Halcyon Imagines

Imagining that it were possible to measure well-being...

 

...at both the personal and wider societal levels.

The Well-Being Agenda from The School of Life on Vimeo.

Imagining how we might become better parents, partners, colleagues, citizens...

 

...by not looking for happiness for our own sakes, but instead through helping others. 

(Source: Richard Layard - On Happiness from The School of Life on Vimeo.)

Imagining how we might all become just slightly happier...

 

 

...rather than trying to solve the insoluble - i.e. the perennial problem of human happiness and fulfilment.

Becoming happier is a subject that has occupied some of history's greatest thinkers, but how do we sort the good ideas from the bad?  Are there any hard and fast rules when it comes to happiness, and should we trust anyone who claims to know the secret?

Over the last five years journalist Oliver Burkeman travelled to some of the strangest corners of the 'happiness industry' in an attempt to find out; in early 2011 he recounted his findings to an RSA audience.

From stress, procrastination and insomnia, to laughter, creativity and wealth, Burkeman suggested how we might imagine achieving a more realistic goal - i.e. becoming slightly happier.

Halcyon Imagines round-up - summer 2010

Kindness, generosity, depression, loneliness, happiness and friendship all fired Halcyon's imagination recently.

Please feel free to comment on any of these stories or contact us so that we can imagine further responses to problems together.

• The Web as random acts of kindness. Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to differ.
• Global Giving. It’s a small world we live in, increasingly connected by technology, trade, and common threats to our species’ survival. Cooperation and collaboration are needed to overcome the enormous environmental challenges before us. But will globalisation encourage this kind of cooperation—or will it just breed more intense competition, as people reinforce their attachments to their own national and ethnic groups?
• Depressed? Anxious? Aren’t we all? "I think we’ve got to get used to the idea that mental illness is actually very common," says Jane Costello. "People are growing up impaired, untreated, and not functioning to their full capacity because we’ve ignored it." A long-term tracking study of more than 1,000 New Zealanders from birth to age 32 suggests that people vastly underreport the amount of mental illness they’ve suffered when asked to recall their history years after the fact.
• The problem with happiness. Professor Richard Layard is launching a campaign to replace GDP growth figures with measurements of happiness, with greater happiness being the correct national objective. This sort of idea is inspired by the Easterlin Paradox. In a 1974 paper Richard Easterlin found the following: "Using surveys of how happy people say that they are, the paper seemed to show that within countries, the richer people are, the happier they are, but that between countries the same didn't hold. What this suggests is that being relatively rich compared to your fellow countrymen makes you happier, but that your absolute wealth doesn't matter. Once a minimum income level is reached, an amount necessary for a country's residents to subsist, all that extra economic growth doesn't appear to be improving life satisfaction."
• Lonely planet . The epidemic of loneliness is a powerful symptom of how modernity offends human nature. But do we understand what loneliness is?
• The science of friendship: where evolutionary psychology fails. Friendship is one of the phenomena that evolution psychlogy has long had in its sights. Charles Darwin himself pondered the adaptive advantage of sympathy in The Descent of Man, though it worried him it must come from a 'low motive', namely survival.

Imagining championing intrinsic values...

 

"All you need to do to be ‘ethical’ in today’s world is to stand against things."

This is a criticism often aimed at e.g. environmentalists, and while it constitutes too broadbrush a dismissal of well-intentioned activists, perhaps it should nonetheless serve as a wake-up call to those who wish to champion the intrinsic values that seem to make people happier and more fulfilled.