04 Apr For more happiness…learn some lessons from the Latin Americans!
via the SMH by Jessica Irvine
It has been said that journalists are a miserable bunch.
It’s true that dedicating one’s life to unearthing and cataloguing the worst examples of corruption and ineptitude by business persons and politicians does rather take a toll on the soul.
Additionally, journalists are commonly required to work every public holiday. So, as the rest of the country headed off to the beach this long weekend, we dedicated few continued to toil to bring you the daily news – even if it’s just tales of backyard cricket-related injuries.
Don’t cry for us, dear reader. We long ago traded the dozen or so public holidays Australians enjoy each year for extra annual leave. We get our holidays, just not on the same days as everyone else.
Still, we do miss out on that special magic of the random public holiday – days on which the pace of modern life abruptly changes, and society is plunged back into an older world order; a time when family reigned supreme, and when the daily rhythms of cooking, eating and drinking dominated over the modern demands of wage slavery.
Roads are emptied. Alarm clocks fall silent. The sunscreen flows as steadily as the beers… Ah, bliss.
Economists have become obsessed in recent years with the study of happiness. But they have brought to the field something of a newfound Puritanism. Rather than focusing on the more fleeting and hedonistic pleasures of life, studies have tended to focus on deeper measures of “life satisfaction” – how contented you are with your life’s circumstances.
On such measures, Australians rank pretty well, living in a country with relatively high average incomes and low levels of crime and corruption.
But if you want to know where the happiest people in the world live – the ones who experience the greatest thrills of daily enjoyment and elation – we must look elsewhere.
To be more exact, we must look to Latin America…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE