“Brett Ford [...] with her colleagues Maya Tamir and Iris Mauss [...] They wanted to know: Does trying consciously to make yourself happier actually work? If you decided—today, now—to dedicate more of your life to deliberately seeking out happiness, would you actually be happier a week from now, or a year from now? The team studied this question in four countries: the United States, Russia (at two different locations), Japan, and Taiwan. They tracked thousands of people, some of whom had decided to deliberately pursue happiness and some of whom hadn’t.
When they compared the results, they found something they had not expected. If you deliberately try to become happy, you will not become happier—if you live in the United States. But if you live in Russia, Japan, or Taiwan, you will become happier. Why, they next wanted to know, would that be?
Social scientists have known for a long time that—to put it crudely—there is a significant difference between how we think of ourselves in Western societies and how people in most of Asia conceive of themselves.
[...]
in the West, we mostly have an individualistic way of looking at life. In Asia, they mostly have a collective way of looking at life.
[...]
If you decide to pursue happiness in the United States or Britain, you pursue it for yourself—because you think that’s how it works. You do what I did most of the time: you get stuff for yourself, you rack up achievement for yourself, you build up your own ego. But if you consciously pursue happiness in Russia or Japan or China, you do something quite different. You try to make things better for your group—for the people around you. That’s what you think happiness means, so it seems obvious to you. These are fundamentally conflicting visions of what it means to become happier. And it turns out—for all the reasons I described earlier—that our Western version of happiness doesn’t actually work—whereas the collectivist vision of happiness does.
[...]
In fact, this search for individual solutions is part of what got us into this problem in the first place. We have become imprisoned inside our own egos, walled off where true connection cannot reach us. I started to think of one of the most banal, obvious clichés we have: Be you. Be yourself. We say it to one another all the time. We share memes about it. We say it to encourage people when they are lost, or down. Even our shampoo bottles tell us—because you’re worth it.
But what I was being taught is—if you want to stop being depressed, don’t be you. Don’t be yourself. Don’t fixate on how you’re worth it. It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy. Don’t be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it. The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.
No, don’t be you. Be connected with everyone around you. Be part of the whole. Don’t strive to be the guy addressing the crowd. Strive to be the crowd.
So part of overcoming our depression and anxiety—the first step, and one of the most crucial—is coming together.”
#LostConnections #读书
其实我去当义工也是我努力想变快乐的一步,想要去帮助别人,认识更多的人。和我一起工作的同事仿佛知道每一个借阅者的名字,热情地和他们打招呼聊天,连我这个初来乍到的人的借阅号都记得清清楚楚,好像真的这里就是一个大家庭。我觉得这个方法会有用的。
不过还不知道我下一次什么时候排班诶 ![]()
刚刚回家发现爹妈在看一期令人震惊的今日说法。讲一位神奇大哥,中学肄业,七年没回家,再回家已是三进宫之身。闯荡期间先后伪造了浙江大学毕业证,清华大学毕业证,注册会计证等证书,在公司干八个月干成财务总监,月薪三万,做了一两个上亿的项目,还帮公司打赢了几场官司,老板表示这个年轻人就是我司的未来!然后该司的未来在春节假期卷款逃走,放假加上疫情,公司上下过了快二十天才知道钱没了,所有人不知道他人是谁,工位和出租屋打扫得干干净净一个指纹都没留下——出租屋还是费劲波折找到的,大哥称自己是富二代,住在离公司很远的别墅区。其实出租屋离公司地铁只有三站路,但大哥每天早上起床先坐十八公里的车前往别墅区,以便搭乘公司领导的顺风车,被目击身在麦当劳就说自己早起晨跑——最后还是大领导想起之前他给自己修过转椅,警方扒着气阀辛辛苦苦找到一个珍贵指纹。对比系统得知大哥已不是初犯。神奇大哥这次卷走公司一千九百万元,找了十几个大学生给自己提现,由于金额巨大不便携带,分别换成了港币美元欧元——追回时虽然自己花了一些,也给大学生们一人十万,但是由于汇率波动,最后还净赚几十万。警方问你是怎么掌握专业知识的,大哥说,就看书嘛,学注会,看网课,学学法,听一些专家讲座之类的。现在正在蹲第三次的大哥在局子里最爱做的事情还是看书学习。
有关于亲密关系的问题想听听嘟友们的看法:
和男友谈恋爱以来我们一直有一个共识:对另一方不满的情绪如果日积月累下来不解决,必定会对我们的关系造成很大影响(主要是我,因为我有时很记仇;他是心很大的类型)
然而最近意识到有些情绪是不能被解决的,因为制造情绪的问题不是通过沟通就能解决的那种,而是两个人在一些事上的观点不同所以无法达成一致,作为两个成年人我们又不太能说服对方改变建立已久的观点。
虽然好在都不是关于人生大事(比如对生育的看法),是比较小的事,但我自己还是就很容易被这种情绪影响,晚上就会到睡不着觉,比如现在。所以想问问:
大家会有这样的经历和感觉吗?有的话是怎么处理的呢?
欢迎评论,救救第一次处于亲密关系中(并且很长期)的孩子 orz