"He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any how." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
I recently read a Bloomberg-BusinessWeek article, How Adults Achieve Happiness, that summarized the results of a new survey on satisfaction at home and at work. The survey, taken by Marshall and Kelly Goldsmith, seeks correlations in happiness, defined as "short-term satisfaction," and meaning, defined as "long-term benefit," between work and home, if there are such correlations.
The survey is quite useful and an illuminating piece amidst a world of high velocity marketing and social media aimed at consumption and empty pursuits. At the same time, however, many of the findings, as the Goldsmiths readily admit, are quite "commonsensical."
As readers here know, philosophers have been talking and teaching about happiness and contentment for thousands of years. For this reason, I am often amused by "findings" that reveal what almost any curious, observant, and open-minded individual can discover entirely by intuition (or simply by reading Plato, Lau Tzu, Viktor Frankl, or countless other philosophical works).
Here are some key takeaways from the Goldsmiths' new survey on satisfaction that may seem quite obvious and achievable yet still overlooked and uncommonly applied:
There is an incredibly high correlation between people's happiness and meaning at work and at home... Those who are miserable on the job are usually miserable at home.
Since work and home are very different environments, our experience of happiness and meaning in life appears to have more to do with who we are than where we are.
...our results showed that the number of hours worked had no significant correlation with happiness or meaning experienced at work or at home.
Those who were more satisfied with life outside of work were the respondents who reported spending more time on activities that produced both happiness and meaning.
But what are some actual behaviors exhibited by the "satisfied" individuals in the survey -- behaviors that can help guide others (you) to pursue happiness and meaning in life? Again, we are given some quite "commonsensical" takeaways as a result of the survey:
- Reduce TV watching. It's stimulating but doesn't increase overall satisfaction with life -- at work or home.
- Cut back surfing the Web for non-professional reasons. It's negatively correlated with the experience of both happiness and meaning.
- Do as few chores as you can (whatever that means to you).
- Spend time exercising and with people you love (respondents who did this had more satisfaction with life at work and at home).
- Feeling challenged is linked to greater satisfaction, so challenge yourself.
"What is important in life is life, and not the result of life." ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The bottom line: Happiness at work and happiness at home are neither cause nor effect of the other; happiness happens because of individual choices and mindful behaviors that are self-actualizing, regardless of the place it occurs. And hence an environment at work or at home that allows the individual to simply be who they are will do more to create satisfaction than meaningless activities designed for entertainment and fleeting happiness, such as TV or office parties... Who you are matters more than where you are...
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Related:
The 'Diminishing Marginal Utility' of Wealth
Achieving "flow". that's what it's all about. ying yang. cat dog. man woman. history imagination. the higher the frequency of interchange between the two, the higher the flow.
Posted by: Alex Golubev | January 20, 2010 at 02:08 PM
Made my life easier..thanks
http://www.filecatch.com/trends/pt/12-08-2010.html
Posted by: Jayden | August 13, 2010 at 04:07 AM
Wow. These are some great suggestions. I'm curious why "thinking positively" is not included here?
Posted by: Quotes About Happiness | June 06, 2011 at 11:52 PM