3/26/2007 8:58:00 AM How do you measure happiness?
By BILL HORNE
Folks, let's look at happiness. Believe it or not, there are people who actually go around measuring how happy we are. From what I can determine, we are fairly happy; although it seems like the more stuff we acquire, the less happy we are.
To determine whether we are happy or not some researchers use the old-fashioned method of just asking us. There are some, on the other hand, who measure electrical activity in different areas of our brain. The only other method that I saw was one where friends evaluate each other.
The opposite of the above are researchers who measure our misery. All of these people find a way to put numbers on our feelings. I hope you don't mind, but I would rather look at our happiness ratings.
Before I get into all of this professional happiness stuff, I want to share some of my thoughts on the subject. It is my belief that we have too much manufactured happiness and not enough homemade happiness.
I hope this doesn't bore you too much, but last weekend our grandson, Zach, came to visit us. He is 5 years of age, so it was time for the two of us to explore the woods.
Zach is an ... umm, er, gulp ... city kid and since the woods did not fit his typical mode of happiness, things were not so good to begin with. We visited the "Indian Rocks" and they were "just OK;" even though our whole family, all ages, pays this spot a visit throughout the year. It is a great place to meditate and to put life into perspective.
Then we came to a creek and up popped the age-old question: "Where does the water come from?"
Finding the source, a spring bubbling up out of the ground, with my grandson was homemade happiness.
Now back to the task at hand. The United States ranks 15th to 25th, depending on which source you use, of all the world's countries for the job of being happy.
We seemed to have peaked, as a country, for happiness in 1974. Since that year, we have witnessed a slow, steady decline. And, it doesn't seem that more "stuff" raises our happiness rating.
During the time period from 1974 until today, we have increased our production of stuff by about 300 percent per year. Each home has two times as many cars, 200 TV channels instead of three, our homes are twice as large, and stuffed with stuff, and the storage industry for our excess stuff has double since 1974.
Maybe we have gone too far with manufactured happiness. It could be like eating too much homemade ice cream. The first bowl of ice cream tastes really good, but if you eat too much you get a headache and a stomach ache. Maybe we have reached the point of too much stuff and too much manufactured happiness.
The happiest people within our national society, according to the researchers, are the Pennsylvania Amish. It has been a while since I have been in an Amish home, but when I was it didn't seem to me that they had a lot of "stuff."
I understand that "The Tiny House Company" is doing very well. This company sells homes that are very, very small. These homes range from one room all the way up to home of 300 to 400 square feet. These are obviously for people who don't have a lot of stuff. I have seen a couple of these homes in our area recently.
Maybe we would be happier if we didn't have so much daily pressure. I saw a report the other day, written by Dr. Jean Twenge of Case Western Reserve University, which stated that, "People needed to feel safe and connected to others." She also has a study that shows that currently the anxiety level of our average school child is about the same as the anxiety level of a child receiving psychiatric care in the mid-1950s. In other words, today's normal child is equivalent to yesterday's extreme.
I mention the connected part because we seem to be teaching ourselves to be loners.
Organizations that were founded by our grandparents and parents seem to be fading away and I don't see anything replacing them. Even our current TV shows have themes about the last person standing. "American Idol" and "Survivor" are a couple of examples.
We used to stop and "sit a spell" with our neighbors. Now, in many cases, we don't even know our neighbors.
We have replaced face-to-face communication with cell phones, text messaging and e-mail. This, of course, has reduced the number of close friends that we have.
The good news is that there are sparks of light popping up all over the country. Living wage laws are being passed, and minimum wages are being raised, and clean election laws are becoming more numerous. These are signs that we care about each other.
Maybe with the very wealthy keeping all of our latest economic boom to themselves we will learn that more stuff is not the key to happiness.
More and more people are buying their food locally and this demand is causing the supply to respond. Small farms have always been more efficient and this is by any measure used. The measurement can be weight, calories or dollars, and small farms always win against large farms.
Our capitalistic system produces the most stuff - wealth - of any system ever tried. But it might be time to measure wealth in terms other than how much stuff we have. Maybe we should look more toward our health and the health of our environment. It is possible that conversation with friends and family is more valuable than "things." Maybe hugging a friend or relative is more valuable than hugging our boxes as we store them forever.
Locally, we seem to be happier than the rest of the country. My unscientific research was simply to ask people and the results were that 42 percent of us were happy as compared to the national number of 33 percent. Clyde Pidcock was included in my survey and he informed me that he was very happy.
--Bill Horne is a professor of economics at Southern State Community College and a columnist for The Times-Gazette.
