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    Happiness for Dummies: A Guide to Thinking and Feeling Better About Things
    Happiness for Dummies: A Guide to Thinking and Feeling Better About Things
    Happiness for Dummies: A Guide to Thinking and Feeling Better About Things
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    Happiness for Dummies: A Guide to Thinking and Feeling Better About Things

    By Dr. George Weathers

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    Most folks balk at one-size-fits-all advice on the pursuit of happiness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t each become happier. Happiness For Dummies is a light, thoughtful, authoritative 32,000-word book about how to go about that. Some aspects depend a lot on who you are--human relationships, for instance. Some things usually represent major investments--homes and cars, for instance. Still other things are only as important as you feel they are--sound systems, for instance. Sometimes, advertising has created needs where none existed before—leisure time, for instance. In areas like love and work, it’s sometimes even necessary to unsnarl the English language and clarify what’s going on in your head and heart.
    Happiness is a feeling, not a fact, and today feelings are at the mercy of advertising. Ads make us unhappy. Then they suggest that if we buy something or do something, a Magic Kingdom will open. Ads appeal not to logic but to feelings and to our wish to trust authority, even if it’s just the advice of an actor in a commercial. Ads’ impact is enormous, but they don’t have our best interests at heart.
    Most people think they’d be happier if they had more stuff. Studies indicate this isn’t really true. In the last 250 years, personal wealth—world Gross Domestic Product per person—has grown 37-fold, but global happiness has decreased during that same time.
    Questions arise. How much quality in, say, table settings is really necessary to you? What other uses might you find for money if you weren’t spending every cent you earned? How can you amuse yourself without investing anything but time? In what ways is “keeping up” useful and in what ways does it just add complication? Post-materialists tend to spend extra time on creative things, family and nature. Maybe you’d add other things to that list. The point is that happiness is possible. You just have to learn how to pursue it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateJan 8, 2014
    ISBN9781483517384
    Happiness for Dummies: A Guide to Thinking and Feeling Better About Things

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      Book preview

      Happiness for Dummies - Dr. George Weathers

      9781483517384

      Step 1

      Decide Who You Are and Who You Want To Be

      Back in 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. We see a desperation explosion today. Most of it is voluntary desperation, artificially induced. While you probably can’t change a world that works this way, you can change yourself so that you don’t volunteer for desperation, thinking it’s going to turn out to be something else.

      Happiness isn’t a stable state. Saying They lived happily ever after is like saying They inhaled ever after. But you can polish your inhaling. A lot depends on your skill in life’s cafeteria line--what you take and what you leave. One happiness plan won’t work for everyone, but you might revisit, regularly and quietly, what you want and what you don’t, especially in terms of stuff.

      Many people rush through life on impulse setting. That tends to get them in desperate situations they might have avoided, stuff-wise. Stuff-merchants almost all advertise, so we’re encouraged to think stuff equals happiness. A University of Chicago study found that Americans, on average, have doubled our stuff-supply in the past forty years, but during that same period, the percentage of people who classed themselves as very happy declined.

      How much of your personal Good Life is related to stuff? How much is related to creative activities, time with other people or communion with nature? These three things were favored by post-materialists, according to Affluenza, a TV documentary produced by John de Graaf and Vivia Boe which later gave birth to a book of the same name and a bit of a movement.

      Maybe your Good Life is related to something else--work, religion, your hobby or some other passion you have. You should try to craft a life that satisfies you, even if it wouldn’t satisfy anyone else. Nobody can make that life but you, but you can and should learn tactics to help make it.

      We have access to a lot more information, a lot more wealth and a lot more technology today than Thoreau had in 1854. Eric D. Heinhocker in The Origins of Wealth pointed out that for 99.4% of economic history, most people had no more personal wealth than aboriginal tribesmen. In only the most recent hundredth of one percent of human economic history, our personal wealth exploded. Global wealth—world Gross Domestic Product per person—grew 37-fold in the last 250 years, but global happiness hasn’t similarly exploded.

      We live in an image-rich age. It’s sometimes hard to calm down and think clearly with so many media fire-hoses herding us this way and that, so let’s start with some basic observations about how our world works.

      In his Essay On Self-Reliance, a friend of Thoreau’s named Ralph Waldo Emerson said that everyone finally has two, finite resources to work with--the organism in which our soul currently resides, and the moment in history during which we’re alive. This notion isn’t unique to Emerson, but it’s important enough to serve as an anchor. Your life will be what you make of yourself and of now. Both these things change constantly. We all face pressures, and we all have options. In a different era, for a different person, the pressures and options might be different.

      We should also appreciate the role that fantasy plays in the modern world. Fantasies, even commercially provided ones, can be healthy, but life also involves many realities. It’s dangerous to confuse the two, but it’s equally dangerous to think anyone’s world turns by logic alone. So how do you arrive at your perceptions of what the world is like? This is not necessarily a look at how you should perceive the world, but you do need to keep track of what your personal organism is up to right now.

      Emerson also said, Man…dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. Despite the condemnation of quoting just quoted, you need to educate yourself constantly, from good sources. Having a firm handle on true facts can really help you reduce desperation, quiet or otherwise.

      Step 2

      Recognize That Logic Isn’t the Most Common Motivator

      In his book TRUTH, a History and a Guide for the Perplexed, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto says people seek truth by four paths. They are feeling, authority, logical reasoning and experience. In listing logic third of the four paths, Fernandez-Armesto was speaking historically and, to a considerable extent, realistically even today.

      Feeling

      Poet e.e. cummings said, …feeling is first. While you really shouldn’t put all your marbles in any one of these bags, do recognize that you won’t always feel like doing what God, society or the law says you should (authority), what makes sense (logic), or even what’s worked for you in times past (experience).

      I love motorcycles. I’ve ridden them since I was 14. I even raced them for several years, with far more enthusiasm than talent. I’ve tasted society’s disdain for motorcyclists. I’ve heard lots of good logical arguments against riding and racing motorcycles. I’ve been colder, wetter and generally more miserable than someone who has never ridden a motorcycle has probably been, not to mention falling off more times than I could ever count, especially while playing in the dirt. But I love motorcycles so much that I ride them anyway. Logically I cover my bets. I’ve bounced along on my head too often not to wear a helmet, and I understand that I am absolutely invisible while riding in traffic and can only survive by paying keen attention (a handy habit even while driving a car). I’ve never owned a motorcycle with a radio or music player, and I’ve never tried to talk on a cell phone or text while riding. Riding is a vivid experience, and it encourages alertness bordering on paranoia.

      I’ve also gotten fairly good at controlling a motorcycle in normal and abnormal situations. Not that others aren’t a lot better.

      You probably have other things which you do because they feel good, despite authority figures who oppose them, logical arguments against them, bad experiences with them, etc. Feeling is non-verbal. It’s not subject to the reality-warping properties of language, but it also resists careful analysis.

      We also all have a desire to create different kinds of art, and this involves feeling. Cars become sculpture; skateboarding is dance. Video games are a new art form, but they’re definitely art. Even bad art can feel good to do.

      Feeling is an okay reason for doing things, but monitor your feelings carefully. In today’s world, advertising usually tries reach you through your feelings, and advertisers put their clients’ best interests far ahead of yours. That’s their job, and it’s dangerous to forget that.

      Authority

      Advertising also loves to appeal to authority. Fernandez-Armesto defines this second path to truth as the truth you are told. Religion, law and ritual exist here, along with a lot of what parents, teachers, talk show hosts and actors making commercials tell you. If you ever cut any of the hair that grows on your head or on any part of your body, you do so mostly in response to authority.

      While you can learn lots of valuable things from those around you, it’s wise to develop and maintain a conscience. People do terrible things because they believe they have an excuse signed by God or their Captain or CEO. This path to truth has less power today than it had in the past, say in the Middle Ages, but it still packs quite a wallop. And there are still people who sacrifice everything for a greater cause. We tend to see this as heroic or idiotic, depending partly on our own system of authority. Emerson said, No law can be sacred to me but that of my Nature, and Thoreau wrote an essay called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, but sometimes authority does lead us down good paths.

      Reasoning

      Rational thinking is more fact-based than other approaches. While man cannot live on fact alone, facts do exist and they tend to be pretty stable.

      All the same, most people find there’s a feel-barrier beyond which they cannot go when it comes to fact-worship. Why use more than one square of toilet paper at a time to wipe yourself? You’re going to wash your hands anyway, right? In fact, why not use junk mail to wipe and avoid store-bought toilet paper entirely?

      Why buy new underwear when clean, used underwear is so cheap? Most people (including me) don’t buy used underwear, despite the potential saving. Some people (not including me) never buy used clothing at all. Of course it’s been washed! Logical arguments against doing logical things usually aren’t very strong, but they are often expressed with great feeling.

      Experience

      Fernandez-Armesto’s fourth path to truth is experience and experimentation. What works for you? This is the path which transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau liked a lot; what’s true to your Nature? Everyone has things that are easy for them and things that are hard. You need to discover what strengths and what weaknesses your organism has, and how trainable it is in various areas. Then learn to live in there as best you can.

      I gag if I try to swallow more than two pills at a time. My wife Kathy knows a lot about physiology, vitamins, etc. She and our doctors have got us both on pills that we take each morning and others that we take each evening. Kathy can down her pills in one gulp and never shed a tear. Not me. Authority

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