by Juncal Cuñado and Alejo Jose G. Sison
Do religious belief and practice affect the happiness of Europeans? In the first part of this two-part article, to answer our question we focused on the European Values Study. In this second part we deal with results from the European Social Survey. Read more…
Here is an excellent talk on sex and happiness
Standing on the Threshold of an Inconceivable Age: Sexuality in the 21st Century, by Reverend Dale S. Kuehne from Alexander Hamilton Institute on Vimeo.
This is about an hour long, but there is alot of good food for thought here.
In the comments of this blog, people have accused me of being “cruel,” “heartless,” and “the kind of guy who would repeatedly pound a burlap bag full of cute and fuzzy puppies with a rubber mallet” on account my opinions about romantic love, especially how it relates to marriage redefinition.
Rather than bask in the warm glow of such heartfelt and fulsome praise, I’m going to set out to earn it still further by pointing out some recent scientific findings.
If my posts have a general theme it is this: love is not what you think it is. Happiness is not what you think it is. Without knowing the nature of love and happiness, we cannot have a meaningful discussion about love, marriage, and marriage redefinition. To discuss these things without this knowledge is to fail to engage the real world. Unfortunately, the real world is a lot less enchanting than sappy love songs and the movies that populate the “Romantic Comedy” section of Netflix.
So, what’s romantic love? Essentially, it’s an addiction. (I guess Huey Lewis was on to something).
The team of researchers, which included Arthur Aron, Ph.D., professor of social and health psychology in the Department of Psychology at Stony Brook University, and former graduate students Greg Strong and Debra Mashek looked at subjects who had a recent break-up and found that the pain and anguish they were experiencing may be linked to activation of parts of the brain associated with motivation, reward and addiction cravings. The study was published in the July issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. Read more…
Having children: you’ve got to do it. If you don’t Charles Darwin will call you a loser or something. And there’s that whole Demographic Winter thing too. So, both for yourself and your society, you’ve got to have children.
But having children is hard.
I thought of something a friend once said about the Children’s Museum of Manhattan—“a nice place, but what it really needs is a bar”—and rued how, at that moment, the same thing could be said of my apartment. Two hundred and 40 seconds earlier, I’d been in a state of pair-bonded bliss; now I was guided by nerves, trawling the cabinets for alcohol. My emotional life looks a lot like this these days. I suspect it does for many parents—a high-amplitude, high-frequency sine curve along which we get the privilege of doing hourly surfs. Yet it’s something most of us choose. Indeed, it’s something most of us would say we’d be miserable without.
People today, however, delay having children. Having children is hard enough. Delaying the process only makes it harder. “Oh,” you will say, “but if I have children later, I’ll have more money. I’ll be able to buy them more stuff. I’ll be able to hire more and better child care. That’ll make it so much easier.”
Dream on.
As this article from New York magazine puts it:
Not only did they find that couples’ overall marital satisfaction went down if they had kids; they found that every successive generation was more put out by having them than the last—our current one most of all. Even more surprisingly, they found that parents’ dissatisfaction only grew the more money they had, even though they had the purchasing power to buy more child care. “And my hypothesis about why this is, in both cases, is the same,” says Twenge. “They become parents later in life. There’s a loss of freedom, a loss of autonomy. It’s totally different from going from your parents’ house to immediately having a baby. Now you know what you’re giving up.” Read more…
There is a lot to be said for cultivating stoic virtues. The best people in the world, as far as I’m concerned are those that are determined to bestow upon others what they need. And they will make their own wants secondary.
The pursuit of happiness is fine. But assigning too high a priority to happiness and pleasure makes a person into a narcissistic jerk.
And here’s where I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there’s possibly some merit — if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it — in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It’s fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard. Read more…
You finally win the lottery. How much happier will you be in the long run?
You finally are able to marry that desirable partner you always wanted. How much happier will you be long term?
Tragically, a teenage girl loses a limb in an automobile accident. How much unhappier will she be in the long run?
A young man, convinced he should have been a woman, saves up his money to get a “sex change” operation. How much happier will he be in the long run if he finally gets his way?
Many of the discussions in the comments section of this site fall into a very familiar pattern. Take, for instance, one issue that we here at the Ruth Institute support: lifelong marriage. Lifelong marriage means that we are not particularly fond of divorce. (I’m sure my opinion as a Jew differs from that of Dr. J who is Catholic, but I think we can agree that divorce is, generally speaking, a bad thing).
And these discussions are usually not very productive because they are addled with illusion.
So, we don’t like divorce. How does this play out so predictably in the comments? And how are the comments beset by illusion?
Interesting, and relates to some of our other recent posts, for interested parties.
By Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers
The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. This decline in relative wellbeing is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing, demographic groups, and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging—one with higher subjective well-being for men. Read more…
Loading ...
