This interesting article in Atlantic, “There’s More to Life Than Being Happy” is shared by Mirza Ashraf;
Some excerpts from article.
“In September 1942, Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished — but he, prisoner number 119104, had lived. In his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, which he wrote in nine days about his experiences in the camps, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died came down to one thing: Meaning, an insight he came to early in life. When he was a high school student, one of his science teachers declared to the class, “Life is nothing more than a combustion process, a process of oxidation.” Frankl jumped out of his chair and responded, “Sir, if this is so, then what can be the meaning of life?”
“Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior — being, as mentioned, a “taker” rather than a “giver.” The psychologists give an evolutionary explanation for this: happiness is about drive reduction. If you have a need or a desire — like hunger — you satisfy it, and that makes you happy. People become happy, in other words, when they get what they want. Humans, then, are not the only ones who can feel happy. Animals have needs and drives, too, and when those drives are satisfied, animals also feel happy, the researchers point out.”
“Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,” explained Kathleen Vohs, one of the authors of the study, in a recent presentation at the University of Pennsylvania. In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need,” the researchers write.”
“What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author, with John Tierney, of the recent book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. Baumeister, a social psychologists at Florida State University, was named an ISI highly cited scientific researcher in 2003.”
Read Full article:
: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/01/theres-more-to-life-than-being-happy/266805/
I have to thank Mirza Sahib for sharing this article.” A happy life and a meaningful life differ”; can’t argue with that, it clears a lot of fog while talking about purpose of life or
meaning of life. I disagree though that “taking” generally makes people happy. Personally I have never felt happy while “taking”, rather felt put under obligation to return the favor and denied my freedom of not even giving (returning the favor). It is true that giving always is a more satisfying act but here again it “may” be happiness only if giving is anonymous.
I get very upset when we humans speak for animals, for example the quote from this article “…. “What sets human beings apart from animals is not the pursuit of happiness, which occurs all across the natural world, but the pursuit of meaning, which is unique to humans, according to Roy Baumeister, the lead researcher of the study and author…”
We should only speak for ourselves as we do not know anything what animals are thinking, or not thinking. There are animal behaviors that show self sacrifice for their off spring (e.g. female octopus retreats into her grave to give birth and then starves to death to spare available food for their off spring), the behaviors that seem against nature – we can only guess but have no right to give a verdict – do animals feel happy by sacrificing, or just genetic unfolding, we don’t know. There are many things that set human beings apart not only from animals but from fellow humans too. Overall a very good article but
I had these two things (taking is happiness & speaking for animals without knowing them)
that I wanted to point out as a bit hard for me to agree with. I must have read or heard somewhere that appealed to me for describing happiness; that it comes in small or big packages, to all, and is never everlasting. I can relate to a meaningful life with a movie I
recently watched “Lincoln” – now that surely was one of “the meaningful lives” … ending human stigma (of a behavior worse than animals) of slavery.
Babar
So far, the best book on the subject happiness is Bertrand Russell’s “THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS.” In 159 pages and 17 chapters, Russell starts from, ‘What Makes People Unhappy’ to the last chapter, ‘The Happy Man,’ covering almost every aspect of human life and belief relating to unhappiness and happiness. I am here giving some salient points from the last chapter ‘The Happy Man.’
“Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that so far as this part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very simple one. … It is thought by many that happiness is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. It is thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their sorrows have complicated by highly intellectualized sources. I do not believe that such things are genuine causes of either happiness or unhappiness; I think they are only symptoms. The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his happiness and unhappiness to his belief, while the real causation is the other way around. … Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and interests are directed outward, not inward. It should be our endeavor … to aim at avoiding self-centered passions … such as fear, envy, the sense of sin, self-pity and self admiration. In all these, our desires are centered upon ourselves: there is genuine interest in the outer world. . . Fear is the principal reason why men are so unwilling to admit facts and so anxious to wrap themselves round a warm garment of myth. . . . The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. The man who receives affection [or any favor] is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it.”
“What then can a man do who is unhappy because he is encased in self? So long as he continues to think about the causes of his unhappiness, he continues to be self-centered and therefore does not get outside the vicious circle; if he is to get outside it, it must be by genuine interests, not by simulated interests adopted merely as a medicine. . . . All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration or lack of integration; there is disintegration within self through lack of co-ordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The HAPPY MAN is the man who does not suffer from either of these failure of unity, whose personality is neither divided against itself nor pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. IT IS IN SUCH PROFOUND INSTINCTIVE UNION WITH THE STREAM OF LIFE THAT THE GREATEST JOY IS TO BE FOUND.” (Russell)
Selected by Mirza Ashraf.