This from the February 27, 2006 New Yorker Magazine, an article on happiness research:
Layard cites a study, by the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, reporting that people’s top four favorite parts of the day feature sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing. Their bottom four involve commuting, work, child care, and housework.
The article opens by explaining many folks’ predisposition to unhappiness. The happy-go-lucky cavemen all died from eating poisonous plants and attacks from which they did not bother to take precautions. We inherit our genes from the timid fearful cavemen.
Now to write a Nobel-prize winning article finding that people are happier when eating chocolate and walking Golden Retrievers than when using Microsoft products…
My updated comment:
The New Yorker article is just the tip of the iceberg of human psychology and emotion. By analogy, there is likely a genetic and historically evolutionary beneficial basis for most human personality traits, including propensities for bigotry/fundamentalism, tolerance, revenge, forgiveness, jealousy/anger/hatred, love, meanness, kindness, selfishness, altruism, bitchiness, stoicism, heterosexuality, homosexuality, religion/magic, spirituality, …, and of course irrationality and rationality.
That in turn leads to the notion that someday we perhaps can take a little DNA/virus pill that will modify our genetic predisposition in any way we want, as well as genetically engineer future humans, pets, and other life forms, to have whatever personality predispositions we, in our future wisdom, prescribe.
interseting topic. I just wonder why no more comments. people seem busy, maybe they pursuit their happiness on this weekend.
Li: As the profuse response to the Java language topic (above) shows, Philip’s readers are much more interested in computer languages than in being happy.
Phil: You are right.somebody told me “Wisdom is that you can see yourself. Knowledge is that you can see the outside.”
If the function q(t) denotes a person’s quality of life over time (where q takes all factors like wealth, health, fitness, job, recognition by others, etc. into account), then I’d say happiness is the derivative of that function, i.e. h(t) = q'(t).