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More Happiness Please 

If we think carefully about our decisions, we’ll wind up living better lives, right? Jean Kazez asks this question in response to three recent books about happiness. (emphasis mine)

Do reflective people live better lives? To the Greeks, the answer was obvious. If the unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates said, the examined life goes much better. We need to think deeply before aiming and acting, if we are to have the best chance of succeeding. Think, aim, succeed. It sounds good; but do things really work that way?

Two recent books on the psychology of happiness call into question the notion that success in life depends on thinking and aiming. Stumbling on Happiness, by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, suggests that we don’t steer our way toward better lives, but mostly just happen upon them. In The Happiness Hypothesis, University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt compares a person to a combination of horse and rider. Thinking (the rider) is not entirely in control.

There are some ideas in this article worth considering, but they start off with an awful juxtaposition of meaning. Equating  an “examined life” with a happy life. Socrates’ point wasn’t as far as I can tell that  people would be happier if they lead a more reflective life, only that it was more virtuous to do so and one would tend to make fewer bad decisions. Doing those things might make some people happier, maybe not, but achieving happiness was not the main thrust of what he was saying. There is, as some of the authors mentioned in this review an element of luck in having a happy life. Most people regardless of religion or politics are  reluctant to acknowledge the role of luck or happenstance in their lives. Probably because giving luck its due acknowledges how little control we have over our lives. Its not an either/or choice. We all make decisions and we could all be better at making consistently good decisions, but the cards have a way of falling their own way and despite painstaking research, thought or consultation with others we don’t get what we planned or needed.

We all have our moments when emotion gets the best of us and Mr. Hyperbole smacks down Mr. Reason and Mr. Calm, but most of us are not highly paid TV commentators who’s job is reportedly to be to inform and enlighten millions of viewers -  Fox’s Neil Cavuto Tries To Link National Health Care To Terrorism 

….national health care program creates a bureaucracy and need for foreign doctors that Al Qaeda is only too happy to take advantage of.

There are arguments to be made against a national health care program. The suggestion that such a program is the same thing as opening a door to terrorists sounds like something you would here from a heavily drugged babbling inmate at an institution for the criminally insane.