ch1
1. Who has frequently been held up by philosophers as a paradigm of happiness?
2. What nation did Gallup find to be happiest in terms of daily experience?
3. What does Haybron say will most likely NOT be on your deathbed list of things you'd like to experience again before you go?
4. What was Aristotle's word for happiness, and what did he particularly not mean by it?
5. Which of Haybron's three happiness theories is not mainly concerned with feelings?
6. Why does Haybron consider "subjective well-being" unhelpful?
ch2
7. How does the author's Dad describe existence "on the Pond"?
8. What does Big Joe the commercial fisherman feel at the end of his working day, and how does he feel generally?
9. Your posture or stride reveals something deeper than what?
10. The author says moments like the one depicted in the photo on p.18 involve no what?
11. Who developed the notion of flow?
12. Tranquility, confidence, and expansiveness are aspects of what state of mind/body?
13. Though your temperament may be more or less fixed, your ___ may be more or less prone to change with circumstances.
14. What famous western Buddhist says happiness is an optimal state of being, much more than a feeling?
Discussion Questions (please add your own)
- Do you often, or ever, experience a state of mindless meditation? Are you happy in those moments? Or must such moments recur regularly over the course of a lifetime before such a judgment would be appropriate?
- How often do you find yourself fully engaged and absorbed in what you're doing? Do you think you could learn to experience such a state of being more frequently and reliably?
- How much attention do you pay to your posture and bodily presentation? When striding confidently do you feel more confident, when sitting erect do you feel more competent? Can acting happy make you happy?
- This isn't how most philosophers would define "rationality," but what do you think of it as a description of happiness? "When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, " I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness, — this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it, — is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational." William James
- Do you ever experience "flow," when your absorption in a task makes the experience of the passage of time drop away? Did you experience that more when younger? (Could that be what the poet Wordsworth was talking about when he referred to intimations of immortality in childhood?)
- How do you manage your bad moods? Does it work for you to try and ignore them, and just get on with your day? Or have you learned the Stoic/Vulcan art of distancing yourself from all moods? Is it possible to achieve selective distancing, drawing closer to happy moods and away from bad ones?
- Who's the happiest person you know? What have you learned from observing them?
- Do you agree that there's never been a better time to be alive? 1 (Steven Pinker in Better Angels of Our Nature, for one, says life's never been better.)
- "Life is good" - agree? What hypothetical circumstances in your life do you imagine might reverse your opinion?
- Do you think many poor communities are happier than the average college student? 3
- How important is health, and healthcare, in your conception of happiness? 7
- Do we need a theory or definition of happiness? 10
- What do you think of Aristotle's approach? 11
- Do you have views about eastern (eg, Buddhist) approaches to happiness?
- Can you be a genuinely happy individual in an unhappy society? 13
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