"If we're so rich, why aren't we happy"
Submitted by jaz on August 26, 2008 - 1:10pm.
Science
I'm researching articles for a section my Rhetoric class is going to do on consumer culture and I stumbled on this article by (long name coming) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "Enjoyment as an Alternative to Materialism." His main idea is that we have two contradictory motivational systems--he calls one "pleasure" and the other "enjoyment." Pleasure has to do with satisfying needs like eating, resting, procreating, while enjoyment is more of a feeling of exhilaration that accompanies being immersed in an activity. Consumer culture is almost entirely about the former and not about the latter. I tried to find the article online, but couldn't; there's another one by the same author (a bit more scientific and in depth) if you click on this link and download the document: "If We Are So Rich, Why Aren't We Happy?"
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Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy
Submitted by jaz on August 23, 2009 - 8:29am.
Heh, somehow these two things seemed connected to me--this is a video of the comic Louis CK on the Conan O'Brien show talking about how we've become so blase about our technology. It starts a little slow, but the part toward the end about flying on planes I found hysterical :-)
Everything is amazing, and nobody is happy
ETA--think that link wasn't made correctly before--hopefully I feex
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Another article on same subject
This is another article looking at some of the same kind of research on money and happiness. In some ways it doesn't actually seem about money to me (when discussing how money is used are we actually talking about money? heh, maybe that's a feature of money--it doesn't actually mean anything on it's own). As far as "money" is concerned, I thought the most interesting finding was that thinking of money makes people more isolated (they will put more physical space between themselves and others, for instance) and more pain resistant.
Otherwise, some of the findings seem fairly obvious--money used to buy things doesn't increase happiness. Money given away or used to foster social experience does.
Happiness: A Buyer's Guide