Reading #1

How to Find True Happiness

By Steve Ross and Olivia Rosewood
Posted on the Huffington Post May 9, 2008
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-ross-and-olivia-rosewood/how-to-findtruehappines_b_100892.html
Posted: 05/09/08 11:17 AM ET
Yogis have always known there's a significant difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure
comes from getting what you want: for example food, good sex, clothes, etc. But pleasure is short-lived
and fickle. It lasts for as long as it lasts--a few hours at best. And then it's gone. Pleasure is fleeting.
However true happiness is inexhaustible and permanent.
According to the yogis, pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. One never goes anywhere
without the other, and they alternate. You may eat, but you'll be hungry again. You're lonely, then you're
in love, then you're lonely, then you're in love. Then you're lonely and in love at the same time (and
hopefully writing country western songs). Love and hate, war and peace, hot and cold, success and
failure, rich and poor, and on and on. But true happiness transcends the pleasure/pain principle.
Everyone has isolated moments of feeling on top of the world: when you buy something you really
want, achieve a long held goal, overcome a monumental challenge, or even fall in love. Yes, it feels
phenomenal. In those moments, the mind is quiet, there's a sense of intense satisfaction, and a tiny sliver
of happiness reveals itself. This sliver is pleasure. You might think it comes from the buying of a new
house, getting a big promotion at work, finding true love, or winning a prestigious award. But the truth
is that these things just assuage your desire long enough for you to experience your natural state. The
happiness is the same happiness every time. The happiness is not only coming from you (as opposed to
those achievements or acquisitions), it IS you. The fulfillment of desire gives you a brief glimpse of
what you really are. But the yogis have realized that you don't have to merely glimpse this happiness
within you through the satisfaction of desire. The material world gives you a peek at pleasure, but
lasting happiness is found right where you are.
Happiness is in you, it is you, and it's not coming from an external source (including the shopping mall-and did I already mention that happiness is not at the shopping mall?). Here is the essential point: Brief
happiness (pleasure) doesn't come from the object of satisfactions, it comes from you. This is where
many people are erroneous in their perception, and also why people stress out, worry, and suffer: They
believe happiness is out there...somewhere.
A wise man I met in India put it to me this way: You're living on a mountain of gold and you don't
realize it. Every time it rains, the dirt and muck are washed away and the gold is revealed. And you run
out into the rain, scooping up fistfuls of gold and dancing around. But you mistakingly think that the rain

is bringing the gold, so you worship the rain, and you make sacrifices with your schedule to please the
rain. When there's a drought, you become poor, starve, and bemoan the absence of the rain. But the gold
is always there, just beneath the surface, and the rain has simply been revealing it. If you'd just dust off
the mountain the slightest bit, you'd see it for what it is. Scratch the surface! Look deeper! There's no
need to rely on the rain to reveal your happiness.
Now I'm not saying move out of your house, relinquish your possessions, live in the streets, and that will
make you happy. That's not it at all. Living like a monk isn't necessarily going to remove your desires,
either. Having is not the problem. It's wonderful to be grateful for what you do have, and it's great to
have fun in the material world. You can have and enjoy all that you can manage. Suffering does not
come from having, it comes from endless wanting.
Having is a necessity for survival. Having a roof over your head and food in your belly will not cause
you pain. When you truly have something, you accept it as it is. There's no lofty expectation projected
onto it. Will winning a trillion dollars make you happy? Well, you will have a trillion dollars. But true
happiness? Nope, a trillion dollars is just a trillion dollars. Does having a roof over your head and food
in your belly guarantee happiness? No, it's just food and shelter. You can have food, shelter, and even a
trillion dollars, but your experience of these things has very little to do with the things themselves and
everything to do with the one who is experiencing them. You can be miserable or happy. That's really up
to you. Ownership and having don't rule out attaining uninterrupted happiness, but they can't promise to
deliver it, either.
Remember, true happiness is independent of circumstances. Pleasure is utterly dependent on
circumstance. True happiness is prior and senior to the flickering phenomena of the world. True
happiness transcends the boundaries of the mind and the limitations of conditioned propriety. True
happiness is uninterrupted.

Reading #2
Money Won't Buy You Happiness
By Matthew Herper
Published by Forbes.com
September, 21, 2004 http://www.forbes.com/2004/09/21/cx_mh_0921happiness.html
09.21.04, 3:00 PM ET
It's official: Money can't buy happiness.
Sure, if a person is handed $10, the pleasure centers of his brain light up as if he were given food, sex or
drugs. But that initial rush does not translate into long-term pleasure for most people. Surveys have
found virtually the same level of happiness between the very rich individuals on the Forbes 400 and the

Maasai herdsman of East Africa. Lottery winners return to their previous level of happiness after five
years. Increases in income just don't seem to make people happier--and most negative life experiences
likewise have only a small impact on long-term satisfaction.
"The relationship between money and happiness is pretty darned small," says Peter Ubel, a professor of
medicine at the University of Michigan.
That's not to say that increased income doesn't matter at all. There is a very small correlation between
wealth and happiness--accounting for about 1% of the happiness reported by people answering surveys.
And for some groups, that relationship may be considerably bigger. People who are poor seem to get
much happier when their monetary prospects improve, as do the very sick. In these cases, Ubel
speculates, people may be protected from negative circumstances by the extra cash. Another possibility
is that the money brings an increase in status, which may have a greater impact on happiness.
Why doesn't wealth bring a constant sense of joy? "Part of the reason is that people aren't very good at
figuring out what to do with the money," says George Loewenstein, an economist at Carnegie Mellon
University. People generally overestimate the amount of long-term pleasure they'll get from a given
object.
Sometimes, Loewenstein notes, the way people spend their money can actually make them less happy.
For example, people derive a great deal of pleasure from interacting with others. If the first thing lottery
winners do is quit their job and move to a palatial but isolated estate where they don't see any neighbors,
they could find themselves isolated and depressed.
Other trophies simply don't bring the payoff one expects. Says Loewenstein, "If you're a single male
driving around in the Ferrari with nobody next to you, it's a glaring omission."
The central problem is that the human brain becomes conditioned to positive experiences. Getting a
chunk of unexpected money registers as a good thing, but as time passes, the response wears off. An
expected paycheck doesn't bring any buzz at all--and doesn't contribute to overall happiness. You can
get used to anything, be it hanging by your toenails or making millions of dollars a day. Mood may be
set more by heredity than by anything else: Studies of twins have shown that at least half a person's level
of happiness may be determined by some of the genes that play a role in determining personality.
But this raises another question. How important is happiness anyway? People with chronic illnesses
describe themselves as happy, but they would still pay large sums for better health. And although
healthy individuals are not much happier than quadriplegics, they would pay large sums of money to
keep the use of their limbs. Some of life's most satisfying experiences don't bring happiness. For
instance, having children actually makes people less happy over the short term--but that doesn't
necessarily mean we should stop procreating.

"I think it's possible to way overestimate the importance of happiness," says Loewenstein. "Part of the
meaning of life is to have highs and lows. A life that was constantly happy was not a good life."
However, there may be at least one important relationship between money and happiness, according to
Ed Diener, the University of Illinois researcher who surveyed the Forbes 400 and the Maasai. Diener has
also written that happy people tend to have higher incomes later on in their lives. So, while money may
not help make people happy, being happy may help them make money.

Reading #3
Down the Tube: The Sad Stats on Happiness, Money and TV
By Jonathon Clements
Published by the Wall Street Journal
Apr. 2nd, 2008
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120709012659781613.html
Put down the remote and back slowly away from the television.
Despite the sharp rise in our standard of living in recent decades, Americans today are little or no
happier than earlier generations. Why not?
A new study suggests one possibility: Maybe we need to be smarter about how we spend our time.
And, no, that doesn't mean watching more TV.
Feeling unpleasant. You can think of your happiness as having three components. First, there's your
basic disposition -- whether you are, by nature, a happy person or not. Clearly, there isn't a whole lot
you can do about this.
Second, there are your life's circumstances, such as your age, health, marital status and income. Often,
this stuff isn't nearly as important as folks imagine. If your income doubled, you would initially be
delighted. But research suggests you would quickly get used to all that extra money.
That brings us to the third factor, which is how you spend your time -- something you have a fair
amount of control over. This is the subject of a major new study by academics Daniel Kahneman, Alan
Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone.
For the study, the five professors surveyed some 4,000 Americans, asking what they did the previous
day and then quizzing them in detail about three randomly selected events from the day. Those
surveyed were asked to rate the three episodes based on feelings such as pain, happiness, stress and
sadness. All this was used to calculate what percentage of time people spent in an unpleasant state.

Getting involved. Result? Women, folks under age 65, those divorced or separated, lower-income
earners and the less educated were likely to spend a bigger chunk of their day in an unpleasant state.
But what I found most intriguing was the study's data on which activities we enjoy. The five professors
grouped activities into six clusters, based on the emotions associated with each.
The standout cluster was what the authors label "engaging leisure and spiritual activities," things like
visiting friends, exercising, attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting in a
cafe or going to a party. When we spend time on our favorite of these activities, we're typically happy,
engrossed and not especially stressed.
"These are things you choose to do, rather than have to do," notes one of the study's co-authors, Prof.
Schkade of the University of California, San Diego.
The obvious implication: If we devote more time to these activities, maybe we would be more satisfied
with our lives. Yet the evidence suggests we've missed a huge chance to do just that -- which may help
explain why Americans are little or no happier than they were four decades ago.
Zoning out. Over that stretch, men reduced the amount of time they spent working. Meanwhile,
women -- as a group -- spent more time earning income, reflecting their increased work-force
participation. But this increased time at the office was more than offset by a drop in time devoted to
mundane chores.
In other words, both men and women had the chance to lavish more time on "engaging leisure and
spiritual activities." But in fact, time spent on these activities has actually declined over the past four
decades.
Instead, there's been a significant increase in the hours devoted to what the authors call "neutral
downtime," which is mostly watching television. Women now spend 15% of their waking hours staring
at the tube, while men devote 17%.
Watching TV may be low-stress and moderately enjoyable. But people aren't mentally engaged the
way they are when they're, say, exercising or socializing.
"I wonder whether there are self-control problems when it comes to watching television," muses Prof.
Krueger, an economist at Princeton University and another of the study's co-authors. "I wonder
whether people would feel better about their lives if they spent their leisure time doing something that
was more interactive and more engaging."