Adventures in Reading

I finished my first book about positive psychology - Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment by Martin E. P. Seligman - and am on to Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

I really enjoyed Authentic Happiness so I’m excited about The Happiness Hypothesis — and yes I’m still currently also reading Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; I’m just taking my time with it and reading other books at the same time.

Jonathan Haidt is a professor of Social Psychology at the University of Virginia who studies morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is also a leader in positive psychology and studies positive emotions such as moral elevation, admiration, and awe.

From what I gather from reading the introduction, The Happiness Hypothesis is about ten Great Ideas that Haidt has come across in the works of ancient wisdom (Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, the sayings of Buddha, Analects of Confucius, the Tao te Ching, the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, etc.) and other works of philosophy and literature (Shakespeare for example). Each chapter attempts to savor one of these ten Great Ideas and to question it in light of what we now know from scientific research, and to extract from it the lessons that still apply to our modern lives. This book gives advice on how to construct a life of virtue, happiness, fulfillment, and meaning.

Visit the author’s website to read Chapter One (The Divided Self) and Chapter Four (The Faults of Others). Here are the other Chapter titles in case you’re curious:

Introduction: Too Much Wisdom

1 The Divided Self 1
2 Changing Your Mind 23
3 Reciprocity with a Vengeance 45
4 The Faults of Others 59
5 The Pursuit of Happiness 81
6 Love and Attachments 107
7 The Uses of Adversity 135
8 The Felicity of Virtue 155
9 Divinity With or Without God 181
10 Happiness Comes from Between 213
11 Conclusion: On Balance 241

Acknowledgments 245
Notes 247
References 265
Index 291

My favorite quotes from the Introduction are two from Shakespeare and Buddha with similar meanings.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. - Shakespeare

Our life is the creation of our mind. - Buddha

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist.

But I do love being outdoors, particularly being in the ocean so in honor of Earth Day (April 22) and Earth Week, here are the eco-themed books I recommend:

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond - Jared Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at University of California, Los Angeles and the writer of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

Diamond lists eight factors which, based on his analysis, have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies: 1. Deforestation and habitat destruction; 2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses); 3. Water management problems; 4. Overhunting; 5. Overfishing; 6. Effects of introduced species on native species; 7. Human population growth, and; 8. Increased per-capita impact of people.

He further isolates four new factors that may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies: 1. Human-caused climate change; 2. Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment; 3. Energy shortages, and; 4. Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity.

Some of the collapsed societies Diamond discusses are Easter Island, Anasazis (Southwestern US), and Maya (Central America). He also compares modern day Haiti to the Dominican Republic, which share the same island but have vastly different economies.

Click here to read the first chapter on washingtonpost.com.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy - Yes McCarthy is the author of No Country For Old Men. I promise this book isn’t nearly as violent as that book/movie. The Road was deservedly awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. The NYTimes Book Review writes a good summary of this book.

I really liked the Road — I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting — though it’s one of those books that I won’t re-read it (I frequently re-read my favorite books, but this one is just too sad).

I don’t like to read or watch a lot of violence so I found some of the scenes a bit nauseating. However, McCarthy seems purposeful in writing the scenes of violence so you don’t feel like he’s just trying to shock you just for the sake of sensationalism.

The conclusion was reassuring with it’s idea that mankind could not only survive nuclear destruction but do so without every person resorting to looking out just for themselves (as most of the folks the father and son encountered on the Road seemed to). It seems to be part of the moral of the story; not just that nuclear war cannot be an option but also that we need to work together towards a better future.

Click here to read an excerpt on the Random House website.

Happy Earth Day!

Yesterday, I read Parts I (Positive Emotion) & II (Strengths & Virtue) of Martin E. P. Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment and I’ve just finished the chapter on Love in Part III (In the Mansions of Life).

In this chapter, Seligman shares his ideas on marriage. First, research shows that married people — across the seventeen nations that psychologists have surveyed — have the least depression (followed by never-married, divorced once, people co-habitating, and people divorced twice).

In other words, marriage — stable, pair-bonding, romantic love — is good for you! Why? Seligman says it is because marriage is the only arrangement that gives us all three kinds of love:

• “love of the people who give us comfort, acceptance, and help, who bolster our confidence and guide us.” This is like a child’s love of his/her parents.
• “people who depend on us for these provisions.” This is like a parent’s love for his/her child.
• “romantic love - the idealization of another, idealizing their strengths and virtues and downplaying their shortcomings.”

In addition to these types of love, Authentic Happiness describes three styles of love:

• secure - people who have this style of love tend to have relatively enduring and satisfying relationships. They are comfortable expressing their emotions and tend not to suffer from depression and other psychological disorders. The secure style benefits care giving, sex-life, and coping with bad events.
• avoidant - people who have this style of love are less comfortable depending on others and opening up to others. These people tend to prefer their own autonomy — oftentimes at the expense of their close relationships. Although they often have high self-confidence, they sometimes come across as hostile or competitive by others, and this often interferes with their close relationships.
• anxious - people who have this style of love tend to worry about whether their partners really love them and often fear rejection. Although they are comfortable expressing their emotions, preoccupied individuals often experience a lot of negative emotions, which can interfere with their relationships.

Seligman also recommends these books about marriage (though he thinks most books on marriage are focused on how to make a bad marriage tolerable instead of making a good marriage even better):

• Reconcilable Differences by Andrew Christensen and Neil Jacobsen
• The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships by John Gottman
• The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert by John Gottman
• Fighting for Your Marriage: Positive Steps for Preventing Divorce and Preserving a Lasting Love, New and Revised by Howard Markman, Scott Stanley, and Susan Blumberg

John Gottman is the University of Washington in Seattle professor who’s known for being able to predict divorce with over 90 percent accuracy by watching couples interact for twelve hours each day for an entire weekend in his “love lab” (a comfortable apartment with all the amenities of home plus two-way mirrors). The predictors of divorce are:

• A harsh startup in disagreement
• Criticism of partner, rather than complaints
• Displays of contempt
• Hair-trigger defensiveness
• Lack of validation (particularly stonewalling)
• Negative body language

In addition, Gottman accurately predicts which marriages will improve by simply devoting an extra five hours per week to their marriage:

• Partings - before these couples say goodbye each morning, they find out one thing that each is going to do that day (2 minutes per day, 5 days a week)
• Reunions - at the end of each workday, these couples have a low-stress reunion conversation (20 minutes per day, 5 days a week)
• Affection - touching, grabbing, holding, and kissing, all laced with tenderness and forgiveness (5 minutes per day, 7 days a week)
• One weekly date - just the happy couple in a relaxed atmosphere, updating their love (2 hours once a week)
• Admiration and appreciation - every day, genuine affection and appreciation is given at least once (5 minutes per day, 7 days a week)

Other researchers have shown that optimism helps marriage. As Seligman states, “Satisfied couples see virtues in their partners that are not seen at all by their closest friends.”

Back to reading…just three more chapters to go: Raising Children, Reprise and Summary, and Meaning and Purpose.