22 Jul A Happiness Columnist’s Three Biggest Happiness Rules
Arthur C Brooks has been writing about happiness for quite a while now; and to be honest, he’s one of my favourite writers on this topic.
I almost always agree with his opinions and summaries, and he writes in way that’s so easy to comprehend and to contemplate.
In his latest article in the Atlantic, he does it again with 3 great happiness rules we could all learn from …
More than two years have passed since I became The Atlantic’s happiness correspondent. “How to Build a Life” launched on April 9, 2020, as an experiment: Could we reframe the misery and loneliness of the coronavirus pandemic’s early days as an opportunity to think more about well-being? The experiment is still going strong: This column is my 100th.
“How to Build a Life” has covered procrastination and pet ownership, Ben Franklin and Aristotle, summer vacations and winter blues, elections and exercise—all through the lens of happiness. The lessons in each column are different, and that’s exactly how things should be: We focus on millions of different things over the course of a day, week, year, and lifetime. The work of neuroscientists, social psychologists, behavioral economists, and philosophers can be trained on any number of subjects to show how our quotidian pursuits can help us in the pursuit of happiness.
But this is not to say that happiness is only about getting all the little details of life right. Each of us should also keep in mind some large truths from the science of happiness that can transcend circumstance and time, guiding us across all of our life’s events, from the trivial to the momentous. These are, you might say, the three maxims of happiness.
Maxim 1: Mother Nature doesn’t care if you are happy.
Perhaps the greatest error people make about happiness is assuming it will come naturally if we follow our instincts—that is, If it feels good, do it. There’s a simplistic sort of logic here: Humans desire lots of worldly rewards, like money, power, pleasure, and admiration. We also want to be happy. Thus, if we get that worldly stuff, we will be happy. But this is nature’s cruelest hoax, perpetrated to make sure that we pass on our genes with no consideration of whether we enjoy doing so.
Your brain’s reward system keeps you chasing earthly delights that will enhance your reproductive fitness in comparison with others. These fall broadly into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and honor, which the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas called substitutes for God. Whether you buy Aquinas’s assessment or not, you can’t really argue with him that these rewards overpromise and underdeliver happiness. They simply don’t satisfy.
Happiness is your responsibility, not Mother Nature’s. That means you need to curtail your worldly appetites, and instead pursue what truly brings enduring happiness: a faith or life philosophy, family relationships, real friendship, and meaningful work…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE