Technology Review: Technology and Happiness
Rated • 1 review • technology, happiness • technologyreview.com
Happiness may seem like a pretty nebulous concept, but psychologists like Martin Seligman have been doing their best to study it scientifically. This field is called Positive Psychology, and over the past few decades its practitioners have come up with some interesting results.
- "Contrary to everything you might think, 'in the long run, it doesn't much matter what happens to you,' [Jonathan] Haidt writes.... 'It's better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you'd think.... Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.'
"The study showed that people were most content when they were experiencing... 'the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one's abilities.' We are at our happiest when we are absorbed in what we are doing.... [Happiness is] 'a by-product of absorption.'
"A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. [People in the past] would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn't be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us." (John Lanchester, "Pursuing Happiness")
