Life and Living
The Infinite and the Beyond — Episode #22 — Life and Living
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In the latest episode 
of The Infinite and the Beyond, we talk about late Llewellyn author Scott Cunningham in A Corner in the Occult. Many Pagans and or Wiccans often find Scott’s books on their journey as Pagans. Many find his books on magick and religion uplifting and at times pertinent to their growing views on life and existence.
We also look into the idea of human flourishing and happiness and how to create it in one’s life. Are you happy? Are you flourishing? How would you define and list your values and virtues? Would you say that they are serving you and your life beneficially? Learn about virtue and Eudaimonia and how your life lives up to the teachings of Aristotle and other philosophers. See how some of the new virtue systems found in modern Paganism stand in comparison to a tried and true system which comes from Plato as we find an elementary way to update it for modern use.
The Happiest Places Have The Highest Suicide Rates
The Danish royal family: Are they really so happy? Photo: Bill Ebbesen
From ScienceDaily:
The happiest countries and happiest U.S. states tend to have the highest suicide rates, according to research from the UK’s University of Warwick, Hamilton College in New York and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.The new research paper titled “Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. It uses U.S. and international data, which included first-time comparisons of a newly available random sample of 1.3 million Americans, and another on suicide decisions among an independent random sample of approximately 1 million Americans.
The research confirmed a little known and seemingly puzzling fact: many happy countries have unusually high rates of suicide. This observation has been made from time to time about individual nations, especially in the case of Denmark. This new…
The Economics Of Happiness (Video)
I recently had a chance to attend a showing of the documentary The Economics of Happiness. It has a very strong message about the fiscal and social problems of globalization, especially its impact beyond the western world. As a solution, the film suggests a movement towards focusing on communities and localization. Here’s the trailer and a plot synopsis:
Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet, life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.
Just Keep Going, You Got Nothing To Lose (Video)
A thought-provoking video by Luke Rudkowski on happiness, freedom, government, humanity, and life in the words of subway passengers. Via WeAreChange.org:
Happiness Is Overrated
“Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” is one of the most famous phrases in the United States Declaration of Independence. These three aspects are listed among the “unalienable rights” or sovereign rights of man.* But some new research suggests that happiness ain’t all that; Shirley S. Wang reports for the Wall Street Journal:
The relentless pursuit of happiness may be doing us more harm than good.
Some researchers say happiness as people usually think of it—the experience of pleasure or positive feelings—is far less important to physical health than the type of well-being that comes from engaging in meaningful activity. Researchers refer to this latter state as “eudaimonic well-being.”
Happiness research, a field known as “positive psychology,” is exploding. Some of the newest evidence suggests that people who focus on living with a sense of purpose as they age are more likely to remain cognitively intact, have better mental health and even live…
The Happiest Person in America
Alvin Wong is happier than you — statistically speaking (which brings to mind the old saying, “there are lies, damned lies, and statistics,” but I digress). As ABC News reports, Mr. Wong is the exact statistical composite of the happiest person:
Alvin Wong always considered himself a happy guy.
“I get up in the morning and say, ‘I’m very fortunate. I’m living in Hawaii, doing what I want to do,’” Wong said. But when Wong, 69, learned he is the exact statistical composite of the happiest person in America, he wasn’t sure what to think.
“When The New York Times called and read off all the information about who this person is, I asked if it was a practical joke.”
According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, the happiest person in America is…
Racial Identity Tied to Happiness, Study Finds
Photo: vargas2040 (CC)
ScienceDaily reports:
African American people who identify more strongly with their racial identity are generally happier, according to a study led by psychology researchers at Michigan State University.The study, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, appears in the current issue of Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, a research journal published by the American Psychological Association.
“This is the first empirical study we know of that shows a relationship between racial identity and happiness,” said Stevie C.Y. Yap, doctoral candidate in psychology at MSU and lead researcher on the project.
Previous research has found a relationship between racial identity and favorable outcomes such as self-esteem, Yap said, but none has made the link with happiness.
For the study, the researchers surveyed black adults in Michigan. The results suggest the more the participants identified with being black — or the more being black was an important part of who they are —…
Seeing Other People’s Happy Lives On Facebook Makes Us Depressed
A new study suggests that viewing everyone else’s cheery updates and pictures on Facebook makes us feel even worse about our own crummy existences. Of course, online sharing often takes the form of a sort of competitive, veiled bragging, an effort to make it appear that we’re having fun and finding fulfillment. Slate explains:
“Misery Has More Company Than People Think,” a paper in the January issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, draws on a series of studies examining how college students evaluate moods, both their own and those of their peers. Led by Alex Jordan, who at the time was a Ph.D. student in Stanford’s psychology department, the researchers found that their subjects consistently underestimated how dejected others were–and likely wound up feeling more dejected as a result. Jordan got the idea for the inquiry after observing his friends’ reactions to Facebook: He noticed that they seemed to feel particularly…
Those Damn Yanks! Are Americans Intent on Destroying Football Around the Globe?
If the U.S. earning a draw with England wasn’t bad enough for the Brits, here comes another blow. Another Yankee is trying to purchase one of their beloved football teams Liverpool. Alex Massie writes in the Daily Beast:
If Red Sox owner John Henry’s purchase of Liverpool soccer club goes through, he’ll have to clean up the mess left by its current owner, former Texas Rangers chief Tom Hicks.
This week, John Henry and the New England Sports Ventures consortium made great strides in their attempts to purchase Liverpool football club. For once, an American takeover of a great English institution is being welcomed — but only because it means running the previous American owners out of town. Better the wealthy Americans you don’t know than the ones you do.
That’s because owners of American sports teams have a history of running English football clubs into the ground. Liverpool, the most successful football…
How Much Money Do You Need To Be Happy? $75,000/Year
If you live in New York City it’s going to be considerably more than that! From the Los Angeles Times:
Does happiness rise with income? In one of the more scientific attempts to answer that question, researchers from Princeton have put a price on happiness. It’s about $75,000 in income a year.
They found that not having enough money definitely causes emotional pain and unhappiness. But, after reaching an income of about $75,000 per year, money can’t buy happiness. More money can, however, help people view their lives as successful or better.
In the study, researchers tried to evaluate the effect of money in two ways: One was on how people think about their lives and the other was on the feelings they have as they experience life. Responses from more than 450,000 Americans, gathered in 2008 and 2009, were evaluated.
The study found that people’s evaluations of their lives improved steadily with annual…
I Love My Children — I Hate My Life
Photo: Jessica Todd Harper
Jennifer Senior writes in New York magazine:
There was a day a few weeks ago when I found my 2½-year-old son sitting on our building doorstep, waiting for me to come home. He spotted me as I was rounding the corner, and the scene that followed was one of inexpressible loveliness, right out of the movie I’d played to myself before actually having a child, with him popping out of his babysitter’s arms and barreling down the street to greet me.
This happy moment, though, was about to be cut short, and in retrospect felt more like a tranquil lull in a slasher film. When I opened our apartment door, I discovered that my son had broken part of the wooden parking garage I’d spent about an hour assembling that morning.
This wouldn’t have been a problem per se, except that as I attempted to fix it, he grew impatient and…
Naomi Wolf: What Price Happiness?
Naomi Wolf. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
Are women really less happy now than they were 40 years ago? Naomi Wolf stirs up the debate, writing at More:
In September 2009, Marcus Buckingham—a motivational speaker and trainer who now claims the improbable job title of “the world’s leading expert in personal strengths”—rolled out Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. His headline? Women have become less happy in the past 40 years. Unstated but clear: What happened 40 years ago is that feminism reappeared on the scene.
Buckingham’s announcement immediately stirred a press sensation. His findings were featured on the home page of the Huffington Post and worried over by Maureen Dowd on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Blogs, newsmagazines and daytime talk shows all agonized over the notion that feminism—all that freedom, all those choices!—was making women sadder. The data seemed to touch that…
Depression’s Evolutionary Roots
Paul W. Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson, Jr. write in Scientific American (via Theoretick):
Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression? [...]
In an article recently published in Psychological Review, we argue that depression is in fact an adaptation, a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits. [...]
So what could be so useful about depression? Depressed people often think intensely about their problems. These thoughts are called ruminations; they are persistent and depressed people have difficulty thinking about anything else.…
