Public Message

What is Happiness

What are we doing? What am I doing? All of us wake up in this world each day and with out noticing it, we dive deep into thought processes that help us to plan our morning, our afternoon, and our evenings around our biological human needs like how we are going to cloth ourselves, feed ourselves, and harness the resources required to transport ourselves to places we need or want to be.

Although the process which takes place between thinking of what we need or want and how we will be able to attain that of which we need or want may be acquired through divergent means and paths through which we experience negative and positive emotion. The goal of the human decisions process is to weigh outcomes and decide on the action, which will deliver the most efficient satisfaction.

Most of us wont naturally come to the conclusion that the human decision process is the vehicle that we use to strive for positive satisfaction. Happiness. Simply put, this is the pathway each of us use to reach positive emotional outputs.

What does any of this mean? Why does this question matter!

There seems to be an imbalance within todays wealth creation and how we feel about ourselves, what really makes us feel happy. If we look at consumerism today, with a wide objective view, we can easily see which countries are the largest consumers, deriving from the economy the largest financial sums. And yet it seems as though none of this financial prosperity is improving our happiness.

The most recent evidence of this was published in a recent issue in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, March 2010 publication by Thomas Gilovich and Travis J. Carter that explain when consumer habits and behaviors were examined to find a correlation with satisfaction and happiness, the research showed that the consumers whos derived an experience from their activity were much more satisfied than consumers who opted for material purchases.

Thomas Gilovich had this to say about consumer happiness: "There's a lot of work in the area of well-being and happiness showing that we adapt to most things," "Therefore, things like a new material purchase make us happy initially, but very quickly we adapt to it, and it doesn't bring us all that much joy. You could argue that adaptation is sort of an enemy of happiness. Other kinds of expenditures, such as experiential purchases, don't seem as subject to adaptation."

Simply put; the novelty of purchasing items that we think will help us be happy eventually wear off with its gradual adoption, where experiences are more emotionally lasting and satisfying. Gilovichs research into happiness has allowed him to conclude that people get more enduring happiness from their experiences than from their possessions.

This is important to note because the implications of these findings can help society reach needed social structure policies specifically designed to improve civil happiness where we might want to make available the resources that enable people to have experiences. You can't go hiking if there are no trails. And if those are the kinds of things that give people more enduring enjoyment, we need to make sure we're creating the kinds of communities that have parks, trails and so on that promote experiences that produce real enjoyment.

There are many social movements today that are focused on improving the quality of ones lifestyle. For example slow food is a practice that is slowly being adopted by many communities and individuals that involves the slow enjoyment and experience of producing and consuming the elements that provide us with nutrition and sustenance.

There are also many communities switching to 4 day work weeks because individuals and businesses have realized an improvement in worker productivity, efficiency and overall happiness in the work place. Individuals have noticed a improvement in their well-being as they have more quality time to spend with their families or on their own personal lives.

So where do we go from here having this understanding of consumerism and happiness. This information should be used to help all of us to start to think about a future we think would be nice to live in and be apart of while positively contributing to our communities.
We are all collectively the designers of our future.

Its time we start building a better and smarter world. I wish all of you good luck in finding your happiness.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Algonquin
• College
• Happiness
• and
• Consumerism