WELLBYs

…You can measure wellbeing by simply asking people to report their wellbeing, for example, by asking, "How happy are you?" on a scale of 0-10.

We use WELLBYs as our metric of choice. WELLBY is an acronym for wellbeing-adjusted life year, where a WELLBY is a one-point change in life satisfaction on a 0-10 point scale for one person over one year.1 Essentially, it is the wellbeing equivalent of the DALY (disability-adjusted life year) or QALY (quality-adjusted life-year), which are traditional measures of health outcomes…

https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffstreeter/p/can-we-make-the-world-a-happier-place?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Why happiness is like exercise

 “Much of what we teach revolves around positive psychology interventions that divert your attention away from yourself, by helping others, being with friends, gratitude or meditating,” Hood said. “This is the opposite of the current ‘selfcare’ doctrine, but countless studies have shown that getting out of our own heads helps gets us away from negative ruminations which can be the basis of so many mental health problems.”  Hidden Brain

International Day of Happiness

Tea? Cheese? Inventing? Tell us what makes you happy this International Day of Happiness 👇⁠

https://www.threads.net/@thewallaceandgromit/post/C4vWSKptfP7/?xmt=AQGzxF2X-y89Mb8M6-XJ2RYITb8BPA22OAvjwIx8pz_KQA

Solid psychological insights on happiness

#1. Anticipation enhances pleasure…

-Paul Bloom

https://open.substack.com/pub/paulbloom/p/three-intruiging-findings-about-pleasure?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Happiest Countries, 2024

Missed the cut:

The Top 20 World's Happiest Countries, 2024.

1. 🇫🇮 Finland
2. 🇩🇰 Denmark
3. 🇮🇸 Iceland
4. 🇸🇪 Sweden
5. 🇮🇱 Israel
6. 🇳🇱 Netherlands
7. 🇳🇴 Norway
8. 🇱🇺 Luxembourg
9. 🇨🇭 Switzerland
10. 🇦🇺 Australia
11. 🇳🇿 NZ
12. 🇨🇷 Costa Rica
13. 🇰🇼 Kuwait
14. 🇦🇹 Austria
15. 🇨🇦 Canada
16. 🇧🇪 Belgium
17. 🇮🇪 Ireland
18. 🇨🇿 Czechia
19. 🇱🇹 Lithuania
20. 🇬🇧 UK

https://www.threads.net/@veryfinnishproblems/post/C4vsMHdCwSQ/?xmt=AQGzroRKipmonTpbvrsVPpXE70zfgLQiLcd5Kp6YmQ4TKA

The right side of the U-curve

…People aged 60 and older in the U.S. reported high levels of well-being compared to younger people. In fact, the United States ranks in the top 10 countries for happiness in this age group.

Conversely, there's a decline in happiness among younger adolescents and young adults in the U.S. "The report finds there's a dramatic decrease in the self-reported well-being of people aged 30 and below," says report author Jan-Emmanuel De Neve, a professor of economics and behavioral science, and the director of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University…

U.S. drops in new global happiness ranking. One age group bucks the trend
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/20/1239537074/u-s-drops-in-new-global-happiness-ranking-one-age-group-bucks-the-trend

Happiness lessons from toddlers

Who Has the Secret to Well-Being? The Answer May Surprise You. Toddlers — full of energy, curiosity and laughter — have a lot to teach adults, experts say.

...Two-year-olds are active for almost five hours a day, according to a review of 24 studies. They move joyfully and instinctively, Dr. Merali said.

Adults can look for ways to move more, even if it’s just for a minute. Take a quick walk around the block, or schedule a meeting on foot rather than sitting down. If you’re home alone, do what Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist at Stanford University, has called “full-body karaoke,” singing and moving to your favorite song...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/15/well/live/tips-happiness-mental-health-well-being.html?smid=em-share

Colbert and Simon on faith, gratitude, happiness

 This interview is "incredible"-meaning delightful. 

I don't agree, I do think happiness (not sublimity) is the more profound "goal"… but I respect Stephen's thoughtful (if slightly manic) reflections here. And his experience, and his pain and suffering. And I share his gratitude. I just don't think I owe it to a god.

But as Montaigne said, "Que sais-je"… I don't know, and neither do you. Believe what you will.

Paul's a Yankee fan and a scorekeeper, and his gratitude is unconditional. He and I are co-congregants in the Church of Baseball. Time to cue up Graceland...

Please notice

https://www.threads.net/@lacancircle/post/C27JosyL-ll/

Time and the soul

(As we discussed last semester in Happiness)-

…This attrition of presence, he observes, is maiming not only our individual inner lives but the inner life of humanity as we have come to mistake the right away of immediacy for the now of presence. Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have invented innumerable tools and technologies to save time but find ourselves wasting it more helplessly than ever. We can only save ourselves, Needleman intimates, by recalibrating our relationship to time, which is fundamentally our relationship to the self and to the meaning of human life. He writes:

The real significance of our problem with time… is a crisis of meaning… The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychological. It is metaphysical. It is a question of the meaning of human life itself.

At the center of our self-defeating challenge is an unexamined premise: We have framed time as a problem — the problem of how to structure and manage our lives — when it is best regarded as a question...

https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/time-clouds-despair