the pursuit of unhappiness the elusive psychology of well-being nov 2008

[...]... people of B mistakenly think themselves happy? Perhaps they do not know there is anything missing from their experience of life, or even unpleasant about it That would be something to know A further cluster of inquiries concerns the provenance of these states Do the people of B fail to be happy despite their best efforts, or because of them? Are their lives unpleasant because they lack what they want,... swarm of hummingbirds?—and was sometimes sought by experts at the Smithsonian or Harvard for her knowledge of corals, mollusks, and other life forms She was my mentor in the natural world of the island, and while I knew even then that the two of them were pretty special, I had no idea of my great fortune Someone must write a book about them All of these people, and many other good friends on and off the. .. the prevailing ethical and political doctrines of our time made reasonable assumptions about these matters? If not, that would really be something to know This book is fundamentally a plea for the importance of the psychology of wellbeing—or what I will call ‘‘prudential psychology, ’’ following the philosophical practice of using ‘prudential’ to denote matters of well-being, and the use of ‘moral psychology ... accounts of eudaimonia or well-being Virtue and morality came into the picture because of how they connected with the more fundamental notion of well-being, not the other way around This is precisely the reverse of what we find in the modern literature, including virtue ethics (Even neo-Aristotelian accounts grounding the virtues in human flourishing are still, in the first instance, virtue theories In... The central thesis of this book is that people probably do not enjoy a high degree of authority or competence in matters of personal welfare We should expect them systematically to make a host of serious mistakes regarding their own well-being Surprisingly often, people’s choices may frustrate their prospects for happiness and well-being rather than improve them In the pursuit of their dreams, even... is the study of happiness especially the province of positive psychology (To my mind, unhappiness is the more urgent topic; but since its pleasanter counterpart has tended to get short shrift from angst-ridden intellectuals, the positive psychology movement marks a welcome development, and this book is basically a part of 10 Part I: Fundamentals of Prudential Psychology it the dark side of positive psychology, ... about There are many interesting questions we can ask about this, the merely-oneof -the- most-important-things-in -the- world Might B’s residents think their lives are going well for them, even if they are not? Maybe they could be satisfied with their lives, or have lots of cheery feelings Would that qualify them as happy after all? Similarly, we can ask how accurately they assess their own happiness Might the. .. at least three forms of rationalism and sentimentalism regarding well-being, including normative views about the roles of reason and sentiment in the constitution of well-being (as in the example of hedonism) or, second, in the proper governance of human life As well, there are descriptive doctrines concerning the actual roles of reason and sentiment in determining human behavior The discussion in this... in other fields have initiated a major effort to improve our understanding of happiness and other psychological aspects of well-being After fitful beginnings in the 1960s, this work started to take off with the pioneering research of Ed Diener and others in the 1980s.¹⁴ And the literature has grown explosively in the last decade, particularly since Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, among others,... and the culture at large Philosophers too have been attending to these developments, and it is only a matter of time before these matters give rise to a substantial body of philosophical work.¹⁵ In short, there has been a broad interdisciplinary resurgence of interest in the psychology of well-being This effectively amounts to a new field of inquiry—what I earlier called prudential psychology Because there .