Happiness for Dummies

Most folks balk at one-size-fits-all advice on the pursuit of happiness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t each become happier. Happiness For Dummies is a light, thoughtful, authoritative 32,000-word book about how to go about that. Some aspects depend a lot on who you are--human relationships, for instance. Some things usually represent major investments--homes and cars, for instance. Still other things are only as important as you feel they are--sound systems, for instance. Sometimes, advertising has created needs where none existed before—leisure time, for instance. In areas like love and work, it’s sometimes even necessary to unsnarl the English language and clarify what’s going on in your head and heart. Happiness is a feeling, not a fact, and today feelings are at the mercy of advertising. Ads make us unhappy. Then they suggest that if we buy something or do something, a Magic Kingdom will open. Ads appeal not to logic but to feelings and to our wish to trust authority, even if it’s just the advice of an actor in a commercial. Ads’ impact is enormous, but they don’t have our best interests at heart. Most people think they’d be happier if they had more stuff. Studies indicate this isn’t really true. In the last 250 years, personal wealth—world Gross Domestic Product per person—has grown 37-fold, but global happiness has decreased during that same time. Questions arise. How much quality in, say, table settings is really necessary to you? What other uses might you find for money if you weren’t spending every cent you earned? How can you amuse yourself without investing anything but time? In what ways is “keeping up” useful and in what ways does it just add complication? Post-materialists tend to spend extra time on creative things, family and nature. Maybe you’d add other things to that list. The point is that happiness is possible. You just have to learn how to pursue it.

To find happiness, first we must know how we seek it. We perceive reality through combinations of feeling, training, logic and personal capability. It’s important not to operate in one area when we think we’re operating in another. We also need to separate fact from inference or opinion, and to understand causality. Advertising affects everyone today. Ads make us unhappy, because happy people aren’t in the market for anything. Ads are almost never logical, though they seldom really lie. This is good in some ways, bad in others. Abraham Maslow created a hierarchy of human needs that can help us seek happiness. We need shelter, for instance; but our possessions possess us as we possess them. The simplicity baseline to shelter is a used tent, but most people would feel terrible living in one. Various forms of mobile housing are worth a look however, if only for what they can teach us about what we can tolerate, how well we can resist ads and how self-trainable we are. Home remodeling, for instance, is a dangerous pit. Fashion-worship in any area can lead to misery. Maslow didn’t see transportation as a human need, but house and car together represent over half the average American’s expenses. How can we simplify transportation without sending our feel-meter off the scale? Transportation also provides a good place to examine the new vs. used question. A lot of unhappiness involves a desire for stuff, and used stuff can help solve that. We can often buy used stuff, in good shape, for very little. Maslow said we need love and a family, but how much and what kind? The better we understand all the wildly different things that our culture lumps together as love and family, the more likely we are to be happy in this area. We treat work and play as opposites, but many people enjoy most of what they’re paid to do. If we think in terms of plurk, a mix of play and work, it’s easier to mesh reality here with Maslow’s human need for respect. We might also deal with how to treat excess the money that can accumulate as we immerse ourselves in the joyfully profitable. Excess money unmonitored produces excess stuff. How do you avoid drowning in your favorite things? Gourmet’s Disease sufferers need the best currently available. Advertising contributes greatly to this malady. You can almost always get 90% as good as the best quite cheaply. For that last 10%, the cost sharply escalates. “You deserve better,” is a poison proverb. Ads also have us spending big money on the voluntary--leisure time activities. Today’s gourmet recreational equipment is often so good that users must seek out harder and harder challenges. If we go back to cheap, used equipment, suddenly activities like skiing, golfing and motorcycle trail riding become much more fun in cheaper locales. Maslow said the highest aspiration for man is devotion to something beyond himself--self-actualization. Surveys suggest post-materialists spend time on nature, creativity or other people. All these areas, and others, offer fodder for self-actualization, and it doesn’t really matter whether or not your self-actualization meets anyone else’s standards. Don’t fret over whether others live by your principles. Don’t let others’ attention or lack of it consume you. Lots of criminal behavior springs from people who obsess about being noticed, even if it means they’ll be hated. You need to make the most of your life, not to make some who’s-who list. Things like the government and the economy are part of the service sector. Their duties to us outweigh our duties to them, or so says the Declaration of Independence. Habit, routine and loyalty can be okay, even though they all involve living in the past. There’s a strong up-side to continuing to do something effectively as you’ve always done it--or to being someone people can trust. Just check periodically to make sure the way you do things still works for you.

George Weathers has loved writing, teaching, fiddling with interesting machines and visual communication all his life. Fortunately, he’s made enough money at these things that he’s never had to “get a job.” He has a doctorate in Film and Electronic Communication, has been married 50 years and has two kids and two grandkids, all of whom still speak to him.