November 5, 2019

📚 Book Notes: The Happiness Hypothesis - Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

A 4/10 for me, it didn’t have anything new, and I probably slept a couple of times while reading this book!

Here are my notes from The Happiness Hypothesis - Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom:

Bits

1. Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world.
   Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; and on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it.
2. Gossip is a policeman and a teacher. Without it, there would be chaos and ignorance. Paired with reciprocity, it allows karma to work here on earth, not in the next life.
3. One of the most common lessons people draw from bereavement or trauma is that they are much stronger than they realized, and this new appreciation of their strength then gives them confidence to face future challenges.
4. The benefits of volunteer work for the elderly are so large that they even show up in improved health and longer life.
5. There is no test to hand in at the end of life, so there is no way to fail.

Bytes

1. One of the most bizarre demonstrations of the like-o-meter in action comes from the work of Brett Pelham, who has discovered that one’s like-o-meter is triggered by one’s own name. Whenever you see or hear a word that resembles your name, a little flash of pleasure biases you toward thinking the thing is good. So when a man named Dennis is considering a career, he ponders the possibilities: “Lawyer, doctor, banker, dentist . . . dentist . . . something about dentist just feels right.” And, in fact, people named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely than people with other names to become dentists. Men named Lawrence and women named Laurie are more likely to become lawyers. Louis and Louise are more likely to move to Louisiana or St. Louis, and George and Georgina are more likely to move to Georgia. The own-name preference even shows up in marriage records: People are slightly more likely to marry people whose names sound like their own, even if the similarity is just sharing a first initial. When Pelham presented his findings to my academic department, I was shocked to realize that most of the married people in the room illustrated his claim: Jerry and Judy, Brian and Bethany, and the winners were me, Jon, and my wife, Jayne.
   The unsettling implication of Pelham’s work is that the three biggest decisions most of us make—what to do with our lives, where to live, and whom to marry—can all be influenced (even if only slightly) by something as trivial as the sound of a name. Life is indeed what we deem it, but the deeming happens quickly and unconsciously. The elephant reacts instinctively and steers the rider toward a new destination.
2. For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.
3. Suppose you were invited to play the “ultimatum” game, which economists invented to study the tension between fairness and greed. It goes like this: Two people come to the lab but never meet. The experimenter gives one of them—let’s suppose it’s not you—twenty one-dollar bills and asks her to divide them between the two of you in any way she likes. She then gives you an ultimatum: Take it or leave it. The catch is that if you leave it, if you say no, you both get nothing. If you were both perfectly rational, as most economists would predict, your partner would offer you one dollar, knowing that you’d prefer one dollar to no dollars, and you’d accept her offer, because she was right about you. But the economists were wrong about you both. In real life, nobody offers one dollar, and around half of all people offer ten dollars. But what would you do if your partner offered you seven dollars? Or five? Or three? Most people would accept the seven dollars, but not the three. Most people are willing to pay a few dollars, but not seven, to punish the selfish partner.
4. The author of Ecclesiastes wasn’t just battling the fear of meaninglessness; he was battling the disappointment of success. The pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting. You dream about getting a promotion, being accepted into a prestigious school, or finishing a big project. You work every waking hour, perhaps imagining how happy you’d be if you could just achieve that goal. Then you succeed, and if you’re lucky you get an hour, maybe a day, of euphoria, particularly if your success was unexpected and there was a moment in which it was revealed (. . . the envelope, please). More typically, however, you don’t get any euphoria. When success seems increasingly probable and some final event confirms what you already had begun to expect, the feeling is more one of relief—the pleasure of closure and release. In such circumstances, my first thought is seldom “Hooray! Fantastic!”; it is “Okay, what do I have to do now?”
5. It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. Because whatever happens, you’re likely to adapt to it, but you don’t realize up front that you will. We are bad at “affective forecasting,” that is, predicting how we’ll feel in the future. We grossly overestimate the intensity and the duration of our emotional reactions. Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness. The lottery winner buys a new house and a new car, quits her boring job, and eats better food. She gets a kick out of the contrast with her former life, but within a few months the contrast blurs and the pleasure fades. The human mind is extraordinarily sensitive to changes in conditions, but not so sensitive to absolute levels. The winner’s pleasure comes from rising in wealth, not from standing still at a high level, and after a few months the new comforts have become the new baseline of daily life. The winner takes them for granted and has no way to rise any further. Even worse: The money might damage her relationships. Friends, relatives, swindlers, and sobbing strangers swarm around lottery winners, suing them, sucking up to them, demanding a share of the wealth. (Remember the ubiquity of self-serving biases; everyone can find a reason to be owed something.) Lottery winners are so often harassed that many have to move, hide, end relationships, and finally turn to each other, forming lottery winner support groups to deal with their new difficulties. (It should be noted, however, that nearly all lottery winners are still glad that they won.)
   At the other extreme, the quadriplegic takes a huge happiness loss up front. He thinks his life is over, and it hurts to give up everything he once hoped for. But like the lottery winner, his mind is sensitive more to changes than to absolute levels, so after a few months he has begun adapting to his new situation and is setting more modest goals. He discovers that physical therapy can expand his abilities. He has nowhere to go but up, and each step gives him the pleasure of the progress principle. The physicist Stephen Hawking has been trapped in a shell of a body since his early twenties, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. Yet he went on to solve major problems in cosmology, win many prizes, and write the best-selling science book of all time. During a recent interview in the New York Times, he was asked how he keeps his spirits up. He replied: “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was twenty-one. Everything since then has been a bonus.”

If you liked the above content, I’d definitely recommend reading the whole book. 💯

Until We Meet Again…
🖖 swap