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The Myth Of Happiness (2000)

by Sonja Lyubomirsky(Favorite Author)

3.63 of 5 Votes: 1

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English

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review 1: I was drawn to the title of the book. Most of the tips were not new to me. But the last chapters about looking back were quite good with examples. I also like the rich cosmetic surgeon who turned out to devote his life to helping people in need in South Africa. I also like the idea of two kinds of love, passionate love and companionate love. 'For companionate love, my partner is one of the likable people I know. My partner is the sort of person that I would like to be. I have great confidence in my partner's good judgment. ' One thing I don't agree with the author is that she emphasized with reasonable thinking and denied intuition or gut feeling. But for me, to really make a big decision without regret is we need both methods, thinking through from many angles and our own... more gut feeling as many CEOs point out. I feel the author has been living a relatively peaceful life without major problems or obstacles so she needs to build lots of evidences by experiments or sources. But because of this, I felt the book sounds a bit too superficial and not realistic because we are not logical animals always. But because of defect, our lives are rich with ups and downs.
review 2: NOTE: Although I am not familiar with the author's finances, I am relatively sure that she is rather wealthy judging from the examples taken from her own life (e.g. moving to a new house where the shower has six shower heads, husband is a securities lawyer, etc.). To her credit, she does acknowledge the limitations that wealth (or a relative lack thereof) places on her research. 1. Pursue an appropriate goal The crisis point at the heart of this section concerns our anxiety about not having yet achieved our dreams, yet the empirical evidence reveals that the critical factor in whether goal pursuit makes us happy lies in enjoying the journey and not in realizing the end-goal (dream).Ask yourself the following questions about your so-far unrealized ambition or dream. Is your goal—say, to start your own business—attainable? Who is the owner of the goal—you or someone else? Does it conflict with a long-held plan (e.g., to spend a lot of time with family or travel around the world)? Do you truly feel “yourself” when you are pursuing your ambition or fantasizing about it? Do you expect to grow in the process or to develop lasting relationships? Would you still do it if the compensation were much more modest? First, make a mental note of your initial intuitions or gut reactions about the path you should be taking—perhaps even write them down—and then shelve them for a while. After you spend time thinking through your situation systematically, you may reconsider the initial gut reaction in light of new information or insights. Second, seek the opinion of an outsider (impartial friend or counselor) or simply make an effort to take an objective observer’s perspective. The key is to liberate yourself from the nitty-gritty details of your particular problem (say, that you’re currently experiencing a loss of passion) and try to consider the broader class of problems to which yours belongs (say, the course of physical attraction in a long-term relationship). Third, consider the opposite of whatever your gut instinct is telling you to do, and systematically play through the consequences in your mind. And, finally, when your crossroads involves multiple decisions (as opposed to just one), weigh all your options simultaneously rather than separately. Research reveals that such “joint” decision making is more successful and less prone to bias than “separate” decision making.2. Plan as many (frequent, novel and) pleasurable experiences as possible into your life - happiness is correlated to frequency irrespective of intensity, novelty, anticipation, and an absence of obvious opportunity costs (e.g. why didn't I try the daily special instead of the usual)A simple thrift strategy is suggested by research on the emotional benefits of forging positive experiences that are frequent rather than intense (e.g., several modest restaurant dinners rather than a single blowout) and separated rather than combined (rationing out our favorite Sopranos episodes week by week rather than splurging on several at a time).Thus, although advertisers might tell us otherwise, we should aim to spend our money on a series of small intermittent pleasures (e.g., bouquets of fresh flowers or long-distance phone calls to close friends) rather than one big costly amenity (like a fancy sound system). This practice turns out to be both gratifying and relatively cheap. The reason is that when we savor a positive experience—whether it’s a gripping movie, half an hour in a massage chair, or a delicious piece of lemon cake—“the banquet is in the first bite.” In other words, with each passing minute, hour, or week, our capacity to savor the same experience dwindles. However, our capacity to savor and enjoy can be replenished after a break. Thus, carving up our consumption into smaller doses and separating it out by time can multiply those “first bites” and increase our pleasure.Indeed, researchers who studied a thousand Dutch vacationers concluded that by far the greatest amount of happiness extracted from the vacation is derived from the anticipation period, a finding that suggests that we should not only prolong that period but aim to take several small vacations rather than one mega-vacation. less

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