ยป Happiness = Pleasure + Engagement + Meaning
Martin Seligman is usually considered the founder of positive psychology. In 2004 he gave an introductory talk at TED, where he says positive psychology studies three things:
- pleasure
- engagement
- meaning
Seligman basically says nothing about meaning (but Wikipedia’s Meaning of life is an excellent overview). Engagement is effectively synonymous with flow/wu wei. Pleasure is 50% heritable (which explains why winning the lottery doesn’t make you much happier in the long run) but the other 50% can be changed.
Seligman has both academic and commercial sites with a bunch of questionnaires. The only intervention he talks about for engagement is to restructure unengaging tasks to focus on “character strengths” (although there are others). To increase pleasure there are at least two effective engagements:
- gratitude training (eg: a “good times” journal, writing letters of gratitude)
- mindfulness
Mindfulness is supposedly based on Buddhist meditation, but I think there’s some confusion. As I see it, Buddhist meditation includes two kinds of mindfulness:
- awareness of the present moment external to the self
- meta-consciousness: observing the structure of the self (the “monkey mind”) to transcend the present
The purpose of awareness training in psychology is to increase the pleasure gained and retained from pleasant experiences. When the sense of self is removed to savor an experience, you increase pleasure. When the sense of self is removed in carrying out a task, you increasing engagement. There is a correlation between these but I don’t think positive psychology understands the causal relationship yet.
All of this falls victim to the seeming fact that happiness is a positional good. We can’t all be happy, just like we can’t all be cool. Operations Management talks about redesigning jobs so they’re not so shitty, but there seems to be a base level of indignity you just need to accept.
There’s an expectation in our society that we can all be happy and content. Perversely, since this isn’t the case, struggling towards the impossible probably increases the general level of unhappiness.
Jack
26 Aug 09 at 4:03 pm
@ Jack, Debbie Downer!
Fred
26 Aug 09 at 4:20 pm
The video is neat, actually — don’t try to be happy, just try to distract yourself. Exactly what I was talking about with the “I envy zimboes” masthead. Excellent, finally someone is saying something that didn’t originate in Walt Disney’s frozen, fascist skull.
Jack
26 Aug 09 at 4:43 pm
Re: Jack’s first post
I tried very hard not to use the word “happiness” because I knew I’d get knee-jerk reactions like yours, but then I go and beg for them by making it the first word of the title.
Positive psychology does not study “happiness”. It studies the three separate experiences I listed. Ignore it when I or any psychologist uses the word “happiness”.
Jared
26 Aug 09 at 5:35 pm
I realized I was knee-jerking so I tried to hedge with references to job design. Oh well.
Jack
26 Aug 09 at 8:48 pm
Thanks for linking to happier.com. You can work on building engagement, and watch free videos from Dr. Seligman, on the site.
andrew (happier.com)
23 Sep 09 at 1:22 pm
[...] happy [...]
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