I sat for several heartbeats and just stared at it appalled. Imagine working for a company that doesn’t care enough about its own image to edit automatic emails. Would drive me bonkers.

I emailed back pointing out the mistake and correcting it for them.

Think I’ll hear from them again?

Timing is everything.

ROTFLMFO

Wahooooo! Think I’ll make custard and kiwi tonight and celebrate. I also ordered The Origins of Life by David Deamer and Jack W. Szostak. (It might also take the edge off my reading of Morton, but more on that later.) Reading Szostak will be a future delight.

(weeks of work, that was)

H = S + C + V

As an algorithm it sucks because it would also be true that C = H – S -V, which in English would be that the conditions of life equal happiness minus one’s genetic inheritance and minus one’s voluntary activities, which makes no sense at all. But this isn’t really about science, it’s about trying to discover, with some empirical validity, what makes people happy.

Briefly, S (setpoint) is the genetic inheritance you carry which largely sets the range of happiness you can experience normally. Some of us got a  high range and grow up as happy bubbly kinds of people. (Hate the fuckers.) Then there’s the people like me who got the lower ranges. We tend toward what I call realism and my bubbly friend calls pessimism. The other important thing about setpoint is that we adapt fairly quickly to new conditions and so keep our regular happiness level within our range. Say you win the lottery. Happy, happy you say. Well yes for a little bit and then you will adapt and if nothing else changes you’ll go back to being just as happy/unhappy as before. This adaption is a good thing because if you become damaged in some way and think your life is over, you’ll adapt and go back to being your previous happy self. And, realistically, becoming damaged by life is a lot more likely than winning the lottery so this adaption serves us well.

C (conditions of your life like sex, age, race, disability, IQ) are the aspects of your life you cannot change. But there are aspects you can effect. For example, these five areas directly impact happiness because we do not adapt to them like we do to things like general wealth (or disability, etc.) and so they continually impact our happiness for better or worse.

1. Noise either comforts or stresses us out. Silence is either scary or nurturing. But that occasional jackhammer your neighbour uses in his bedroom at 3AM? That’s going to decrease your happiness. Having a room to go for silence when necessary? That’s going to increase your happiness. Having control over noise is important to upping the value of C.
2. Stop and go traffic and commuting decreases the value of C. Highway driving under good conditions increases the value of C. Has to do with freedom and a sense of control as well as getting into the flow of movement I suspect.
3. Control over things is hugely important. If you have no control over anything in your life your happiness quotient sucks.
4. Shame is going to drop your H level down the toilet (our out-house hole). If I were you I’d stop doing that thing that makes you so ashamed or if it’s your face (butt, boobs, mind etc) then either fix it or find a way to be grateful that you have one at all.
5. Love is going to raise your H level. Not got a partner? Go get a friend. Have a good talk. Those hormones will get released just the same.

Voluntary activities are the things you choose to do on a daily basis. Apparently it is in this area that you can make the greatest impact on your happiness level. Here there are things like taking vacations, exercising, meditation, walking, helping others, learning something new. Because you choose these activities—and therefore exert control in your life—they are perhaps your easiest way of increasing your happiness level.

A word about work: work is critical to our general happiness because we spend so much of our lives doing it and because the value of creation and contribution is built into being human. Like love it is a condition of life that one can change but can become a constant over a long period of time. If your work sucks, your happiness sucks. We need to feel effective in the world so the idea is to find out what your particular strengths are and find work that uses those strengths daily. Want tests to measure your strengths? Go here.

On a more realistic note (given the need for things like food money and rent) if what you feel passionate about is poetry you’re in trouble because society doesn’t much value poetry and that is  important. In the final bit of Haidt’s book he looks at the idea of coherence. When all one’s components of self are working together you will cohere and be happy. One of those components is social value. So if you work in an industry which either you have lost any sense of its wider purpose or society doesn’t value your group’s perceived purpose your inner coherence is destabilized to the detriment of your happiness. So getting a job in a world that society values (and you do too) is a good way to work toward your own happiness.

But say you still want to do what you love, and poetry is all you really think about. The idea is to create a life-work coherence which enables what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow.” How to do that? To craft a job that meets Maslow’s basic needs, provides gratification and coherence? I’m investigating that now.

Anyway, enough. There are a huge number of positive psychology sites and books out there on happiness and how to go about increasing its presence in your life. Good hunting.

I’m reading The Happiness Hypothesis and like the book. It’s full of interesting bits about how the mind works and neat sites to visit to chase down your own bits and bobs that relate to happiness in your life. Frankly, after reading much of the book, the two things that have stood out is that my range of normal happiness is shit and that is the fault of my genetics. Hopeless misery, me.

The other thing that stood out is that there are fairly simple ways to learn to live at the upper end of your genetic range. So the range might be shit but at least you can live at the upper end of the not-quite-so-deep-and-smelly well of your own feelings.

And they are fairly simple things. Like, for example, getting a job in a field that allows you to gain some gratification in the doing of it. Me, I like learning, love beauty so working for a government agency that has nothing to do with learning and seems to take pride in ugly is probably not such a hot idea. I mean who knew?

Well, I did. But that’s not the point really. One has to be realistic and when rent is due a job is a job. There’s the crux of my problem with the whole chasing happiness thing. It keeps getting tripped up by reality. And then there’s the thing where religious people are supposedly happier because they have something to believe in. It doesn’t seem to matter if what the person believes is true or not. Or at least I haven’t seen any references to studies that examine the relationship between veracity and happiness. I mean based on what I’ve read you could believe in the tooth fairy as the great grand master of the candy-land world (which is greater and more powerful than this world) and as long as you believe in it wholeheartedly and it gives you a sense of deep purpose (making the ground into chocolate so as to bring on the candy-pocalyse?) you’ll be happier than some poor schlub who toils away at evidence and some semblance of veracity. Shitty way to organize the mind. I mean you’d think we were blindly evolved animals for Christ’s sake.

Oh well. The self-tests are kind of fun. You want to find out about your psyche? You can go to this rather neat site called authentic happiness. They have a lot of tests you can do to find out about what will make you happy – or at least things to do to increase your stock of happy.

Still, having done many of them now I have found out that I am a bit of a miserable bitch. And while that doesn’t surprise me, I don’t find it particularly happy-making.

Meh.

Still no poetry. And I feel the lack of it. I also haven’t attended to the page in the last two days either. Someone I know says that if he skips more than a day of exercise he feels it as a need, a desire to move and pull against gravity.  I feel the same kind of thing I think, but for me it is the pull that words can exert when one tries to torque them in the pursuit of some hidden understanding lurking across the threshold of a word’s intelligibility.

Anyway, I have doctor appointments tomorrow so part of the day will be a rest break at a coffee shop so have baby-computer will write. Right now, I’m just going to try and sleep and let go of the idea that I did nothing all day and that this a was bad thing, a really, really bad thing to do – which part of me insists is so.

It’s pretty good actually. I know the book spent a bunch of time atop the bestseller list but I suppose self-help books often do that. My question is how effective is the truth once known? This I won’t know until I’ve done some of the work Pink suggests and seen the outcome.

What Pink does is recount for us, in an easy to understand way, where our corporate-type culture has gone wrong and how it could change to get a better performance out of us, and in the process give us workers a much better shot at a life of happiness and some tools to better direct our lives to make that happen.

His key words are autonomy, mastery and purpose. That’s what motivates us, and he’s right about that I have no doubt. He’s also right that the vast majority of work places assume that we don’t want to work, that unless they stand over us with the big-brother eye we won’t do anything that will result in a profit to them. That’s my experience in most work places anyway. Got a productivity problem? Turn down the screws even tighter. Does it work? Not well in my experience, especially if what you want is a worker who is self-directed and committed to excellence.

I have spent my life making choices possible for the disadvantaged. I’m a really socially dedicated person and have always been part of something with some social-welfare purpose. In my last place of work, the organization was dedicated to such a purpose, but the working conditions were so bad that they were able to alienate me from any sense of purpose that I might have gotten from working toward their goals. That’s some accomplishment. Not a good one, of course, but it took some doing.

And yes, there are some bad employees. I know some rather too well. But really whose fault is it that they still work there after years, and years and years? Where does management stop and realize that the conditions of the office are a mirror of the management style?

Anyway, I quit, and after this surgery is over I’ll move on to another place, and another purpose, and Pink’s book has been good for me in that it has given me some tools to start thinking about what kind of organization I want to work for in the future. Of course it must be one with a strong sense of social justice, but in Pink’s words they are going to have to practice a new kind of corporate leadership if they want me to spend my life promoting their goals.

The thing is I love working. And I am a bit obsessive about my own productivity, so I’ve been told. I even have a decent skill set. But I also have requirements that I am no longer willing to forgo. I do want to work with someone smart enough and culturally savvy enough to realize the carrot-stick motivation thing is not going to work in a corporate world that requires creativity, committment and integrity of its employees.  So I’ll have to find such a person, and such an organization, or I’ll have to find another way to live. Thanks for the tip, Pink!

Does it matter that I mixed up a magnolia and a gardenia?

I suppose I have a touch of concussion from banging my head.

I did have good dreams last night, and I woke thinking I can write the book of poetry now. I do feel considerably better today, so on with Stumbling on Happiness, and when that is finished a few other books that have been hanging out waiting for me to get back to them. And all the while, I’m going to be thinking about poetry.

Yeah for freedom!

Can you imagine? Where I work it is more like a sterile lab. If you’re going to have to spend your life someplace, it might as well feel a bit like actual human beings (not worker bees or ants or something) are in residence.

via peardg