Pages

Friday, February 26, 2016

"What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness." #Powerful


"The clearest message that we get from this 75 year study is this:  Good relationships keep us happier and healthier.  Period.

...

Loneliness kills."



This strikes me as related.  Why are women so unhappy? Too much choice.: "...a whole lot of people, faced with a multitude of choices, are made deeply unhappy by those choices, and often don’t make any choice at all. They become paralyzed by the sheer number of choices. Barry Schwartz wrote on this phenomena in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More. It’s a fascinating book...

Schwartz touches briefly on the issue of family and marriage, and I’d like to explore the subject in more depth, in the context of choices. For most of recorded human history, when it came to marriage and family, there weren’t any real choices...

...one of my biggest beefs with feminism is how it lies to young women about what will make them happy. A certain percentage of women are perfectly contented working in a cubicle and paying someone else to raise their children, if they choose to have them, and no one should stand in the way of their happiness, but most women are miserable under those conditions. 

When Forbes surveyed working mothers, fully 84% of them said being at home with their children was their dream, and of that 84%, one third said they resented their husbands for not making that possible. Where did women get the idea that they would love their paychecks more than their children? Feminism. It started with Betty Friedan, and has only escalated since then. 

Combined with the toxic narrative of ‘men are to blame for everything’, women are virtually guaranteed to make choices that will result in misery for everyone...  The more choices women have, the unhappier they have become, because, as Schwartz explains, women experience the paradox of never being happy enough, even when they have made a good choice..."

2 comments:

  1. Great video. Paradox of Choice is a fantastic book. Read it more than a decade ago and still remember satisficer (sp) vs. maximizer concept. Satisficer makes best choice they can and moves on; maximzizer always looking for very best option, never satisfied with choice they made. America's consumer-driven society meshes perfectly with notion of maximizing. That is, the way to get someone to buy the new thing is to create dissatisfaction with what he/she has. Once you buy the new thing, we'll create dissatisfaction with it by introducing the NEW, new thing (and so on). Great way to drive economy/spending, terrible way to live your life (i.e., always dissatisfied). Satisfaction, of course, never comes from acquiring "things". Cheers!

    ReplyDelete