Psychology and Mind: Always Learning New Things About Being Human
Once upon a distant past, Socrates allegedly said: "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Whatever deeper intention might have been behind that statement, I suppose I must admit that I have taken my interpretation of it to heart, over the years.
Poking Around in Our Hearts and Minds
I never grow tired of poking around in what makes human beings tick, including myself and those around me, as well as humanity on a broad scale.
Without suggesting that the two are necessarily connected, a couple of my favorite topics to look into are happiness and love.
I was watching a rather interesting YouTube interview the other day, which included a Harvard social scientist who pointed out that the whole idea that we choose to be happy or not be happy is only partially correct. What was somewhat of a revelation to me was that studies now suggest that anywhere in the range of 40-75% of what determines whether you have a generally cheerful disposition is genetic rather than environmental.
Even thinking about that set my head spinning a bit because I am — of course — from Denmark, which means I am of Danish genetic heritage, which in turn means that I come from a part of the world that loads of studies and research repeatedly suggest is home to some of the happiest people in the planet.
That said, I was also born to a mother and father who were not particularly cheerful or happy people, by nature. This, of course, leads me to pose the question of which part of the genetic makeup determines the outcome of the subsequent generation?
I think I know some of the answer to that. And it's not as simple as it might appear.
I have never been a particularly happy or cheerful person by nature which is not to say that I don't experience happier and more cheerful moments it's just not a state I stay in for very long at a time.
On the other hand, I am generally a fairly content person, at the meta level.
That is, I don't feel like there's a whole lot of stuff that's lacking from my life or that I have somehow been dealt the short end of the stick in life. I also don't maintain a long list of "things I must have in order to be happy." In a sense, I think that is a more accurate representation of my Danish heritage.
Anyway, the whole reason I took a quick dive down this Rabbit Hole of Happiness today is the fact that I can't help but think that so many of these surveys and studies of happiness will invariably produce ambiguous results because there are so many different definitions of happiness.
Just for starters, the dichotomy I just touched on offsets "happy EXUBERANT" with the idea of "happy CONTENT" and the two are quite different. And yet? They are both expressions of happiness, in the broadest sense of the concept.
And so, I find myself considering the question of what precisely it is people think they are really chasing after when they say they are "in pursuit of happiness." What's more, do they even know what they're chasing after?
After all, the happiness you're pursuing might just be a caricature presented to you through the pages of a magazine or through Hollywood movies, while it bears no real relation to the sort of inner happiness that would actually lead to you living a content life.
Sometimes it really seems to me that "the life examined" very often leads to a good bit of inner conflict and confusion! Thanks for that, Socrates!
Still, I'm happy (see what I did there?) to keep examining and plan to continue doing so for as long as I have breath in me. Whether I ever come up with the answers that will somehow ensure complete peace of mind I don't know. And maybe it doesn't matter...
As another truism goes, "it's not really about the destination, it's about the journey."
And with that thought, I shall take myself and my clichés to bed. Thanks for stopping by and have a great Sunday!
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Created at 2024-01-20 23:55 PST
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Does this mean that the man said that our happiness or sadness is based on genetic reasons or how we think rather than the environmental factors
Really?