[Mb-civic] Happiness Is a Warm Gun By MAUREEN DOWD

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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March 25, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Happiness Is a Warm Gun
By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It doesn't take much to make Dick Cheney happy. According to a list of his
travel perks, printed by the Smoking Gun Web site, all he needs is a few
cans of caffeine-free Diet Sprite, a big bed, a pot of decaf. (And global
hegemony, of course.) Dr. Gloom, who once dismissed conservation as a
"personal virtue," likes all the lights blazing before he gets to a hotel
suite and all the TV's beaming Fox News.

Sometimes happiness means being protected from news about other people's
unhappiness.

Washington may be gripped by a malaise over the miasma in Iraq. But
elsewhere, in business, books and academia, there is a scavenger hunt under
way to root out the scientific, economic and emotional reasons for joy.

When I was in college, in the Vietnam-Watergate era, sullen mugs trumped
smiley faces.

"Happiness was very uncool," my friend Michael Kinsley recalls of his
Harvard days. "There was a huge premium on being depressed."

Leon Wieseltier, who graduated from Columbia about the same time, agrees
that "happiness was considered embarrassing, a mark of shallowness." He
still calls joie de vivre "a sign that you're not paying attention."

But in the Ivy League now, students are eager to embrace the group therapy
of positive thinking. As Carey Goldberg wrote in The Boston Globe, the most
popular Harvard course is one taught by Tal Ben-Shahar about how to shed
pathologies.

You'd think just being lucky enough to get that Harvard edge would cause
elation. But Ms. Goldberg reported that more than 800 students left smiling
and cheering after hearing Dr. Ben-Shahar offer self-help formulas like
these: "Learn to fail or fail to learn"; don't think, "It happened for the
best," but rather, "How can I make the best of what happened?"

He meditated with the students, telling them to "give yourself permission to
just be." A gut on trusting your gut.

If there's post-traumatic stress disorder, he told me, there can be
"post-peak experience order" spurred by music or giving birth. Or making
love ‹ but "not all the time, unfortunately," he said, laughing.

Martin Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who popularized
positive psychology, says the field is growing because there are ways to
measure it. He adds: "The epidemic of depression seems to be completely
democratic. It hits the Harvard kids and the rich people and the poor people
at about an equal rate."

Dr. Seligman developed the theory of "learned helplessness." He found that
dogs who were given shocks for anything they did would become passive,
accepting shocks they could escape if they tried. Humans, he says, should
try to escape the culture of victimology, the self-absorption of "a huge I
and a small we," and shortcuts like drugs and shopping.

In his class, he offers "positive emotion" exercises. One is writing down
three things that went well during the day. Another is taking someone on a
"strength date," encouraging the person to show off a skill or talent.
Another is writing a "forgiveness letter." (I'm Irish, so I won't be doing
that.)

One of his teaching assistants once told his students they'd all get A's, in
the spirit of positive emotions. But we don't need to worry about a placid
Stepford universe. The guru of good vibes, as Dr. Seligman is called, warns
that people can increase their happiness only within a "set range."

"It's like a waistline," he says. "Everyone can't be happier in the pleasure
sense. Maybe people can be happier in the engagement sense" ‹ for example,
taking a job where you use your strengths every day ‹ "and in the sense of
more meaning in life."

Studies show the happiest people are the most resilient. (And probably
regard positive-psych classes as demented psychobabble?) Since they didn't
have to learn to be resilient in the Depression and World War II, yuppies
and their offspring succumbed to narcissism and materialism.

They say money can't buy happiness, but maybe it can buy some. In 2004, two
economists declared that money seemed to buy greater happiness but,
surprisingly, not more sex. (Explain Ron Perelman.) David Blanchflower of
Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick in England
calculated that if you increased your sexual activity from once a month to
once a week, you'd be as happy as if you had an extra $50,000 a year.

But is the converse true? For $50,000 more, you're just as happy as if you'd
quadrupled your sex? Along these lines, how much will it cost us to get rid
of Dick Cheney and end his trillion-dollar war, because that would buy us
happiness?

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