So why else should we study happiness? Why should you take this class?

Well at the
Greater
Good Science Center, we believe and why we offered this class is that the topics
you're
going to learn about and the practices that bring happiness really countervail some
alarming
trends that social scientists have documented in the past thirty years of American
society.
For example, one thing that's really clear is in the last 30 years, people in the
United
States have become more lonely as part of our fast paced culture. Data suggests
that
we have one third fewer close friends than we did a generation ago, that a quarter
of
people in survey data report that they have no close friends at all, more people
are spending
time with strangers as opposed to close friends. There is this epidemic of
loneliness that
we've documented in social sciences in the last 30 years. Loneliness is really
costly
for individuals. It's related to increased stress. It's related to reduced
happiness,
to sleep dysfunction, to problems, as you'll learn, in your immune system in your
neurophysiological
profile. We think that the substance of this course is a corrective to that trend
of loneliness.
A second reason why you should study happiness really with this particular focus
that we'll
be taking on in this class is it's been pretty well documented that there's been
this rise
in narcissism and self focus and self aggrandizement, and this sense that "I'm kind
of the center
of the universe'. In the past 30 years there has been pretty well documented in
cross sectional
survey data a rise in narcissism and a rise in sort of the sense that material
goods are
really the pathway to happiness when in fact that proves to be an illusion. There's
been
kind of a decrement, at least in self report data, in the past 30 years in how
connected
or empathetic people are to other people's concerns. And again, we see the focus in
this
class, this new science of happiness, countering those cultural trends that have
really taken
place in the last thirty years.
Finally, a lot of what you're going to learn about in this class about gratitude,
kindness,
generosity, compassion, cooperation, mindfulness, and forgiveness is that a lot of
these great
themes counter yet another trend that most Americans are concerned about right now,
which
is the rise in inequality. We've learned from different social science traditions
that really
the only incomes that have risen in the past 30 years are those of the top one
percent.
They have grown in the last 30 years by 278%, the middle class has either flatlined
or grown
modestly 35-40%. We know that CEOs earn 1-200 times their workers they manage
today. In
1979, that ratio was only 30 times. Americans care a lot about inequality for very
good
reasons, because as you'll learn in certain parts in this class, inequality costs a
certain
culture in terms of its happiness, its physical health, how well kids are doing,
the conditions
of their immune system, whether they're getting along on school playgrounds. And
yet again,
we have good data that suggest that themes that you'll learn in this class, themes
like
gratitude, themes like kindness or altruism or volunteerism or compassion are
really important
antidotes to excessive inequality, which seems to be running through our culture.
Yet another
good reason to dive deep into this material of human happiness.
What we're doing next is we would like you to think about the following thought
experiment,
which is a famous thought experiment in the philosophical tradition of thinking
about
happiness, which is: Imagine you had some kind of device, it attached to your belt,
it would tap into your neurophysiology, you could press a button and it would make
you
happy as much as you'd want to be happy, whenever you want to be happy, would you
press that
button knowing what you know now? And why or why not?