If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, you’re already on the wrong path. There is research suggesting that doing everything you can to make yourself happy is instead likely to make you unhappy.
Maybe you should instead strive to be self-actualized – which Abraham Maslow defined as rising above your biological needs and your desire to win affection and respect from other people as you pursue your own personal growth, perhaps by playing music or writing poetry. But Maslow’s beloved and revered ideas about self-actualization turn out, on closer examination, to be selfish, elitist, and, when viewed through the lens of a half century of research, more or less wrong.
Well, then, maybe you could run down to the local bookstore, where you will find dozens of advice books about how to be happy, win friends, and find fulfillment. Those books, are, for the most part, full of common sense. But alas, much of that common sense is either wrong, or only right some of the time for some of the people, or only applicable at some phases of your life as opposed to others. And those advice books typically have the theoretical organization of a laundry list, which poses practical problems, like remembering what goes where.
What’s worse is this: even with the best advice in hand, people often completely ignore it.
Why is it so hard to follow simple aphorisms such as “be nice,” “smile,” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” It turns out there is a field full of obstacles between understanding words of wisdom and making wise choices in real life. The obstacles come from our own conflicted motives and cognitive biases, from modern technologies that have perfected the art of parasitizing our most fundamental desires, and from the distracting declarations of right-minded do-gooders who completely ignore biology, or eloquent pied pipers who encourage us to blindly follow the worst of our selfish desires, as they lure us into a cave of hopelessness and despair.
Should we just throw up our hands and either give in to our own weaknesses, or try to live the life of a saint, complete with self-flagellation, and possibly the disdain of our friends? Fortunately, there is a third path - one that taps recent scientific discoveries for guidelines that can help you find personal fulfillment while winning the respect and admiration of the people you care about.
Biographies:
Douglas T. Kenrick is president’s professor of psychology at ASU, and author of The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think, and of Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature. He has published over 200 scientific articles, books, and book chapters, the majority applying evolutionary ideas to human behavior and thought processes. He has also written articles for the New York Times, Scientific American, and Psychology Today.
David Lundberg Kenrick is a filmmaker, editor, and writer. He is media outreach manager at ASU’s psychology department. He received a BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, has worked on educational media and shot videos for the BBC and Pearson Education. He has also filmed prominent psychologists from around the world discussing the implications of their findings for everyday life. He is coauthor of Social Psychology: Goals in Interaction.
The meeting is free and open to the public. Doors open at 9:00 am for socializing with an optional Continental breakfast available for a $5 donation. The meeting begins at 10:00 am.
A Children's Program is available during the Speaker Meeting: https://www.meetup.com/Humanist-Society-of-Greater-Phoenix/events/256378266/
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Mesa, AZ 85211
United States