En relación con el auditor externo:

We all enjoy and derive meaning from diff erent activities, and to varying degrees. For example, writing provides me with both

Quantit

Happiness Explained
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present and future benefi t, but writing for more than three hours a day bores me. Watching two movies a week contributes to my happiness, whereas spending four hours a day in front of a screen, over time, will most likely frustrate me. Just because an activity provides us with meaning and pleasure does not mean that we can be happy doing it all the time.

To extend the food motif beyond the hamburger, I will intro- duce what I’ve come to call the lasagna principle—the notion that our capacity to enjoy diff erent activities is limited and unique. Lasagna is my favorite food, and every time I visit my parents, my mother prepares a tray of it, which I promptly devour. h is does not, however, mean that I want to eat lasagna all day and every day. h e same principle applies to my favorite activities, such as writing and watching movies, as well as to my favorite people. Just because my family is the most meaningful thing in my life does not mean that spending eight hours a day with them is what would make me happiest; and not wanting to spend all my waking hours with them does not imply that I love them any less. I derive a great deal of pleasure and meaning from being with other people, but I also need my daily quota of solitude. Identifying the right activity, and then the right quantity for each activity, leads to the highest quality of life.

h e best method of maximizing our levels of happiness is trial and error, paying attention to the quality of our inner experiences. Yet most of us do not take the time to ask ourselves the question of questions—because we are too busy. As h oreau says, however, “Life is too short to be in a hurry.” If we are always on the go, we are reacting to the exigencies of day-to-day life rather than allow- ing ourselves the space to create a happy life.

Abraham Maslow maintains that a person “cannot choose wisely for a life unless he dares to listen to himself, his own self, at each moment in life.” It is important to put time aside to take Maslow’s dare, to ask ourselves the type of questions that can help

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WHAT IS HAPPINESS?

us choose wisely: Are the things that I am doing meaningful to me? Are they pleasurable? Is my mind telling me that I should be doing diff erent things with my time? Is my heart telling me that I must change my life? We have to listen, really listen, to our hearts

and minds—our emotions and our reason.

EXERCISES

Mapping Your Life

Though it is dii cult to quantify internal states of mind and heart, it is still possible to evaluate our lives in terms of happiness and gain insight into how we can become happier. We could begin by recording our daily activities and evaluating them according to how pleasurable and meaningful they are.

Devoting a few minutes at the end of each day to write down and rel ect upon how we spent our time can help us recognize important patterns. For example, we might realize that we spend a signii cant proportion of our time in activities that provide future benei t but that we do not enjoy, or doing things that provide us with neither meaning nor pleasure. We can then evaluate our lives through the lens of happiness and decide to add more meaningful and pleasurable experiences.

While there are basic principles that can guide us toward the good life—i nding meaning and pleasure, for instance—there is no universal prescription for it. It is self-evident that human beings are complex, multifaceted, and dif erent; each person is unique, a world unto himself. By zooming in on my day-to-day activities, I can see beyond the general principles that govern a life and identify the unique needs and wants of my life.

For a period of a week or two, record your daily activities. At the end of each day, write down how you spent your time, from half an

EXERCIS

Ma

Happiness Explained
●•  hour e-mailing to two hours watching TV. This does not need to be a precise by-the-minute account of your day, but it should provide you with an overall sense of what your days look like.

At the end of the week, create a table listing each of your activi- ties, the amount of time you devoted to each one, and how much meaning and pleasure each one provides (you can use a scale of 1 through 5, with 1 indicating no meaning or pleasure, and 5 signify- ing very high meaning or pleasure). Next to the amount of time, indicate whether you would like to spend more or less of your time on the activity. If you’d like to spend more time, write “⫹” next to it; if you’d like to spend a lot more time doing it, put down “⫹ ⫹.” If you’d like to spend less time on the activity, put “⫺” next to it; for a lot less time, write “⫺ ⫺.” If you are satisi ed with the amount of time you are spending on a particular activity, or if it is not possible to change the amount of time you devote to it at the moment, write “⫽” next to it.

Here is an example of part of such a weekly map:

Activity Meaning Pleasure Time/week Spending time with family 5 4 2.2 hours ⫹⫹

Meetings at work 4 2 11 hours ⫽

Watching TV 2 3 8.5 hours ⫺

Integrity Mirror

Make a list of the things that are most meaningful and pleasurable to you, that make you happiest. For example, a list could include family, exercising, promoting human rights around the world, lis- tening to music, and so on.

Next to each of the items on your list, write down how much time per week or month you devote to it. With or without the help of the

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WHAT IS HAPPINESS?

map you made in the preceding exercise, ask yourself whether you are living your highest values. Are you spending quality time with your partner and children? Are you exercising three times a week? Are you active in a human rights organization? Do you put time aside to listen to music at home and attend concerts?

This exercise raises a mirror to your life and helps you determine whether or not there is congruence—integrity—between your highest values and the way you live. With increased integrity comes increased happiness.6 _{Given that we’re often blind to the discrep-}

ancy between what we say is important to us and what we actually do, it may be useful to do this exercise with someone who knows you well and cares about you enough to be willing to help you eval- uate your life honestly.7

How much time we choose to spend on our highest values depends on personal preferences and availability. Just because fam- ily is my highest value does not imply that to increase my integrity and therefore happiness I need to reallocate all the time I currently spend on my hobby to my family (remember the lasagna principle). A person who must work two jobs to get enough food on the table for his family is living in accordance with his highest values even though he gets to spend little time playing with his children.

Often, however, we are pulled away from the life that would make us happier by internal and external forces that we have some control over—such as our habits, our fears, or other people’s expec- tations. Given that time is a i nite and limited resource, we may need to give up some activities that are lower on our list of importance— say “no” to certain opportunities so that we can say “yes” to ones that are more valuable to us.

Repeat this exercise regularly. Change, especially of deeply ingrained habits and patterns, does not happen overnight. Most important, once again, is to ritualize your activities. In addition to creating a habit of activities that you want to engage in, introduce

Happiness Explained
●•  negative rituals—times during which you refrain from doing certain things. For example, if feasible, create an Internet-free time zone, each day between certain hours. We spend an increasing amount of time on the Web; checking our e-mail every few minutes takes away from our productivity and creativity and ultimately makes us less happy.8 _{You can also introduce phone-free or meetings-free time}

zones, when you can fully focus on other activities, whether getting work done or spending time with your friends.

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h e Ultimate

Currency

What lies behind us and what lies before us are