A professor named Ed Diener at the University of Illinois is among the leading scientists studying happiness. In fact, a whole new area of psychology, known as positive psychology, has emerged in the past few years devoted specifically to understanding what creates favorable feelings or mindsets, such as life satisfaction or upbeat attitudes. A few years ago, Martin Seligman, another psychologist, published the book "Authentic Happiness" in which he described this new movement and some of its characteristics. A website devoted to authentic happiness (with over 700K registered users) is cited in the list of links on this blogsite.
Among the mildly surprising findings from emerging research on happiness is that, on average, people tend to be reasonably happy. It is also worth noting that in cross national studies, some surprising findings have emerged. The top five happiest countries, it seems, are NOT among the world's richest: 1. Nigeria 2. Mexico 3. Venezuela 4. El Salvador 5. Puerto Rico. (Source: University of Michigan World Values Survey (WVS). Only Denmark and Ireland break into the top five when an alternate measure is used. In case you are curious, the U.S. ranked 15th out of 79 countries studied.
So what accounts for this? Clearly, neither per capita income nor standard of living as measured by material goods are determinants of happiness. (But we knew this, despite the pervasive greed attack that put us into the world economic mess we now face.) It seems that buying more simply creates the illusion that buying even more objects will eventually get us to the poorly defined destination of happiness we crave. But enough on that topic. You can read more about this if you want at the WVS website, or scientific articles at Ed Diener's website.
At the end of the day, happiness is a subjective state. It's what we perceive. Some people are ecstatic because they love what they do rather than what they earn. Some people have the best of both worlds. And many people believe that it's all about contentment and supportive, loving relationships. Important relationships exist for us all in many domains. For example, we have important relationships with ourselves, with others, with the environment, and with the world beyond, however we may want to define "the world beyond".
I'm curious about what YOU believe leads to personal happiness. Please share your thoughts below.
And...here's a toast to YOUR happiness in the year ahead!
