Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile or HOW TO AVOID MAKING YOURSELF MISERABLE

“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

                                                                                                                          ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

By Olena Denysyuk

INTRODUCTION

THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK IS “HAPPINESS: the science beyond your smile”.  IT SHOULD BE “HOW TO AVOID MAKING YOURSELF MISERABLE”. Happiness is a word that sells, but not the real topic of this book. It contents no concrete indication of what to do. Rather, it points where the main obstacles to a satisfactory life are. Actually this book is about what mistakes many people often make without realizing that their behavior will have almost inevitably lead to self-deception, disappointment and chronic frustration. And it shows that there can be many roadblocks on our ways to achieve our aims.

 

For instance:

-          our frame of reference, or how we compare ourselves to others with considerable myopia

-          the endowment effect, or how we come to attach more value than reasonable to our possessions

-          the peak-end effect or how we give preference to short-term intense enjoyment/entertainment over long-term pleasure

-          the exaggeration of the importance of life-events, i.e. the over-estimation of their effects on us personally

-          and, ultimately, the power of many foolish human desires, as it prevents us from enjoying our present possibilities for well-being, as Buddha demonstrated 26 centuries ago.

So, have you ever considered that actually we are not predisposed to be happy because we live on considerable state of uncertainty? For example, the knowledge of our own death, society’s suppression of our drives, or the cruel and illusory psychology of desire and “wrong” preferences, as well as other demands from society to be concerned with our self-presentation, put us in a state of eternal worry. 

Alas, we live in an economic system geared to constantly remaining us of our desires. So here we are leaving the personal sphere to the analysis of HOW our social organization based on market economics is inherently a source of profound frustration and the deep foundation of the lack of meaning in most people lives.

Therefore, we have to work hard to construct our own happiness.