Paul Dolan (2)

A mixture of self-help and popular science, this is an engaging read, not least because Dolan comes across as extremely likeable (in spite of confessing to not having read a novel since he was at school!).

Dolan pithily defines happiness as "experiences of pleasure and purpose over time" and sets out to help the reader maximise and find their optimum balance of those two things. Key to this is allocating your attention wisely and not falling into the trap of mistaken desires, projections and show more beliefs. Early on, he makes a distinction between his definition of happiness and that which features in life satisfaction surveys, the former being concerned with the "film" of your life as opposed to the "snapshot", with life as it is experienced rather than as it is evaluated. For instance, someone who has a prestigious job of which they are proud may enjoy the fact of holding that job while not at all enjoying the everyday reality of it.

The inclusion of purpose as a factor of happiness is also interesting: apparently men experience more pleasure over time than women, but with purposeful activities taken into account, women experience greater happiness. This makes me feel better about some of those useful, necessary, but not particularly fun tasks I spend time doing!

This is a quick read and I found myself instantly applying some of the ideas to my life, to good effect. It's also helped me banish certain negative and unhelpful thoughts about work/my employment status that tend to intrude from time to time. However, as what I've read starts to fade from my memory, I can tell that this is a book I will need to return to at regular intervals. Recommended. show less

I have slightly mixed feelings about ‘Happiness By Design’. On the one hand, it treats happiness as a commodity in a reductive and depressingly neoliberal manner. On the other hand, its suggestions are extremely sensible and consistent with my own efforts at stress management. An example of the former: ‘Once we accept that the experience of happiness (for yourself and others) is the final arbiter of the rightness of what you do, we can move away from making moral judgements based on show more ill-conceived ideas about what is right and wrong.’ This incredible statement relies on there never being trade-offs between the happiness of different people or groups of people. To be fair, this is not a book of moral philosophy. I would situate it firmly in behavioural economics, although to its credit the limitations of the field are acknowledged. The tone is of an accessible self-help book that cites academic research, which explains why I was recommended it by a friend who doesn’t usually read non-fiction.

I found the combination of the pleasure/suffering and purpose/pointlessness axes useful, although there ought to have been some acknowledgement of structural and institutional factors that can place limits on both. The advice to consciously choose where to direct your attention, set up habits, do things you actually enjoy, care for others, listen to music, and keep up with friends is really great. I’m less convinced about ‘trying new things’, but liked the frequent reminders that chasing wealth, income, and material goods is not as rewarding as you might expect. The discussion of how entrenched habits can be, and how we rationalise them ex post, is certainly backed up by academic work on car dependence. Habitual drivers may not enjoy driving at all, but they generally claim it is the quickest, cheapest, and most pleasant way to travel even when this is actually not the case.

As for my own application of these principles, since the new year I’ve been consciously reducing the amount of time and attention I devote to the internet in general and online news in particular. So I’ve stopped using a smart phone (which I hated), started taking one completely internet-free day a week, and firmly classified current affairs as work and social media as leisure. So I only read the (work-relevant) news during workdays, avoiding it entirely in the evenings and at weekends. I don’t check social media or personal emails during workdays, unless I’m working at home. As a result, I’m calmer, less inclined to procrastinate, and have more time to read books, something that brings me both pleasure and a sense of purpose. 'Happiness by Design' did remind me, though, that a longer term goal is to get a job that allows me to cycle to work. The bus is pretty relaxing, but in the past I found a cycle commute much better for fitness and general well-being. Dolan's systematic approach to identifying behaviours to change will be familiar to anyone who has had CBT, and potentially helpful to anyone who wants to make improvements to their life. Just don’t expect it to explain why capitalism is stealing your sleep; for that I recommend [b:24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep|16284965|24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep|Jonathan Crary|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1373997570s/16284965.jpg|22399975]. show less

Dolan provides the practical capstone to all of the latest happiness research. Despite the classical debate between meaning and hedonism, people can actually derive happiness from both purpose and pleasure. The relative importance of these depends also on the person, so it's helpful to get intentional and aware about it. Much of happiness is driven by what we choose to focus on. Maximizing happiness is a function of deciding, designing, and doing happiness.

We are promised that many things have the possibility of making us happy, more money, children, friends, experiences and so on, and they have been countless books written claiming to have the secret of happiness wrapped within the covers. But in this book Dolan has looked at the things that make us happy from a scientific and behavioural economics perspective. It has been proven many times that material possessions up to a certain point have very little effect on you happiness state.

He show more defines happiness as ' experiences of pleasure and purpose over time'; with his primary idea being that purpose is itself a feeling. To get a higher level of happiness, you would need to get the balance pleasure and purpose just right. Most people take little pleasure in work, but do find it has a purpose, whereas TV can be pleasurable, but is rarely purposeful. The activities that people considered made them most happy were time spent with others and and working as a volunteer.

It did make for interesting reading, and he does expand his (and Daniel Kahneman's) ideas into a readable book. But overall it does feel a little two dimensional, and doesn't seem to have a huge amount of depth. Shame really, because i think that the principles he outlines are along the right lines. show less