The Journal of Happiness Studies
Comments: 2
Yes, there really is a Journal of Happiness Studies — which could either be wonderful news or yet another sign of our imminent demise. It is, in the mangled phrasing of an recent article in The Scotsman, “a quarterly academic publication dedicated to finding out what makes the good life and empirically to investigate well-being.”
According to the article:
The pursuit of happiness has become a major preoccupation of modern life and now scientists have come up with a nine-point plan to find inner peace.
Each of the points — things like not getting hung up on your appearance, believing in a god or two or at least some sort of higher spiritual power type arrangement — is perfectly straightforward (perhaps staggeringly obvious is a better description), but there’s no word on how to achieve these points themselves so that the happiness may then come flooding in.
Reminds me of something I read from Robert M. Pirsig once — How to become a perfect painter: just make yourself perfect and paint naturally.
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2003.11.12 (Wed) • 15:04
Comments
Posted by kevin 2003.11.12, 23:35
There was an interesting article in Fast Company a while back about the price of happiness. The author did a study that also touched on how much money we need to make up for missing non-monetary sources of happiness, or how much money it takes to actually purchase happiness. They found how much each of these intangibles is actually worth:
Marriage_$100,000 Children$0* Losing job-$60,000 (man) Widowhood-$245,000 Poor health_-$180,000 to -$220,000 (Decline from excellent to good) , -$600,000 to -800,000 (Decline from excellent to fair)
There’s also an interview with the author on the connection if your interested.
Posted by Paul 2005.02.27, 02:47
The price of articles from the Journal of Happiness Studies will not make you happy :-) Suggest happiness researchers reveal their wisdom through free pre/post prints rather than make rich publishers even richer. They will get more citations/fame via this route because people might actually read thir work. This is a win-win approach - everyone gets happier except the rich publisher (whose happiness will remain about the same, the research shows).
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