Petits étirements du muscle avant le retour aux bercails: ba be bi bo buuuuuuuuuuuuu!
Vous l’avez décidé avec 66% des votants, j’écrirai dorénavant en français sur ce journal de la toile autrement appelé blog par nos amis anglo-saxons. Chui hyper jouasse de me réapproprier ma langue maternelle même si là je suis encore en rodage.
Dès la semaine prochaine, je vous ferai part de mes découvertes sur le bonheur en allant interviewer scientifiques, philosophes, badauds et pourquoi pas Bardot. Je serai également très heureuse de publier ceux qui veulent exprimer leur vision du bonheur. N’hésitez pas à me contacter.
Fellow english speakers, fate has spoken: it will be french. I will switch this blog to french as soon as next week but… but… I will keep my Tumblr in english on the same subject: Happiness. There is a few articles I wrote I would like to share with you and it is also very important to me that I stay in touch with the rest of the world. I will stop butchering your beautiful language on this blog and will go back to butchering my mother tongue Take Care.
74% of moodtep’s readers are located in France. So I believe the question is legitimate: should I switch this blog to french? Help me out to take a decision.
74% des lecteurs de Moodstep sont en France. Peut-être est-il temps de rechausser ma plume française pour explorer le bonheur? Qu’en pensez-vous?
When I was younger, I studied Economics at the University. I had to use esoteric terms, complicated theories, hypothesis “all things being equal”, going from micro to macro… I felt I had to understand a monster created by us but not for us.
We have to feed the giant to maybe have a chance to see him do what we want him to do. The pulse of the beast: the GDP. But didn’t we develop all those tools to have a better life? Is it working? What’s the point of all that if human wellbeing is not in the center of our economics?
A small but famous country, Bhutan, is showing us a new way. Bhutan is Famous for it’s measurement of gross national happiness instead of GDP. But measuring happiness is a first step and doesn’t mean that the country is the country of happiness. A wave of suicide has been reported as a consequence of modernization and weaker family links.
Let me introduce you to my friend Gilles who is passionate about emotions and founded an emotion based city guide: Sencities. He is working with specialists in the field of emotions and introduced me to Florent from the Lab LUTIN (Imp in French). They pluged me on a machine that took several data like my heartbeat, my eyes movements and my breathing. The lab is studying and measuring our emotions for industrial purpose, in this lab it’s specifically for the videogame industry but we can easely imagine that it could be used to measure happiness eventhough for the moment they can’t make the difference between anger and happiness for example.
I tried an other machine/gadget/tool that claims it can raise your happiness level: hearthmath. It helps you monitor your emotions and through exercices coordinate your brain and your heart. It’s called coherence.
Technology is trying to measure happiness but on a world level it seems that happiness became a hot subject. Even the very famous social network Facebook launched an analysis of our happiness level using keywords in users status. Learn more about it with this article or this video.
But in the end do we need so many criterias to measure happiness?
In Hypertension and Happiness across Nations , David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald measured blood-pressure of 15,000 randomly sampled individuals from 16 countries. They compared well-being with high blood pressure and found evidence that suggests that happier nations report fewer blood-pressure problems. It matched happiness measurements that were made with a simple scale of subjective happiness.
This other study “examined the accuracy of measuring happiness by a single item (Do you feel happy in general?) answered on an 11-point scale (0-10). Its temporal stability was 0.86. The correlations between the single item and both the Oxford Happiness Inventory (OHI; Argyle, Martin, & Lu, 1995; Hills & Argyle, 1998) and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985; Pavot & Diener, 1993) were highly significant and positive, denoting good concurrent validity. Moreover, the single item had a good convergent validity because it was highly and positively correlated with optimism, hope, self-esteem, positive affect, extraversion, and self-ratings of both physical and mental health. Furthermore, the divergent validity of the single item has been adequately demonstrated through its significant and negative correlations with anxiety, pessimism, negative affect, and insomnia. It was concluded that measuring happiness by a single item is reliable, valid, and viable in community surveys as well as in cross-cultural comparisons.”
We can continue measuring cold data like money but I believe that there is space to use happiness as a legitimate indicator and driver for our society. Who’s in?
…I went for a stroll in the gardens of Versailles Castle. Gold and marbles are a testimony of past fastuous living.
Louis XIV, the Sun King extended drastically the castle under his reign and transformed it in a jewel for festivities. It was then that classical french arts flourished.
Now children are running barefoot in the green. Old couples, hand in hand, listen to the wind flapping tree leaves. But still, when you get lost in the maze, you could swear you heard famous writers from the golden age whisper.
Here is what they said about happiness …
Bossuet was born at Dijon, in Burgundy, in 1627. He was a catholic preacher.
“Human happiness is composed of so many pieces, that it always misses some”
Corneille was born at Rouen, in Normandy, in 1606. He was a famous dramatist.
“We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness.”
“Happiness seems made to be shared.”
Molière was born at Paris, in 1622 . He was a playwright. In French we say Shakespeare’s language for English and Molière’s language for French. He played a major role in French literature.
“Unbroken happiness is a bore; it should have ups and downs.”
Jean de La Fontaine was born at Château-Thierry, in Champagne, in 1621. He was a poet and fabulist. I am quite sure that 99% of French people have learned or read one of his fables.
“We ought never to scoff at the wretched, for who can be sure of continued happiness?”
Montesquieu was born at Bordeaux, in Aquitaine, in 1689. He was a political thinker.
“False happiness renders men stern and proud, and that happiness is never communicated. True happiness renders them kind and sensible, and that happiness is always shared.”
I have a slow pace when it comes to writing on the blog but now it’s worse than ever. My commitment is one post every week and I am below that! I start to worry but Bobby McFerrin comes to my rescue teaching us one of the key to happiness: when you worry, you make it double.
Lately it seems everybody I meet has something to do with happiness: happiness diners, happiness teacher, happiness scientist… So I need to gather my thought and write but I didn’t find the right time. I also opened a french blog (tab above) because so many people are interested but don’t feel at ease with english.
I join the slow food movement and create the slow blog community. If you are a reader that likes to take it slowly: welcome! If you want more everyday use the “I Follow” in the sidebar.
Today I went to the library to buy a book and I came back with five!
I went by the personal development section and discovered loads of books about happiness. It surprised me because I never realized there was so much literature on happiness.
You have to know that here, in France, people can be very cynical about happiness. Happiness is for fools or it’s a sect’s slogan. When you surf the web, most of the people writing, talking about happiness are Australian or American (it seems)(well I don’t speak Tamoul or Chinese).
But lately my beliefs are shaken. Everywhere I go, the topic comes up. Just this week, I was helping a friend at a festival and happiness was on everybody’s lips at conferences. Then a couple of days later, I was at a red light on my bike, and just there was a friend eating at a terrasse. I joined him for half an hour, only to discover that he was organizing happiness diners. They invite specialists on the subject like Ruut Veenhoven director of the World Database of Happiness and editor of the Journal of Happiness Studies and discuss.
I was in shock. A happiness tribe!
Since there is prolific information on the web about happiness (see my blogroll for exemple), I could contribute better by investigating what French have to bring to the table. I have a few people in mind and I hope that even if France is the world champion antidepressant consumer, it has the capacity to produce great happiness thinkers. To be continued…
In the meantime, he is not talking directly about happiness but he is French and I see an evident link between how we treat our planet and the fundamentals of happiness. As I exposed in a former post, when you start to investigate the subject of happiness, more stuff (when basics needs are met) is not doing the trick. Happiness doesn’t lie in having more, wasting, war, exploitation… Once every man will discover his inner happiness, the need to destroy our environment will not be the logics anymore. Well that’s what I believe but It seems I am an utopist ☺
So don’t miss this sublime movie that has been released for free in several languages for us to team up and improve the life of each one of us.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Blip.tv video.
Can we be mistaken on the appearance of happiness?
First, what is the definition of Happiness?
In an online dictionary, that’s what you find:
“hap·py
1. Characterized by good luck; fortunate.
2. Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy.
3. Being especially well-adapted; felicitous: a happy turn of phrase.
4. Cheerful; willing: happy to help.”
Just like in french, the word comes from good fortune. Happiness comes from luck?! Is a happy guy, a lucky guy that has everything going his way?
According to Dr. Seligman, founder of positive psychology, happiness is made up of three segments:
1. Positive Emotion or experiencing pleasure.
2. Engagement in life or losing oneself in meaningful activities.
3. Meaningfulness or participating in meaningful activities.
Activities! That doesn’t seem dull.
Have a look at the wikipedia page on happiness and you realize that, even though happiness is a common human theme, we didn’t come to a unified definition yet.
How can we achieve happiness if we are not able to define it, if we don’t know what it looks like?
Could happiness seem dull from the outside? May be we judge of our happiness with a twisted set of believes.
Take Care.
74% of moodtep’s readers are located in France. So I believe the question is legitimate: should I switch this blog to french? Help me out to take a decision.
