As part of the research of the project I have been reading about happiness and the pursuit of happiness, the most incredible thing is that I selected the texts randomly between all of the different documents I have and all of them have lots of points in common, for example, the money. The following texts come from three documets I found revealing:
Daniel Nettle - The pursuit of happiness
Mike W. Martin - Paradoxes of happiness
The paradox of money is that money does not bring or buy happiness, contrary to the widespread illusion that it does. money is pursued in the belief it will make us happy, in challenging our tendency to regard money as the solution to all our problems. hedonic treadmill’’: the more we buy and have, the more we want In macroeconomic terms, the paradox of money has been called the paradox of (economic) progress. The paradox of money expresses a partial truth. Money does contribute to happiness. It increases happiness dramatically by moving individuals out of poverty, but thereafter it contributes little and haphazardly to happiness. Part of the explanation is that we tend to misuse money once we have it, becoming caught up in endless routines of getting and spending, Also, we are made unhappy by envy and by feeling we are not making what we deserve compared to others.
The paradox of choice, as Barry Schwartz calls it, is that multiplying the number of options sometimes lessens happiness, too many choices can be burdensome because they place responsibility on us, but also because evaluating options takes time and adds complexity and confusion. Again, having the options to return purchased goods would seemingly increase our happiness in making choices. Yet, Schwartz marshals evidence that we are more satisfied when our decisions are not so easily reversible, probably because reversible decisions keep us anxiously alert to better options we have missed. Of greater consequence, the paradox of submission overlaps with the paradox of choice: When we commit ourselves in a spirit of permanence, as in getting married, we tend to be happier than if we feel free to walk away at any time. The goal is to find the proverbial joys of a simple life while grappling with sufficient options to avoid boredom.
All the paradoxes suggest that happiness is pursued indirectly as the by-product of meaningful activities and relationships. Paradoxes of aim tell us that we should not focus narrowly on our pleasures (hedonism) and our personal good (self-interest); nor should we assume that we can have a pellucid picture of what will make us happy (guidance); nor should we conceive of happiness as separable from meaningful activities and relationships (constituents). Paradoxes of success remind us that getting what we want does not always lead to wanting what we get (getting), and that happiness is easily lost amidst illusions about material goods (money) and comparisons with others (status). Paradoxes of freedom emphasize that submitting to causes, loyalties, and standards can bring happiness-promoting liberation (submission), that too many choices can threaten happiness (choice), and that we can undermine our happiness when we fail to reasonably resolve or accept our conflicting desires for belonging and breaking free (conflict). Paradoxes of attitude tell us that pursuing happiness in things we lack can be futile unless we learn to cherish what we already have (affirmation)and derive peace from hope and faith (hope).
Ruut Benhoven - The art of enjoying life
we can experience deeper satisfactions, in particular when ‘actualizing’ ourself in mastering new challenges and when finding meaning in what we do. Broad hedonism assumes that much of these satisfactions are found in productive activities and in social involvement. pains are balanced by deeper and more lasting satisfaction. In this view, the quality of life is not in the number of passing delights reaped, but in enduring satisfaction with life-as-whole, in other words, in ‘happiness’. This view of the good life is figured in classic utilitarianism. what ways of life are most conductive to happiness and it is therefore less easy to see what capabilities are required. Since there may be multiple ways to a happy life there may also be multiple arts for this purpose. general capabilities to cope with the problems of life, such as common sense, energy and some frustration tolerance. Since happiness depends heavily on the realities of life. This capability will be required for almost any way of life. Social competence needs for social contact, keeping up of love-relationships, position in social networks. in particular for sound self-knowledge. we must know what we want and what we can. All this requires an insight in who we are and an ability to learn from experience. The happy do clearly better in social relationships, The happy get also better along with family and friends On personality tests happy persons rate as more kind, sociable and cooperative, while they score lower on measures of aggression and egoism Happy people are also found to be more popular There is also some empirical support for the contention that happiness requires considerable self-knowledge in the conditions of modern multiple-choice society.
These are the bits I highlighted from the documents I read for my research on happiness, I didn't include all the texts because most of them match on lots of aspects so I selected the most relevant ones for me and the group which curiously are also the ones I enjoyed more while reading. Most of the text I read for this project came to me from the rest of my group, it seems like I have been focusing more on classic interpretors of happiness like Plato. As I said before these are just the highlights, I strictly recommend to read them as they give you something to think about while reading them. I read them as part of my research for the speech that me and my group are preparing for our Connexion 1 presentation.
Previously the only contact I had with texts about happiness was a book called “Happiness” by … and in it I found the terms long term happiness and short term happiness for the first time. Later on I noticed that they appeared on all the texts but with different appreciations, in the book by … both are shown as complementary of each other and in the text by Daniel Nettle , for example, long term happiness takes more importance on the individual. This is probably because they are connected somehow to the idea of differentiating material of non material happiness. Normally you find this connection every time the money topic is discussed in relation to happiness. Short term happiness is always just farther than what you can reach and it exists the chance for you to get habituated to it and then by the time that feeling of happiness will disappear. It is interesting that these points are common to all the texts, probably because they seem to be the the first parts of the happiness diagram. The fact that all of the texts mentioned before have similarities might be caused because they have been written in similar contexts, probably speak about happiness during war period is far more difficult to be explained, even if it keeps the first communal parts mentioned. Other example of this is how Plato connects happiness to beauty.
I find a lot of similarities between what my personal idea of happiness and the ideas I read about, and I also try to find it on a long term but I personally never forget the short term one as it seems to be for me the spice of life, what gives taste to the long term happiness. In connection to my every day work I can also say that it is possible to make a difference between long term and short term learning and also confirm that long term learning gives more short term happiness moments than short term itself. So long term happiness and long term learning seems to be a good way of thinking/working as it is the one that are more pleasant at the time of recapitulation
[Ovo]: Bob Dylan - Hurricane
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