04 Aug The Path to Happiness Is Narrow but Easy
I’m always reluctant to write or talk about “secrets” to happiness, or to say things like it’s “easy”.
That being said, the strategies we know of that boost happiness are, in some ways, relatively simple.
Simple, isn’t always easy, and however you put it, most of us know there are many obstacles in the way of and challenges to enjoying as much happiness as we’d like.
But, none of that might really matter. As long as you’re realistic about how much happiness you can have and how long “real” happiness will last, we can all work towards creating and maintaining more of it. And this article, via the Atlantic by Arthur C Brooks, will definitely help …
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece of love and betrayal, begins in a moment of chaos for the Oblonsky family, when the father is discovered to be having an affair. With the parents distracted and distraught, the children “ran wild all over the house,” and every member of the family “felt that there was no sense in their living together.” Misery reigned.
Hence the novel’s famous opening line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
We all want to be happy and have happy families, so the Oblonsky hypothesis is troubling. It suggests that happy people are some sort of elite group who have found the right way. To be happy, we must stay on a narrow path; on either side are sheer cliffs. Stray from the path in any of the many ways you might, and you will fall into unhappiness. If you are like me and my family, and are a bit, well, unconventional, you might fear that you are already off the path and will not find it.
The truth, however, is more encouraging than this. Yes, there are more ways to be unhappy than to be happy. But the narrow path is a straightforward one, and almost anyone can get onto it by focusing on one big idea.
In general, positive things in life are more similar to one another than negative things are. Researchers have tested this observation in novel ways. For example, scholars have noted that attractive faces seem more alike than unattractive ones, and we rate people we find pleasant as more similar than people we find unpleasant. In one study specifically of happiness, two scholars in 2013 showed that people find happy words more interchangeable than unhappy words…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE