What does it mean to be happy?

The answer to this question once seemed obvious to me. To be happy is to be satisfied with your life. If you want to find out how happy someone is, you ask him a question like, “Taking all things together, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole?”

Over the past 30 years or so, as the field of happiness studies has emerged from social psychology, economics and other disciplines, many researchers have had the same thought. Indeed this “life satisfaction” view of happiness lies behind most of the happiness studies you’ve read about. Happiness embodies your judgment about your life, and what matters for your happiness is something for you to decide.

This is an appealing view. But I have come to believe that it is probably wrong. Or at least, it can’t do justice to our everyday concerns about happiness.

I do not mean to suggest that life satisfaction studies can’t give us useful information about how people are doing. But I am suggesting that it is misleading to equate satisfaction with happiness, even if it is perfectly ordinary to talk that way at times.

So how else might we define happiness? There is another approach popular among researchers — one that focuses on feelings. If you feel good, and not bad, you’re happy. Feeling good may not be all that matters, but it certainly sounds like a more suitable candidate for happiness than a judgment that your life is good enough. Evidently, those Egyptians do not feel good, and that has a lot to do with why it seems unnatural to say that they are happy.

But I have come to believe that this approach is also probably wrong. When you look at the way researchers study this kind of happiness, you’ll notice something peculiar: Their questionnaires almost always ask about emotions and mood states, and rarely ask directly about pleasure, pain or suffering. In fact, you might have thought that if happiness researchers were really interested in pleasure and pain, among their queries would be questions aboutpain (“Do you suffer from chronic pain?” and so on). Such pains make a tremendous difference in how pleasant our lives are, yet happiness surveys rarely ask about them

I would suggest that when we talk about happiness, we are actually referring, much of the time, to a complex emotional phenomenon. Call it emotional well-being. Happiness as emotional well-being concerns your emotions and moods, more broadly your emotional condition as a whole. To be happy is to inhabit a favorable emotional state.

On this view, we can think of happiness, loosely, as the opposite of anxiety and depression. Being in good spirits, quick to laugh and slow to anger, at peace and untroubled, confident and comfortable in your own skin, engaged, energetic and full of life. To measure happiness, we might use extended versions of existing questionnaires for anxiety and depression from the mental-health literature. Already, such diagnostics often ask questions about positive states like laughter and cheerfulness, or your ability to enjoy things.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/13/happiness-and-its-discontents/?hp&rref=opinion

( On Not Going Home)

A wonderfully written and enjoyable article by Richard Cohen. It is always in our subconscious but never much thought about the question and subject. It is worth expressing your thoughts on the subject in comments section. (F. Sheikh) Some excerpts;

” In a fascinating recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

That question is worth repeating: If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go? It is a good way of getting rid of the clutter that distracts or blinds. I will get to that in a moment.

In the essay, Wood, who grew up in England but has lived in the United States for 18 years, explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home.

He speaks of existences “marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end.”

This is a widespread modern condition; perhaps it is the modern condition. Out of it, often, comes anxiety. Wood does not focus on the psychological effects of what he calls “a certain outsider-dom,” but if you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about belonging: displacement anguish.

Wood describes looking at the familiar life of his Boston street, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel … nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”

“Wood writes: “Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness,’ which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: It is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”

Yes, being not quite home, acceptance, which may be bountiful, is what is left to us.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/opinion/cohen-in-search-of-home.html?hp&rref=opinion

Shared by,Nasik Elahi

As Asian-Americans Age, Their Children Face Cultural Hurdles

Asian-Americans are struggling to abide by a strong tradition in which they are
commonly expected to care for their parents at home, but few institutions are
prepared to help.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/us/as-asian-americans-age-their-children-face-cultural-hurdles.html