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Proud to be part of this crew of Room to grow
My former boss at Self, Lucy Danziger, just co-wrote a book, The Nine Rooms of Happiness, all about how to figure out, when you feel like crap, exactly why you feel like crap, and how to de-crapify your life.
Or at least change your feelings about your life, which is really all that counts, when you think about it. Most all happiness research uses measures of “subjective well-being” to gauge what is happy-making and what fails to deliver lasting joy. In other words, they ask folks what makes them happy, super jazzed, and off-the-hook ecstatic and for how long. Then they analyze the data and come up with truisms that the likes of Cyndi Lauper, George Michael, Bette Midler and countless others have been singing about for decades: Girls just wanna have fun, you gotta have faith and you gotta have friends. Oh, and for what it’s worth, money can’t buy you love, nor does it lead to lasting happiness.
Good reminders, all, and I appreciate when there’s solid research that confirms what we know or dispels conventional pop music wisdom. It’s just that I live in fear of the day that science figures out where on a woman’s body to attach electrodes to measure how “objectively” happy she is. After that, it’s only a matter of time before certain people are declared sub-optimally content, even if they were pretty sure they felt fine (they’ll call it SOC Syndrome), and market old drugs under new names to treat it. Pretty soon, the women who feel fine will start to feel sub-optimally fine and want the pill. There will not be a generic until it goes off patent…you know the drill. (more…)
