fact that too many of us cave to societal forces early on and do not actually follow our aspirations. The practicalities of life have a way of imposing themselves on us, beginning with parental pressure to enter a remunerative career path and continuing with the fact that no matter what your vocation is you still have to somehow pay the bills and put dinner on the table every evening. And yet, you wouldn’t believe the number of people I’ve met in recent years who — about midway through their expected lifespan — suddenly decided that what they had been doing with their lives during the previous couple of decades was somewhat empty and needed to change. Almost without exception, these friends in their late ‘30s or early ‘40s contemplated — and many actually followed through — going back to (graduate) school and preparing for a new career in areas that they felt augmented the meaningfulness of their lives (often, but not always, that meant teaching). One could argue that such self-examination should have occurred much earlier, but we are often badly equipped, in terms of both education and life experience, to ask ourselves that sort of question when we are entering college. Better midway than at the end, though...
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For at least the past decade, there has been a boom in work on the economics of happiness. But recalling Tolstoy's famous opening lines in Anna Karenina, I've always wondered why we don't study the economics of unhappiness instead. After all, we have so much more data.
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economic activity is largely concerned with the relief of unhappiness. At the subsistence level of economic activity that has prevailed through most of human history, people must work to eat and to be clothed and housed, not so that they can enjoy the happiness that these goods can bring but so that they can avoid the pain of hunger, cold, and exposure to the elements.
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To the extent that stoicism involves freeing oneself from irrelevant attachments to material goods, technological progress provides us with more options
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Researchers found that children who are rated "highly cheerful" at school went onto die younger than their more reserved class mates.
This is because they are likely to lead more carefree lives full of danger and unhealthy lifestyle choices, it is believed.
They may also be more likely to suffer from mental problems such as bipolar depression which sees moods swing from extreme happiness to debilitating sadness.
Being too cheerful – especially at inappropriate times – can also rouse anger in others, increasing the risk of a person coming to harm.
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trying too hard to be happy often ended up leaving people feeling more depressed than before, as putting an effort into improving their mood often left people feeling cheated.
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"The strongest predictor of happiness is not money, or external recognition through success or fame. It's having meaningful social relationships.
"That means the best way to increase your happiness is to stop worrying about being happy and instead divert your energy to nurturing the social bonds you have with other people.
the relationship between religion and happiness might vary from society to society. Now a new analysis, by Jan Eichhorn at the University of Edinburgh, finds that this indeed might be the case. He looked at 43 countries, mostly from Europe but also including the USA, Australia and New Zealand.
Same as everyone else Eichhorn found that, on average and after taking other factors into account, religious people (whether measured by belief or attendance) tend to be happier. However, countries with more religious people weren't happier on average.
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Having strong religious beliefs isn't linked to happiness in countries where few others have strong beliefs, or where few people go to Church. Eichhorn explains:
People who place a higher importance in god, however, are happier when they live in a country
where others do as well. Furthermore, when many people in the country attend religious services regularly, their happiness also is found to be higher.
As the reverse is not the case—people who attend services more often are not happier when the average personal level of importance of god is higher—it appears to be that happiness through religiosity can mainly be derived through conforming to the standard in their country—in particular the visible standard. -
people are happiest when they are in a group of people who are similar to them. Since religious people are a large majority in most countries, it seems that this is a major reason why religious people tend to be happier.
In common with other surveys, there was no relationship between religious/spiritual beliefs and happiness. Stronger god-belief did not equate to more happiness.
There was, however, a small, statistically significant link between attending Church (or Mosque, or Synagogue) and happiness. That's what I've shown in the graph.
That's pretty similar to what other surveys have shown. But what's interesting is that Cooper broke down the results by age. She found that the 'happiness effect' of going to Church only appeared in the over 80s.
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Cooper broke down the results by age. She found that the 'happiness effect' of going to Church only appeared in the over 80s.
The very old tend to be more religious than younger people, but actually less likely to go to church than those aged 60-80 (probably because of ill health). Perhaps, as a result, they have fewer alternative social support networks. Or perhaps it's simply that those who are well enough to get out to Church are happier just because they are healthier!
Whatever the reason, these data show that for English people under 80 years old, there is no link at all between religion and happiness.
The finding is the first to demonstrate a link between the gene, called 5-HTT, and satisfaction. People with the long version are more likely to be cheerful while sulkiness is the default position of those with the short version. Knowing which version of the gene they carry may help people improve their mood.
As David Cameron's £2m plan to measure the nation's happiness gets under way this month, the American psychologist whose work inspired it has said he has changed his mind about the importance of being happy.
One of the pioneers of positive psychology, Professor Martin Seligman insists he is not recanting the doctrine which has made him a bestselling author and world-renowned expert on optimism but just that we should be focusing less on people's happiness and more on their ability to "flourish". He said he was naive in the past to think wellbeing was based only on mood.
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the notion of what made people happy had to be rethought. He said he has become increasingly frustrated with the perception of what he called "happyology"
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this was much more than a happyology. What humans want is not just happiness. They want justice, they want meaning.
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Profs. Daniel Gilbert, Elizabeth Dunn and Timothy Wilson lay out eight principles of spending efficiently, including:
1) Buy more experiences and fewer material objects
2) Buy many small things rather than a few large things
3) Avoid extended warranties and outsized insurance plans -
we tend to overestimate how bad a future loss will be, and so we pay too much to insure against it. For example, Derek, how much would you have to be compensated for the loss of your finger? As you're typing, you might think: "Millions! I'm willing to give up a big part of my paycheck!" But if you examined people who'd actually lost a finger, you'd probably find that they're doing just fine. It's an inconvenience, but not a horror, and you shouldn't give up half your paycheck to be compensated for that loss.
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Although most authors of economics texts have long cautioned that GDP is an imperfect gauge even of economic activity—for not including the value of production within the home or of leisure time, ignoring illegal transactions like prostitution and drugs, and not considering environmental degradation and depletion—they have nevertheless assumed that it is better than other measures.
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In the end, GDP and average income may still be the best measures of well-being, in part because they correlate so strongly with other quality-of-life variables such as access to basic necessities, better health, and education. And despite their flaws, they are a pretty good ‘North Star’ to follow.
There is no Easterlin Paradox.
The facts about income and happiness turn out to be much simpler than first realized:
1) Rich people are happier than poor people.
2) Richer countries are happier than poorer countries.
3) As countries get richer, they tend to get happier.
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Arguably the most important finding from the emerging economics of happiness has been the Easterlin Paradox.
What is this paradox? It is the juxtaposition of three observations:
1) Within a society, rich people tend to be much happier than poor people.
2) But, rich societies tend not to be happier than poor societies (or not by much).
3) As countries get richer, they do not get happier. -
Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a “hedonic treadmill,” in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness.
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People spend 46.9% of their waking lives thinking about something other than what they're actually doing. It's a terribly inefficient use of one's mind and, worse, it actually seems to make people unhappy.
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Letting your mind wander might seem like a bad thing, but really it's just the natural byproduct of being capable of abstract thought. Humans are capable of thinking about things that have happened, things that might happen, and things that may never happen at all. (As a science fiction blog, we rather encourage doing that last part.) Sure, letting your mind wander is a good recipe for goofing off, but it's also a necessary part of contemplation and reflection.
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The problem is, whether we're doing it for low or lofty reason, letting our minds wander actually seems to make us demonstrably less happy. So says a new study from Harvard researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, in which they explain:
"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind. The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.
"Mind-wandering appears ubiquitous across all activities. This study shows that our mental lives are pervaded, to a remarkable degree, by the non-present. Mind-wandering is an excellent predictor of people's happiness. In fact, how often our minds leave the present and where they tend to go is a better predictor of our happiness than the activities in which we are engaged."
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we make a fatal mistake in thinking of happiness as a kind of duty. If we're not happy, we feel as though we've committed a crime against ourselves; if we are happy, we feel as though we've accomplished something.
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Is the importance of happiness overstated? That's the question the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner asks in Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy, a book-length essay on happiness and its place in our lives.
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For centuries, Bruckner explains, Western society focused on heavenly things. Happiness, if you were lucky enough to get some in this life, was understood only as a nice bonus, fleeting and illusory. What really mattered was the state of your soul - and it was suffering, not happiness, that would bring your soul closer to God. Bruckner quotes his namesake, Pascal, who wrote: "It is not shameful to die in pain - it is shameful to die in pleasure."
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Instead of existing as a stable equilibrium, Headey suggests that happiness is much more dynamic, and that individual choices — about one’s partner, working hours, social participation and lifestyle — make substantial and permanent changes to reported happiness levels. For example, doing more or fewer paid hours of work than you want, or exercising regularly, can have just as much impact on life satisfaction as having an extroverted personality.
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“Objective choices make a difference to happiness over and above genetics and personality,” said Bruce Headey, a psychologist at Melbourne University in Australia. Headey and his colleagues analyzed annual self-reports of life satisfaction from over 20,000 Germans who have been interviewed every year since 1984. He compared five-year averages of people’s reported life satisfaction, and plotted their relative happiness on a percentile scale from 1 to 100. Heady found that as time went on, more and more people recorded substantial changes in their life satisfaction. By 2008, more than a third had moved up or down on the happiness scale by at least 25 percent, compared to where they had started in 1984.
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Headey’s findings, published in the October 19th issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run contrary to what is known as the happiness set-point theory — the idea that even if you win the lottery or become a paraplegic, you’ll revert back to the same fixed level of happiness within a year or two. This psychological theory was widely accepted in the 1990s because it explained why happiness levels seemed to remain stable over the long term: They were mainly determined early in life by genetic factors including personality traits.
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Pascal Bruckner
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philosopher Pascal Bruckner
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Bruckner is perhaps best known in Britain as the author of the novel Bitter Moon, which mapped the psychological limits of sexual pleasure in graphic detail and was turned into a successful film (with Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott Thomas) by Roman Polanski.
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"Our study offers compelling evidence that it is the social aspects of religion rather than theology or spirituality that leads to life satisfaction," said Chaeyoon Lim, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study. "In particular, we find that friendships built in religious congregations are the secret ingredient in religion that makes people happier."
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The study's findings are applicable to the three main Christian traditions (Mainline Protestant, Evangelical Protestant, and Catholic). "We also find similar patterns among Jews and Mormons, even with a much smaller sample size," said Lim, who noted that there were not enough Muslims or Buddhists in the data set to test the model for those groups.
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