Letters Remain

Tag: happiness

  • The Source of Happiness

    When, after twenty years of marriage, Laura Munson’s husband told her “I don’t love you anymore. I’m not sure I ever did.“, she chose to not believe him. Not because it didn’t hurt or that she wasn’t taking it personally, but because this wasn’t about her — it was about unmet expectations. In yet another…

  • The Advantage of Busywork: Happiness

    “We are happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness”, says Christopher Hsee, a researcher at the University of Chicago who has been studying the link between busyness and happiness. What this means is that work conducted merely to keep us busy (so-called busywork) can actually increase our happiness, despite what conventional wisdom suggests…

  • The Argument for Parenthood

    It is often suggested that having children has a negative net effect on the happiness of the parents. Economist Bryan Caplan disagrees, suggesting that studies have missed the evidence suggesting that parents sacrifice more than they need to and overestimate the long-term effects of parenting on a wide range of child outcomes (including education, morality,…

  • Complexity and Autonomy Key to Workplace Satisfaction

    Work complexity and autonomy are the two largest factors in deciding workplace satisfaction, suggested findings reported in a 1985 article in The New York Times. The findings came from research by Dr. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Dr. Melvin L. Kohn and seems to agree with a more recent discussion on the three keys to programmer…

  • Happy Citizens are Good Citizens

    By fostering happiness in our cities, towns and villages we are simultaneously cultivating inhabitants that will give more blood, donate more to charity, and generally be better citizens. That’s the conclusion from a study looking at how happy people become better citizens as a result of being happy. Happier people trust others more, and importantly,…

  • The Heritability of Happiness

    A study looks at how much of our happiness can be attributed to our genes? Neither socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in well-being (WB). From 44% to 52% of the variance in WB, however, is associated…

  • Technological Affluence and Happiness (Everything Except TV is Good)

    In a study probing the association between ‘technological affluence’ and general well-being it was found that computers, mobile phones and music players increased self-reported levels of happiness, while television ownership decreased it. That is: the ownership of most modern technological goods makes us happy, except for televisions, which make us sad. Using self-reported life satisfaction…

  • A Summary of Happiness Research

    David Brooks brings ‘happiness research’ back to the wider public’s attention with a succinct summary of research into what does and does not make us happy: Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? […] If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are…

  • The Rise of Cooking Shows, the Fall of Cooking (and Happiness)

    I almost ignored this bit-too-long piece on the rise of the TV cooking show and the simultaneous fall of the home cooked meal (via @borrodell). That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them…

  • Evidence-Based Methods to Become Lucky

    In an attempt to discover whether there were genuine personality traits that separate the lucky from the unlucky, Richard Wiseman studied 400 people over a number of years and discovered that there are indeed behavioural differences between the lucky and luckless—and that we can ‘learn’ these traits to improve our luck. Wiseman states that the…