Book of the Week: Happier

13 Oct 2014

Continuing my positive psychology binge, I read Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, the Harvard professor who teaches the happiness class. The book is divided into three parts. The first part is about happiness. The second part is about happiness applied to education, work and relationships. The third part are thoughts about the nature happiness and its place in our lives. I’ll focus on the first part. Hamburger Model Tal likes food analogies. He mentions the Hamburger Model and Lasagna Principle. In the hamburger model, there are four types of hamburgers.

• Junk-food burger, present benefit and future detriment, hedonism
• Vegetarian burger, present detriment and future benefit, rat race
• Ideal burger, present benefit and future benefit, happiness
• Worst burger, present detriment and future detriment, nihilism

Those involved in the rat race are never happy, because they keep sacrificing present benefit for future benefit. The problem is that future benefit is like fusion energy. It is the energy source of the future and always will be. You always think that achieving the next goal will make you happy, but once you achieve it another goal looms on the horizon. You need to be able to enjoy the journey to be happy. Happiness

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence - Aristole

Tal defines happiness as “the overall experience of pleasure and meaning”. Pleasure is the present benefit and the future benefit is meaning. Ultimate Currency

When we were still hunters and gatherers, the accumulation of wealth—of food, primarily—would often determine whether we would survive the next drought or the next cold winter. Hoarding became part of our constitution. Today, even those of us whose futures are materially secure still have a tendency to hoard far beyond our needs. The accumulation of wealth is no longer a means toward survival but an end in itself. We no longer accumulate to live; we live to accumulate.

If you keeping asking why people do things, you eventually end up with, because it makes them happy. Money and wealth are only as useful as the amount of happiness they can bring once your basic needs are met. Instead of optimizing wealth, we should be working on things that make us happier. The problem is that wealth is easy to measure, while happiness is not. People are very poor at predicting future emotional states. The book has a lot of tips and exercises. One of the best things to increase happiness is to write about what you are grateful for in a daily journal.