"What
science has found is what sages, philosophers and grandmothers have been
telling us for an awfully long time some things that won’t bring you happiness " Dr. Gilbert, author of Stumbling Towards Happiness.
Bob McDonald:
Our brains are untrustworthy when it comes to helping us
find happiness.
Doctor Gilbert’s book ‘exploring our sometimes misguided
search for the good life: “Stumbling
Towards Happiness”’
Dr. G.: What science
has found is what sages, philosophers and grandmothers have been telling us for
an awfully long time some things that won’t bring you happiness are gobs and
gobs of money, for example. Money has a
very unusual relationship with happiness.
Some people say ‘money can’t buy happiness’ and those people should go
talk to somebody who is living under an underpass. Indeed, when you’re abjectly poor, money does
move you from poverty to the middle class.
It makes a huge difference in a person’s happiness. However, more money doesn’t make you more
happy. So, we get all the happiness we
can out of money very early on and once we have a comfortable life style,
accumulating more of it doesn’t seem to make us very happy at all.
Here’s one that surprises a lot of people – children. Now most of us, if you said ‘What’s your
greatest source of happiness?” If you’re
a parent we immediately think of our kids.
And yet, when you look at how happy people are when they are actually in
the act of parenting, they’re not very happy at all. (me: hahahaha) Indeed, when you look at happiness over the
life cycle of a marriage, for example, you see that people are very happy when
they first get married and then their happiness starts to plummet. And the only time when it actually returns to
its pre-marital levels is when their children leave home. So, do children make you happy? Well, in some sense they contribute to our
belief that we’ve had a fulfilling life and there are certainly moments with our
children and our grandchildren that are absolutely transcendent. But the data suggest that, on the whole,
trying to be happy is not a good reason to have kids.”
Personally, I think experiencing being a parent helps teach you how to be happy.
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