This is one of the worksheets we used to try to hone in a new XPrize on Happiness (easier-to-read size or mouse-over notes above). Our subgroup self-organized around meaningful work as the fountainhead of sustainable happiness. You can see the sequence of thoughts below…
Oh, here’s the path…
Jenn Lim shared a summary of happiness research to kick it off:
”Our brains are hardwired to seek happiness. Yet we are superbad at predicting what can sustain it.”
She showed a spectrum of happiness drivers from the short-term and fleeting to the lifelong and enduring:
and the Zappos framework from Tony Hsieh’s book Delivering Happiness
I generalized this graph to the simple precept that happiness comes from finding purpose and meaning that transcends the mortal self. In other words, we all seek symbolic immorality — by creating something that will last beyond our short time on this Earth. We create art, companies, charitable organizations and acts of philanthropy, offspring, and if all else fails, a belief in the afterlife =).
And I had to defend the summary of our brainstorm with the larger group. A Prize has to be specific and clear… and although we thought the winners would have to think of viral crowdsourced work deployable over smart phones, we did not want to constrain the solution space to that:
We were told to end with our Elevator Pitch, so I improvised a bit:
First Floor: (ding!) Food, Shelter, and Clothing
Second Floor: Women’s Fragrances
Top Floor: (ding) Self-actualization and the symbolic immortality of meaningful work.
"Happiness" is a very fleeting thing, when it appears it is good to be grateful but if you try to hold on tight to it, it vanishes in the instant and turns into craving. My experience is teaching me that "contentment" is harder to achieve than happiness, but once found is quite solid and loyal to its possessor., truly a treasure. Most of the world’s great paths of wisdom give more importance to contentment than happiness, but of course making people permanently discontented is the secret of a prosperous consumer economy
Wow, absolutely no awareness of Zen, Stoic, Buddhist and Hindu ideals of why self obsessed searching for happiness is ignorant futility. Even Epicurians discard all this design and time obsession. You must WORK at making yourself happy damn you, and your unhappiness is your fault so get busy!
Forget about this tragic sense of life seeking immortality in something larger than yourself futility. What you really want to construct in these ‘what will we do with all these new connected people to amuse them?’ thinkfests is the basic Tom Sawyer epiphany of making work a source of play, amusement and happiness:
"If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign."
Eg what it would be nice for an Iwatch or Imoodring to do as gamification on your biometrics. This does get close to that film where they have the individual reality recorder and playback device for emotions, memories, etc. Strange Days. If I recall, it was a bit of a Sony Walkman-like gadget for debauched nihilistic clubsters – I forget if they were using drugs to enhance it, probably – and why not. Rather than happiness they were optimising on things that debauched nihilistic clubsters the world over tend to enjoy so much.
"After hours of discussion and debate within a group of individuals who all quite naturally had their own concepts of what makes people happy, we finally started to home in on a single idea: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. If you can’t measure happiness, how can you hope to improve it? Thus, the Mood Ring was born.
This theoretical device (which may or may not be an actual ring) would, through a series of biometric sensors, begin to study and track your stress and endorphin levels, effectively developing a personal happiness index. That statistical information would then be augmented by user-provided information"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yaXPx6xWEQ
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeany7] http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/10/inside-xprize-visioneering/ has more info.
One thing I find amusing is when these groups are surprised to uncover basic sunday school level religious practices as beneficial as if they are brainstorming uncharted new domains.
And it has to be stated in a way that puts it in the clinical realm of pop PC clinical science. Deepak Chopra for example makes a career out of this. Could confession be a source of stress relief? Despite them having no cultural tradition or any familiarity with institutional hierophants and confessionals. The same as him putting it in terms of quantum physics. But at least a Deepak Chopra has the freedom to admit a soul as a legitimate object to address in the realm of human happiness and endeavor. Richard Dawkins has to address that in secular scientific humanist terms where rationality is the prime agent to the absurd extent where it functions in the role of de facto individual soul, source of happiness and higher overall venerated power. That is, unlike the emperor Marcus Aurelius, Richard Dawkins has nothing to confess and no need for it.
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