Despite coming at happiness from many angles, one thing all these new books agree on is the difficulty in defining precisely what happiness is. One thing seems clear, they don’t mean pleasure. Pleasure seems too fleeting and too much linked to sensation and the physical body. Happiness on the other hand, while refusing to fit within a neat and concise definition, seems more related to a feeling of peace of mind and general wellbeing. More a kind of background emotion that can persist even in the face of physical discomfort or psychological or emotional strain. After all, people can report happiness in the most extreme places or situations, such as concentraton camps, or during severe illness.
The Gratitude Key
One thing appears to be key in being able to develop happiness as a steady and reliable feature of your life and not something that’s contingent on events: gratitude. But what do we have to be grateful for? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, Work, thought
Friday Jun 13, 2008
You hear a lot these days about work/life balance. About how it’s becoming more important for people to integrate their lives better with their work. It’s a big buzzword in corporate life, and many large companies stress their commitment to helping their employees pursue it.
Jazz Up Your Life
If you’ve been thinking about work/life balance lately, forget it! It’s wrong headed thinking. The balance analogy implies a win/lose relationship between the two - a pair of scales where as one goes up the other goes down. I prefer the approach of Dr. Stewart Friedman presented at T4HWW. He argues that a much better analogy is to think of our lives like a jazz band, where the aim is to be a tight, integrated musical masterclass - think Miles Davis and John Coltrane:
Posted by Steve Munroe | Under Life, thought
Tuesday Jun 10, 2008
Forget the four-hour-work-week, the power of positive thinking, lifehacks and winning the lottery, there’s only one sure fire way to turn yourself from a sad, underpaid, unfulfilled depressed loser into one of life’s, serene, impossibly positive and happy-to-be-alive winners. It’s something available to all of us and guaranteed to happen to you on a not infrequent basis. Each of the people below discovered its life altering powers, and here are just some of their testimonies to its awesome, life affirming badasserdry (taken from Daniel Gilbert’s book “Stumbling On Happiness”).
- “I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way.” - JW from Texas
- “It was a glorious experience” - MB from Louisiana
- “I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now” - CR from California
If you go to your bookshop these days you are likely to see several new books that all focus on happiness - what it is, how to get it, how we misunderstand it, the history of it and the latest research about it to name just a few of the themes.
