Get happy, and you'll live longer

It's always safe to tell lies about human nature.  It makes us feel good to hear, for example, that happiness is a learned skill.  Magazines and self-help books constantly repeat this lie, because it's the lie we wish to hear.  What is the alternative?  If happiness were genetic and innate, that would just be too depressing!

A recent article in US News & World Report magazine (among many other sad examples) concludes that:

While some people may be born with sunny dispositions, happiness isn't necessarily based on genes or luck.  Psychologists now believe it's a learned skill, almost like knitting.

Really?  Can we force ourselves to be happy, by willing ourselves (as Martin Seligman suggests) to be absorbed in our work, goals and leisure activities, and by thinking happy thoughts?  Sure, it's true that happier people live longer.  But you can't simply become happy by changing your thoughts and habits.  You can't teach an emotion or motivation.  It has to come from within (read: genetic predisposition) to have any lasting effect.

Self-help books or magazine articles are just trying to separate us from our money, by preying on our fervent desire for happiness and self-fulfillment... but in reality, it's all just a bunch of confabulations by greedy hucksters like Martin Seligman who just want to make a buck.

Comments

[Steve Harold - Hypnosis mp3]

You cannot, as you know, force happiness on someone. What you can do is help them to perceive life differently.

[Matthew]

I read Seligman's "Authentic Happiness" and was mostly disappointed. He helped found an interesting discipline in Positive Psychology, but he seems particularly uninterested in honestly confronting the problems that "genetic determinism" pose for his view of happiness. (At this point, he changes the subject by talking about living near the "top end" of your "set range" for happiness.)

Initially, it seemed to me that those like Seligman would try to challenge the pedestrian conceptions of happiness (that it's a feeling, that it's subjective and squishy), but as he trots out his self-helpy tips, he seems unable to avoid telling people how to FEEL better, rather than how to think differently about what happiness is...

But maybe we can't change our ways of thinking about happiness either?...