Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness - Emily Esfahani Smith Health People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity. Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these ways Subscribe Now > For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good life outcomes, including — most promisingly — good health. But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) challenges the rosy picture. Of course, it’s important to first define happiness. It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. "Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided," the authors of the study wrote.
Online disinhibition effect The online disinhibition effect is a loosening (or complete abandonment) of social restrictions and inhibitions that would otherwise be present in normal face-to-face interaction during interactions with others on the Internet. This effect is caused by many factors, including dissociative anonymity, invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection, dissociative imagination, and minimization of authority.[1] General concept[edit] Because of this loss of inhibition, some users may exhibit benign tendencies, including becoming more affectionate, more willing to open up to others, and less guarded about emotions, all in an attempt to achieve emotional catharsis. With respect to bad behavior, users on the Internet can frequently do or say as they wish without fear of any kind of meaningful reprisal. CB radio during the 1970s saw similar bad behavior: You don't know me[edit] You can't see me[edit] Core Concept: Invisibility See you later[edit] Core Concept: Asynchronicity See also[edit]
I am the Orson Welles of Powerpoint. I am the Orson Welles of PowerPoint 2010. Next slide. I don’t let marketing get in the way of a potential masterpiece. You see I don’t create mere presentations. I use technology and the language of our times to evoke human emotions from my audience. I’m not a junior sales manager, I’m a storyteller. At one point, artists and the alleged tastemakers of society scoffed at the notion of motion pictures. So too will history one day be unkind to those who belittle the artistic merits of my PowerPoint journeys. My slides are arranged with a careful eye to typography and design; two well trusted guardians of the Modern Arts. The transitions I select from the pre-determined palette are individually chosen with consideration for both aesthetics and narrative lubrication. No two of my PowerPoints are the same. I don’t use PowerPoint in the same manner as my peers. I believe that sometimes a PowerPoint demands five consecutive pages of full bleed abstract images.
Happiness report - Women's Health Magazine Getty Images A report conducted by Deakin University, in conjunction with Australian Unity, has uncovered the essential ingredients needed for happiness and it’s good news for your mum. Yep, the researchers found women tend to be more content with their lives than their male counterparts, while happiness for both genders increases with age. When it comes to living quarters, those who’ve shacked up with a partner rate higher on the cheery scale, as do people who volunteer. Bad news on the finance front, the report also found happiness usually rises proportionally with household income of around $100,000. Confused? Gender Overall, women are the happier sex. Health Finances When it comes to love, it seems being hit by cupid’s arrow really does pay. Love and relationships People who’ve tied the knot are just as happy as de facto couples that own a home together. A note for singletons? Also worth a mention: Wellbeing amongst Aussies spiked after terrorist attacks, including September 11.
What Writing Has in Common With Happiness By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. The final line of an enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges poem became the title for Yasmina Reza's latest book, Happy Are the Happy. For Reza, Borges’ poem suggests that happiness, which people tend to talk about as achievable and context-dependent, is dispensed more mysteriously than we like to think. In our conversation for this series, we discussed the ways contentment transcends our understanding—and how works of literature, too, are more than what their authors understand them to be. Happy Are the Happy features 18 different narrators, each of whom gets to command the reader's attention for at least one chapter. Reza’s books—novels, plays, and an unorthodox book-length profile of Nicolas Sarkozy—have been translated into more than 30 languages. She lives in Paris and spoke to me in New York City. And we can never know.
Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports their creativity. As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists. As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience can sometimes be related to creativity. However, creativity also requires knowledge. If you are not willing to do something new, then it’s hard to be creative. At the same time, creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of knowledge and another. In order to have deep knowledge about a discipline as well as a wide base of knowledge that can be mined later for analogies, it is important for someone to enjoy thinking. How About You?
Calvin and Hobbes Snow Art Gallery The Original Snow Goon must be making his OWN Snow Goons. I'll bet he's making an army! In a few days, he could build a hundred snow goons! If each of THEM built a ANOTHER hundred, and then THOSE all built a hundred MORE, why... that would be pretty cool, if they weren't out to kill me. I'm looking for something that can deliver a 50-pound payload of snow on a small feminine target. --- Calvin Calvin: This is going to be the biggest snowman ever built! Snow, Snow! Calvin: It snowed last night! "Snowgoons on the horizon... I should be doing my homework now. Calvin: Dad, if you threw a snowball at someone, but deliberately missed, would that be "bad"? ANY dumb kid can build a snowman, but it takes a genius like me to create ART.
Happiness is a choice “How do you know if someone is happy?" my 10-year-old blurted out on a recent quiet drive to school. I took the parental lazy way out — ahem — opportunity to turn it around on him. "How do YOU know when someone is happy?" He looked at me with the most adorable face and said forcefully "It's hard to tell if someone is really happy or not. Oh boy. "Honey," I responded, "happiness is not a specific look. I wanted to go on to inform him that happiness isn't the destination, it's the way of travel. But, he's 10. I asked him "What makes you happy?" He pauses for several seconds. While staring out the window, he says almost in a whisper: "I'm happy when I help people and when people are good to me. About 30 seconds pass and he opens up again. "Sweetness, those words are more true than you know," I said to him. I adore the fact that he gets this at such a young age, but life doesn't always bless you with knowledge and the ability to implement that knowledge at the same time.
Kierkegaard on Our Greatest Source of Unhappiness by Maria Popova Hope, memory, and how our chronic compulsion to flee from our own lives robs us of living. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in reflecting on why presence matters more than productivity. “On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” Henry Miller asserted in his beautiful meditation on the art of living. And yet we spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves with overplanning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness. Kierkegaard, who was only thirty at the time, begins with an observation all the timelier today, amidst our culture of busy-as-a-badge-of-honor: Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. The unhappy one is absent. Consider first the hoping individual. Donating = Loving
Why indigenous and racialized struggles will always be appendixed by the left Inspired by artists, academics and activist colleagues who have rolled their eyes at the spiritual beliefs of their Indigenous counterparts as well as protested the inclusion of prayer and ceremony into political, academic and artistic activities, I have decided to share my thinking on some fundamental differences in values and knowledge ways that impede relationship-making across our communities. While I can't generalize about what Indigenous or other racialized peoples mean by the words "decolonization", anti-racist or "anti-colonial", I can certainly observe how SOME philosophies and action strategies employed in leftist movements relegate anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles to the periphery. Furthermore, concepts of "decolonization", as they are talked about in many Indigenous and other racialized communities, are not always compatible with what are essentially Eurocentric philosophies and actions strategies. That isn't to say that glasses can't ever be useful.
9 Mind-Blowing Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for making life more fulfilling. They’ve added up to a significant improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life. But the major breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely rocked my world and redefined reality forever. The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed really, it was how I thought of it. Maybe you’ve had some of the same insights. 1. The first time I heard somebody say that, I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience. If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s doing the observing? 2. Of course! 3. 4. 5. Yikes. 6. 7. 8. 9.
10 Easy Activities Science Has Proven Will Make You Happier Today A thankful message, spending on others, listening to music, happy daydreams and more… Science can make you happier. Do at least some of these activities today and feel the positive vibrations flow. 1. People spend a lot of time thinking about good things that didn’t happen, but might have done. Say you’d never met your partner or friend or got that job? Thinking about what might not have been can be tremendously powerful if used in the right way. So, mentally subtract something good from your life to really appreciate it. 2. Gratitude is a powerful emotion that helps us enjoy what we have. Evoke it right now by sending an email, text or letter to someone who has helped you in some way. It’s easy and quick and one study has found that practising gratitude can increase happiness 25%. 3. Money can make you happy but only if you use it in the right way (see: how to spend wisely). One of the easiest ways is by spending it on others. So, buy a friend a present today or take them out to lunch.