I'm reading Flourishing. I'm enjoying it. It's more scholarly than I had hoped for, and because each chapter is written by different authors, usually more than one author, the quality of writing varies widely from chapter to chapter. Lots of footnotes. Basically, it's a literature review of the various psychological studies that have and have not been done on various aspects of human happiness. The scholarly nature of the tome makes me feel less flaky for reading and liking it, as does the conscientiousness of citations and the limitations with which the authors draw their conclusions.
The chapters of the book cover various elements of human experience, and each summarizes the research into people's different responses and their different levels of perceived satisfaction or fulfillment. Section 1 includes a chapter about resilience, one about turning points, and one about optimism. The second section talks about engagement and finding meaning, about personal goals and the differences in life satisfaction that people who set and achieve certain kinds of goals, and about relationshops. The third section looks at studies about creativity and genius, about people's approaches to work and hobbies, and about well being in the workplace and its relationship to business outcomes. I haven't read the fourth section yet -- doing well by doing good, elevation and morality, and something with "Meta-Hueristics" in the title that I can only hope to figure out the meaning of when I read it.
This is a pretty interesting book. I've read some popular books on positive psychology that cite some of these studies, so reading the literature reviews is both familiar and a little bit comforting -- I've heard of some of the conclusions already, but it's nice to see a deeper treatment of the studies, their shortcomings, etc. Nonetheless, it's possible to draw some pretty clear conclusions about how to live and feel more satisfied from the studies gathered here. People who set goals that are focused on intimacy, spirituality or transcendence, and service are happier than people who set goals focused on power, influence, or material rewards. We all know this, but seeing the studies is a helpful reminder. There are some kinds of striving that are better than others. A happy outlook depends on some attitude traits that you can cultivate: patience, prudence, and perseverance. Optimism is something different than the lack of pessimism. Relationships can be destroyed by the following four things: criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling, and can be built up by forgiveness and accomodation. We're happy when we do things that involve us fully, absorbing activities that we also believe are good for the world in some way. There are four main arenas in which we measure ourselves: work/achievement, relationships/intimacy, religion/spirit, and service/legacy. Happy people attend to all of those things.
None of this is rocket science but, like eating healthy foods, it's not always easy to attend to these things. There are lots of cultural forces encouraging us to act in ways that probably won't make us happy, just as there's a lot of cheap, tasty, bad food out there. It's hardly a revolutionary act to avoid all the junk food in the world, but it takes daily attention; it's easy to get lazy. I think behaving in a way that will make your life satisfying and healthy takes that kind of attention, too. It seems at least as important.
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