Why are wiser people becoming unhappy?

Happiness means "having a meaningful social relationship", "to do something with a day 's skill" and "to have freedom to voluntarily determine life" It is written in one of the academic literature. However,"If You're So Smart, Why Are not You Happy?According to Raj Rahnathan, a professor of marketing studies at the University of Texas, according to Mr. Raj Rahnathan, who is a better educated person, who achieved a wealthier and higher goal tends to be "less happy" ,The AtlanticI answer in an interview.

Why So Many Smart People Are not Happy - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/why-so-many-smart-people-arent-happy/479832/

The Atlantic reporter (Q):
In your book, "People are approaching things in a way that can not be happy", but what is it?

Mr. Rafunathan:
It is to involve what is called a social comparison. Let's say that you want to be the best among a group such as "I want to become the best professor". There is a big problem with this, the scale "highest" is not clear. Even if it says "the best professor", there are many evaluation items such as "contents of research", "evaluation from students", "perfection degree of resume distributed in class" and so on, there is no more clear numerical value Therefore, it becomes hard to understand which state is "can be evaluated as highest".


And, many people try to evaluate with something easy to understand. For example, in the case of "best professor", I will try to judge by "number of prizes awarded", "salary" and "school affiliation". Though these may seem to be a "good measure" in general, only in a specific field such as research, there are no awards, even in schools with low notoriousness highly valuable in a specific field In fact, it may be a poorly relevant evaluation item.

To put it more clearly, if a person gains huge income this month, he may be able to live a happy life for about six months. However, if that person gets used to this life, I feel that I do not want to go back to my original life and I will try my best to continue to earn huge income. But it is obvious that this person's effort to live is not happy and totally connected.

Q:
So, how do you think about it?

Mr. Rafunathan:
The approach I recommend is "to enjoy something and become good". Especially if you do not need to compare yourself with other people, it is only intuition to enjoy, improving the chances of success. If you can improve and improve your happy behavior for a long time, you will gain wealth and fame as a by-product of it.


When returning to the three elements of happiness such as academic literature 'Relationship', 'Acquisition' and 'Autonomy', it is better to add "World View" as the fourth element besides these three. The view of the world can be characterized in two ways, one related to the so-called social comparison, an "compete with people" approach that leads to the loss of others if someone wins. And the other one is "approach to (self) improvement" approach mentioned earlier, there is room for everyone to grow at the same time.

Q:
I was able to feel very interested the story of "Approach to progress" and "Compete with people" approach. This story came to be thought to apply to "economics" as well. Economics can be said as "research competing with people" in many respects. Can you talk about spiritual change when people are thinking about things with "approaching people" approach?

Mr. Rafunathan:
I do not want to misunderstand, but I do not intend to argue that the "compete with people" approach is bad. For example, the idea of ​​"competing with people" such as when you get caught in war, live in a poverty-stricken area, fight to survive, and compete in sports etc. is extremely important is.

Historically, most of us humanity is the product of people who have survived long survival competition. For this reason, there is a tendency to emphasize the concept of "competing with people". But what I want to say is that there is no need to fight to survive every day. It may be better for you to change your perception that the concept of "competing with people" that has shaped us so far may rather be retreating us.

For example, in advertising agencies, software design, research shows that you can demonstrate good performance simply by not placing yourself in "thinking to compete" with yourself. People can naturally get results if they can enjoy some process without worrying about outcomes and goals.


Writer Simon Cinec wrote in his own book that "the rules adopted by companies to do business are similar to military and organizational structure is hierarchical" We compete with 'approach. However, Mr. Cinec's book noted that the military's top leader was thinking "to aim for progress." For this reason, many companies have created an organization based on past history, but you can think that the easier it is to achieve greater success is the "aim for progress" approach.

Q:
I am currently the one who is happy in many ways, but I feel uneasy about the future. Is there a good way to avoid this idea?

Mr. Rafunathan:
The basic concept is "Do not combine happiness with achievement". This means that your own outcome does not have a positive or negative impact on happiness. For example, if you suffer from a serious illness and you think you will feel great happiness if you can recover luckily, even if you encounter a negative event, your role as a good teaching material of life that will grow us It plays.


We all have some belief about "good things" and "bad things". Those who feel that they have been having a good life until now will recall a lot of good events in their lives and will prove it as evidence, and those who feel that they have had a bad life on the contrary, We will gather evidence. that isPlacebo effectIt is like.

However, if these beliefs actually play only a similar role, I think it's a good idea to adopt a "aim for progress" approach that is more useful to you.