Tag: happier

How to think about being happy and how to be happier

If you are like many people, you might wonder: am I happy? How can I be happy? Why am I not happy? What does it mean to be happy? It is a problematic term, happiness.

Perhaps we have problems with the idea of happiness because it varies from one person to the next. One person might be happy travelling the world, while another is happiest staying at home.  I could be happy being alone on a porch in a rainstorm: you could be happy at a big noisy party. It truly depends on the individual.

That said, if you are struggling with the uncertainty of knowing how to be happy, consider pursuing feelings associated with happiness. I find it is easier to be certain when it comes to feeling content, satisfied, pleased, delighted, joyful, amused, relaxed, calm or cheerful. Happiness is a rainbow of feelings, are all those positive feelings are a part of that rainbow.

Likewise, you may not know how you are feeling at the moment, but you may be able to firmly say you do not feel sad, angry, hungry, tired, or stressed. The absence of those unhappy feelings means you are closer to happiness than when you are experiencing them.

If your days are filled with hours of  contentment and calm and occasional moments of excitement and euphoria, it’s safe to say your days are also filled with happiness. If that does not describe your life, aim to do things and think thoughts that lead to more of those feelings. You’ll be glad you did. Dare I say, you’ll be happy.

 

 

The problem with OKCupid and Facebook and their experiments is one of trust (and why that’s good)

Trust and mistrust is one thing that has not been explicitly mentioned in the many critical pieces about the experiments that Facebook and OKCupid have done with their users, but I think it is a key aspect of this that should be addressed.

When dealing with organizations, there is a degree of trust we put in them. Facebook has been eroding that trust for some time by evading it’s privacy settings. Now we find out that it is actively trying to see how effective it is at affecting people’s mood. It seems OKCupid is basically lying to you to see if it makes a difference.

However you feel about their actions, I think the common response is to trust these organizations less. I make an effort to avoid engaging with Facebook as much as I can. I haven’t used OKCupid, but I used to be interested in their data analysis:  now I no longer trust that analysis and I think it’s just as likely that they make up the data. I suspect others feel the same way,  and that can’t be good for either of them.

Furthermore, I am now distrustful of similar organizations that want to collect data on me. Two apps I downloaded recently, Happier and Unstuck, both looked appealing to me at first. However, after some thought, I stopped using them because I worried that they might misuse that data for their benefit and my detriment. I had no specific reason to believe they would misuse it, but Facebook has bred that mistrust, and that mistrust has spread.

Ultimately that mistrust is bad for organizations trying to build new technology, at least in the short term. However, in the longer term, I think this is a good thing. I think that mistrust and scepticism towards organizations will lead them (at least the smarter ones) to have more respect towards their users if they even want to have any users. Without that mistrust, organizations will continue to abuse their users in any way they seen fit. That abuse has to stop. This mistrust is a step towards stopping it.

P.S. This image…

… is from a great post on how Facebook has eroded privacy settings over time and is worth a look.