What makes up happiness?
DB: There are a few enormous databases around the world (Gallup is the biggest) that use survey data to assess happiness. But happiness itself is a meaningless term because you can’t measure it. The components of happiness that you can measure, and that I’ve been most interested in are:
Pride: This is about how you evaluate your life overall. How satisfied are you with your job? Your family? Are you financially secure? Is your mom proud of you? Do you feel like you live your values?
Pleasure: You only remember about 2 percent of your life — highs like marriages and awards, and lows like getting dumped. You don’t remember most of the minutiae, or say, what you had for lunch last Tuesday. So if I ask you to think of your life as a whole and tell me how happy you are, you’re only using about 2 percent of memory to make an assessment. Because you can remember how the past 24 hours felt, this bucket is about what you ate for lunch yesterday. How much joy did you feel in the last 24 hours? How much did you smile, laugh, cry? How do you experience life?
Purpose: How often do you use your strengths to do what you do best? How engaged are you with your life?
No comments:
Post a Comment