To start, we don’t really know what happiness is, or how to measure it. Measuring happiness is about as easy as taking the temperature of the soul or determining the exact color of love.
As Darrin M. McMahon shows in his illuminating study Happiness: A History, ever since the 6th Century B.C., when Croseus is said to have quipped “No one who lives is happy,” we have seen this slippery concept being a proxy for all sorts of other concepts, from pleasure and joy to plenitude and contentment. Being happy in the moment, Samuel Johnson said, could be achieved only when drunk. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, happiness was to lie in a boat, drifting aimlessly, feeling like a God (not exactly the picture of productivity). There are other definitions of happiness, too, but they are neither less nor more plausible but those of Rousseau or Johnson.
And just because we have more advanced technology today doesn’t mean we’re any closer to pinning down a definition, as Will Davies reminds us in his new book The Happiness Industry. He concludes that even as we have developed more advanced techniques for measuring emotions and predicting behaviors, we have also adopted increasingly simplified notions of what it means to be human, let alone what it means to pursue happiness. A brain scan that lights up may seem like it’s telling us something concrete about an elusive emotion, for example, when it actually isn’t.
The post Research on Happiness appeared first on Taxi Times.
Source Link Research on Happiness
