Put down the remote and back slowly away from the television.
Despite the sharp rise in our standard of living in recent decades, Americans today are little or no happier than earlier generations. Why not?
A new study suggests one possibility: Maybe we need to be smarter about how we spend our time. And, no, that doesn’t mean watching more TV.
Feeling unpleasant. You can think of your happiness as having three components. First, there’s your basic disposition — whether you are, by nature, a happy person or not. Clearly, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about this.
Second, there are your life’s circumstances, such as your age, health, marital status and income. Often, this stuff isn’t nearly as important as folks imagine. If your income doubled, you would initially be delighted. But research suggests you would quickly get used to all that extra money
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This article points to a study that convinces us that people are doing everything they can to attain happiness. Question is, are they succeeding? I look around me at my own life and listen to others present their story and I wonder about the meaning of life. What is my purpose here and now?
The research states that, “The study showed that people were generally happy in activities that the authors described as “’engaging leisure and spiritual activities’ – things like visiting friends, exercising, attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting in a cafe or going to a party” – and that people choose to undertake such activities, instead of doing them out of necessity.
Moreover, the study mentioned watching TV as taking a lot more of people’s time than the above-mentioned activities did in the past, and that if we spent more time on the “engaging leisure and spiritual activities,” we would then have a more satisfying life.”
I investigated, over many years, the numbing question of existence. How was happiness to be achieved? What was I missing? I looked everywhere and finally found some encouraging answers through the science of Kabbalah. Of particular interest was the work of Rav Michael Laitman PhD. He has a unique take on the subject of the article.
Rav Laitman states in a comment regarding ‘engaging leisure and spiritual activities’on his blog that, “Soon we will start finding out that even these activities will leave us empty and unfulfilled. We will search for fulfillment in all kinds of places, until we arrive at our last desire: the desire to discover the meaning of life, through the attainment of the Creator.”
His comments on this article and related material can be found on http://www.laitman.com/2008/04/what-do-we-need-for-a-more-satisfying-life/ .