A quote from a TED talk given by Dan Gilbert, the Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness: Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness […]
happiness
Open Discussion: “You are here to be happy.” True or false?
Obviously I’ve been in the mood for introspection these last couple of days. And I think that introspection is important in the environmental realm, because we must prioritize the use of resources. We must decide what our limited resources are best used for. That requires introspection. Because to know what our resources should be used […]
Treating anxiety and depression could save the planet
Something a regular reader of this blog may have been able to guess about me: I suffer, at times, from anxiety and depression. I’m not talking about the worst kind of anxiety and depression. I’m talking about the kind that takes the edge off the gratitude I should be feeling for a good life. Not, […]
How to cut out home heating oil–Japanese style
This is a guest post by my friend Sean Sakamoto, who blogs at www.idratherbe.tv/injapan. “It’s so weird that you heat your whole house,” my wife said one winter. She’s Japanese, and when we first got married, here in the United States, we got a lot of mileage out of the “I can’t believe you people […]
The problem with happiness
Well, what I mean is that there is a problem with happiness as a measure of whether limited planetary resources should be used. I talk about this a lot, right? I talk a lot about how if we only choose to use the resources that actually make people happy and cut out the things that […]
Does high resource use make a great life?
This photo (sorry for the poor quality) shows one half of an empty basketball court that I’ve ridden past many times during my car-less vacation in Greenport. It’s in someone’s back yard. Never once have I ever seen anyone playing basketball on it. And I thought: some dad or mom might have worked so hard […]
Business People: Forget the fallacy of the zero sum game
Zero sum game: A situation or interaction in which one participant’s gains result only from another’s equivalent losses. Sometimes, we imagine business works that way. But what a sad, sorry way to look at the world. And if we do look at the world that way, does it make us happy? Let me explain: The […]
“Why your happiness matters to the planet”
The headline is the title of an article in the Christian Science Monitor about how consuming fewer planetary resources may, instead of making us deprived, make us happier. We’ve discussed this so often here on No Impact Man. The article, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, points to yet another study that shows that material consumption above […]