I just came across an interesting and entertaining short video of a 22 minute talk by Stumbling on Happiness Author Daniel Gilbert. I thought you might find it useful so I’ve posted it below. In it he talks about synthetic happiness and real happiness.

I have his book here, when I’ve read it I might post more on it. Share your comments and let me know your thoughts on the ideas in the video.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In response to Kirk’s comment a short series on happiness and happiness thresholds.

Have you ever read those glossy women’s magazines that share inside gossip on celebrities or real life stories on people?

I have. Sometimes there might be a tale of someone who spent $100,000 on plastic surgery and still thinks she’s ugly. It will tell how she started with a nose job because she was plagued with insecurity. After surgery she was delighted with her nose, but less happy with other parts of her body. And so bit by bit she went back and back to her Surgeon. Because the problem was never really her body, but her emotional insecurity.

I think this is a good analogy to us as a society and our relation to happiness. What we think will make us happy, usually won’t. Socially we have evolved very quickly. We’re much richer, we have more freedom, more options and more knowledge.

Yet study after study has shown that despite being far more affluent, people are not happier than 50 years ago and are often less dissatisfied. Does that mean that we live in a worse time?

There might be some people who look back on past times with nostalgia and think we have lost community spirit and so on. However if you were to look back over the history of humanity, you’d see those same opinions thousands of years ago. Each generation takes progress past the last. And those who don’t understand the changes always think it is a sign of ‘the world going crazy’.

My parent’s generation and older will often hark back to the 50’s and 60’s saying, back then you could leave your door open without being burgled. But they forget that was mainly because they didn’t have much worth stealing.

Think about it, would you really want to go back to a world without washing machines, television, fridge freezers, computers, double glazing, central heating and indoor plumbing?

So today we have more, but we also want more.

We are richer because our economy has developed exponentially. People in the 50’s wanted and expected less. They weren’t exposed to the endless barrage of media attempting to make them feel insecure unless they buy a certain brand at quite the same level.

My mum tells me that she and her friends never thought about their weight. Maybe it’s just her, but I can believe it was less of an issue. Today you have 6 year olds wanting to go on diets.

Lottery winners are another example. Millions of people eagerly buy their tickets and pray for a chance at a life changing win. One year later and most who win are at the same level of happiness or unhappiness they were at when they were hoping for that change of luck. Again because the problem wasn’t really money.

Money is an important part of our lives. It can free up our time. It can get help for projects we want to do. It can speed things up. In short, what it does is magnify and amplify what we are doing. If things are going well, it can enhance them. If things are going bad it can exacerbate the problems. But it is only a tool we have developed. It is not the only route to what you want.

It is only lack of imagination not lack of money stops someone from doing something.

So why doesn’t having more lead to more happiness?

In the next few posts we’ll examine this question.