PERSONAL HAPPINESS SPECIAL ....................Why smart people ain't too happy in their lives

Why smart people ain't too happy in their lives





Once upon a time happiness meant having food, clothing and shelter. Soon, these were not enough and people need ed to have stable family and friends, mastery in one's vocation, and the freedom to choose whom to marry and where to live to be deemed happy.

Now research has shown that fulfilling these criteria might not be enough.Happiness is not guaranteed even if you are well-educated, rich and talented. All these accomplishments might mean that a person is less likely to be satisfied with life. Most often this is because people may have an idea of what will make them happy , but go about it in a way that makes them angry and dissatisfied. For instance, to fulfil the need for competence, people decide that they will become the best at doing something, the best professor or the best salesman in the world.

There are many problems with these social comparisons. The biggest hurdle is that it is difficult to assess the `best' in any profession, says Raj Raghunathan, a professor of marketing at The University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business, who attempts to decode the happiness conundrum in his book, If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
What are the yardsticks for being the best professor? Is it about research, teaching? If teaching, is it the ratings from students or your lesson plans?
“What happens is that people tend to gravitate toward less ambiguous -even if they're not so relevant -yardsticks,“ Raghunathan tells Joe Pinsker of The Atlantic. The number of awards, salary, or fancy designations might seem like good yardsticks to judge a person's competency.

But happiness isn't found in awards and pay packets. “If you get a huge raise this month, you might be happy for a month, two months, maybe six months.But after that, you're going to get used to it and you're going to want another big bump,“ says Raghunathan. And the cycle goes on with people scrambling for bigger and bigger rewards to feel happy.

To get out of this cycle, Raghunathan says it might help if people are more aware of what it is that they are good at, and enjoy what they are doing. “When you don't need to compare yourself to other people, you gravitate towards things that you instinctively enjoy doing, and you're good at,“ he says. And if you hang on to it long enough, chances are that you will master it. Fame, power and money should naturally follow.

It will also help to cultivate an abundance mentality where you think that there is room for everybody to grow. Scarcity mindset, where you think that your win might mean somebody else's loss, might be useful in a war zone or in a sport like boxing.

These are not easy to achieve as we are hard-wired to focus more on negative things. At the same time, we all seek happiness and desire to be our best. “Ultimately, what we need in order to be happy is at some level pretty simple. It requires doing something that you find meaningful, that you can kind of get lost in on a daily basis,“ he says.

For more: theatlantic.com

TOI1MAY16