Don't Worry, Be Happy

Questions for the authors

(http://elenasbennett.com/)

Q: What are the main components of being happy?

A: It has been 30 years since people started asking the question, “what makes people happy?” It has been found that “ The keys lie in finding meaning and flow”. Meaning is when a person uses his or her strongest strengths and abilities to do something greater. For example, a high end company CEO runs into a wall with what he does. In other terms, he has gotten out all he can in his business. If he were to go and donate some amount of his money to charity or to go and do some charity work, he would have meaning. He is doing the greater good. Flow is a term to describe how a person gets so into a particular thing, that he/she forgets about the rest of the world and just focuses on it. A craftsman who is building a masterpiece of furniture will often get distracted from the world because he loves working on it so much.

Q: Is it possible for a nation, as a whole, to be happy?

A: I have been studying this topic and have come to an interesting conclusion. Income is only part of the picture. Getting a big income is only happy in the early stages. All nations are not the same, and that is for no random reason. All nations with a more stable democracy are subjected to having a greater well-being. The nations that have a low subjective to well-being are usually authoritarian. The fact that people get to choose to be controlled under a government that they choose keeps people comfortable and therefore, happier.

Q: How do people think about happiness?

A: Daniel Kahneman, a leading American psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in Economics, says there are several ``cognitive traps'' that make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. One of these traps is the confusion between being happy in your life and being happy about your life. Being happy in your life means to create situations or be involved in things that make you happy. Being happy about your life entails how you view your life overall. It is not only the individual things that you do to make yourself happy, but the overall outcome of those things. People think like this almost everywhere. They do not usually think about what will benefit them in the long run.(utilitarianism) Most people only do what they think will bring them joy right there and then.