[extropy-chat] the good life

[The Avantguardian]

--- Ned Late <nedlate2006 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Avantguardian got me thinking about what constitutes
> happiness, or shall we say the good life.
>   First come the twin pillars of health & intellect,
> of course. 
>   But a close second is assertiveness, rapid
> assertiveness. Rather than get angry and raise your
> voice you have to politely talk back to people who
> diss you, otherwise they will peg you as a pushover.
> You've got to be quick on your feet in responding to
> those who probe your defenses. Don't be vicious, but
> show your opponent you can't easily be trifled
> with-- by isolating your opponent's weakness.
> Someone insulted me earlier this year so I quickly
> glanced at his pot belly and quietly responded,
> "well, at least I'm not fat". That was the last time
> he caused trouble.
>   Thirdly, it helps to be goodlooking, being born
> that way or by way of cosmetic surgery. No amount of
> beauty creme, exercise, or supplements is going to
> turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.
>   Money comes fourth. Of course it helps to have a
> lot of dough, but if you got money but aint got
> health, brains, assertiveness and looks, you are not
> going to live much of the good life. Swear to you,
> I'd rather be a healthy goodlooking assertive pauper
> than an unhealthy, ugly, unassertive billionaire.

Interesting take on an important question, Ned. You
might be curious how your thoughts stack up to a
survey that is the subject of a paper I found:

Diener et. al., "Happiness of the Very Wealthy",
Social Indicators Research, 1985; v. 16, 263-274

In the study, the authors handed out 1 page
questionaires on happiness to a sample of 49 of the
Forbes 400 richest people, all with an annual income
of > $10,000,000, and to a control group of 60 people.


The summarized results were that the wealthy group and
the control group were happy 77%+/-18% and 62%+/-22%
of the time. On a 1-7 scale 1 being terrible and 7
being delighted, the participants rated themselves as
5.82 for the wealthy vs. 5.34 for the controls.

As far as what they percieved as being necessary for
their happiness and the relative contributions of
these factors ranked from most important to least:

Wealthy
love 1.33
self-actualization 0.71
esteem 0.66
physiological 0.44
safety 0.24

Controls
love 1.25
physiological 0.76
self-actualization 0.55
esteem 0.46
safety 0.39

So what seems to clear to me is that the wealthy have
slightly different needs than average folk but are not
that much better at getting those needs met.



    

Stuart LaForge
alt email: stuart"AT"ucla.edu

"What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school... It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don't understand it. You see my physics students don't understand it... That is because I don't understand it. Nobody does." - Richard Feynman on QM

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