86Thousand400: Happiness

Among the imperfect definitons of happiness, the pleasure-purpose concept is a strong contender. It is a good description of what I wish for my Grandchildren: a life that is rich in activities that are both pleasurable and meaningful. Paul dolan believes you can make your life both pleasurable and meaningful with deliberate choices, about the environment you create for yourself and about the aspects of life that deserve your attention.

Your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you attend to drives your behaviour and it determines your happiness. Attention is the glue that holds your life together.

The scarcity of attentional resources means that you must consider how you can make and facilitate better decisions about what you pay attention to and in what ways. If you are not as happy as you could be then you must be misallocating your attention. You will be the happiest you can be when you allocate your attention as best as you can.

The key to happiness is finding pleasure and purpose in everyday life. The key is to organise your life in ways so that you can go with the grain of your human nature and be happier without having to think too hard about it. This is happiness by design.

To be truly happy, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at times. But you do need to feel both. This is called the pleasure-purpose principle - The PPP

Day to day , moment to moment, you feel sentiments of pleasure, purpose, pain and pointlessness. You are happier when you experience more of the positive sentiments - and when you experience them for longer. So happiness is ultimately about the pleasure-purpose principle over time. Time is truly a scarce resource. You can beg, borrow and steal money but a minute spent has gone for good. Each day you have a time bank account with 1440 minutes in it. Each day that account goes back to zero again, with no borrowing or saving. Put bluntly but accurately, you are getting ever closer to death. There are surprisingly few researches who think about happiness in terms of your time use. But the scarcity of time means that any sensible definition and measure of happiness must consider the duration of your experiences of pleasure and purpose as well as their intensity. Ultimately we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Just as you cannot recover happiness that is lost. Staying in a boring job or an annoying relationship simply prolongs the misery and any future happiness is unlikely to full compensate for this loss. Lost happiness is lost forever.