Happiness is More than Pleasure

(Guest post by Eric Irons on May 30, 2012)

I’ve always been suspicious of people who equate happiness with pleasure and unhappiness with pain. It’s a simplistic model woefully inadequate to accurately assess such a multifarious concept. If the pursuit of happiness were about minimizing pain and capitalizing on pleasure, we would be a nation addicted to immediate gratification, drugged on cheap painkillers, obese from fast food, and using up our natural resources to fulfill shortsighted objectives. We would identify as consumers in our everyday lives and see our overall life satisfaction drop as the country continued to grow. In fact, we wouldn’t be that much different from how we are now.

Happy Holidays from Sustainable Seattle

I just got finished opening my presents from my mom, her boyfriend, and my sister and I have a few hours to reflect to myself since my family members have all gone off to other gatherings they are expected at. I looked at the floor of the living room, covered with opened presents from and for the four of us, scattered around with the miscellaneous wrapping paper or bow that didn’t make it into the recycle or trash, I can’t help but think about how the holidays vary for different people.

Back when I was in high school and Facebook was just getting popular, friends used to post pictures and updates about all the presents they got. “I got two Coach purses, a new laptop, an iPod…” Needless to say, some of the kids I went to high school with were quite spoiled and grew up in what we would call the “nice” neighborhood. (But to put it in perspective, their houses could eat my house for a midnight snack, and the rumor is that the neighborhood bylaws still had it written, although it wasn’t talked about or followed, that African Americans couldn’t live there.) The problem wasn’t so much how much they got, or what they got, because I myself grew up with a family who was always…comfortable…and they could tend to go overboard for the holidays. It was the fact that people felt the need to run around and brag about everything they got like it was a competition of who could get the most stuff.

So, almost 6 years later, looking around my living room post-Christmas-morning made me think about the old times, how far we have come, and what it all means in the greater world. At just 1 PM, I have already had two friends who had texted me “Merry Christmas” also ask what I got. I don’t understand the point of this… I'm not embarrassed of what I got, how much I got (whether a lot or too little), or any combination. I merely question their motivation. To me, Christmas is not about gifts. This does not mean that I didn’t give or receive any. But what makes me happy is making other people happy. Many of my gifts, especially for my friends, were homemade craft projects. I made my sister a set of earring hangers made out of two pieces of wall art I got at a secondhand store for two dollars each and a roll of lace ribbon I got for $1. It was the hours of hammering, sawing, and cutting, and hot gluing that really “cost” me.

This year for Christmas, I vowed to donate something equivalent to everything I got. If I got a new sweater, I would donate a few of my old sweaters. I am encouraging my family to do the same, because even in the economic hard times the world is going through, we still have SO MUCH STUFF.

As your holidays wrap up, and you are looking to see what you got, what you didn’t get, what you feel you need or don’t need, I encourage you to critically evaluate your situation and try to downsize. Whether that means regifting something you aren’t going to use, donating something you got that you didn’t want or don’t need, or donating something old that has been replaced by a new item. Always remember, there is someone out there who has less, but they are usually the ones that need less and want less too. All you NEED, is what you NEED to survive. This doesn’t mean we should feel guilty for having more than that, but I hope that you will all take a moment to think of the less fortunate with me.

Merry Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and Happy Holidays from everyone at Sustainable Seattle.

OECD Measuring Well-being

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, (OECD) is turning 50 and they are now considering “life satisfaction” along with its existing economic measures. They have developed the “Your Better Life Index” measuring 11 domains in each of the OECD 34 member countries. OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría says, "[The Index] has extraordinary potential to help us deliver better policies for better lives."

http://happymentary.blogspot.com/2011/05/oecd-throws-its-hat-into-happiness.html

Starting tomorrow the OECD is hosting New Directions in Welfare II, a three day conference focused on discussing the economics of welfare and public policy. Economists from around Europe and the World began this discussion with part one in 2009 in Oxford.
http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/welfareconomicstheory/files/ndw-conference-2011-programme.pdf

Additionally they are collaborating with Action for Happiness, an organization founded last year in Britain that is dedicated to bringing people together to create a happier society.
http://www.actionforhappiness.org/news/oecd-looks-to-compare-happiness-across-nations

Just over a month ago New Zealand published a national happiness study. The study, "Working Towards Higher Living Standards for New Zealanders," conducted over 18 months acknowledges that, “living standards are broader than income alone, and are determined by a wide range of material and non-material factors." Ross McDonald, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, says, "We've got to get out of the mindset that sees growing economies as our ultimate purpose in life,"
http://happymentary.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-zealand-does-its-own-happiness.html

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has called the movement from GDP to the measurement of happiness a “revolution.”
http://article.wn.com/view/2009/09/15/Sarkozy_wants_to_use_measure_of_happiness/

What gets you fired up?

I haven't always worked in sustainability, and at first glance my path to this work looks rather random.  I originally moved to the U.S. to work in a specific lab, towards a PhD in biologically-based artificial intelligence.  In some ways it is far enough removed from what I do today that I joke about this being "a former life", but my interests haven't changed - only my priorities.

I grew up an environmentalist - first in the narrow "we must save beautiful places" sense, and as a teenager moving to a much broader understanding that we have to take care of the environment because threats like climate change have the potential to hurt so many people so badly.  I've also always felt that the world can only be understood with scientific tools, and unfortunately happened to start university (in the U.K.) just as Greenpeace was ramping up its campaign against genetically modified foods.  The problem wasn't the cause itself, so much as the horrifyingly anti-science rhetoric used.  Flyers that scaremongered about "alien viral DNA" had the opposite effect on me: they blinded me to the [more complicated, but nonetheless important] real issues around GM food.  Overall, the shriekingly science-phobic campaign gave me such a bad feeling about the environmental movement as a whole that I ignored it for years.

What brought me back was a combination of the complex systems work I was doing on the way to a PhD, and Jared Diamond's book "Collapse".  The more I learned about complex systems, the more frightening the IPCC's climate change predictions started to sound.  With a proper understanding of feedbacks and tipping points, climate change went from being a vague theoretical worry to a convincingly real threat to cities and agriculture.  Meanwhile, "Collapse" showed me how real the risk is that as a global society we won't manage to respond usefully to what's going on until it's far too late.  The last thing I wrote on my academic blog sums up the human side: Why I found "Collapse" so depressing.

All of this made me feel that the global environmental crisis was simply too important and too urgent to ignore.  I dropped out of the PhD and started looking for work in the sustainability sector.  In the four years since then, I've become convinced that the real action is on the social side.  The science is well enough developed that we know what needs to be done.  The technology is good enough that we have the tools to do it.  The problem is educating people, and changing behaviour at every level from individuals to governments.  I've been looking for tools to push back the materialism and atomisation that lead to collapse, and help bring about a world in which we all understand what we really need, and look out for each other, because we need that for humans to continue to thrive.

So now I find myself running a training program, and helping out wherever my skills are relevant with the Happiness Initiative, which is all about the change in values and the public conversation that needs to happen.  And now I'm experimenting with something new: working on a collaborative handbook for social change campaigns.

One of the things we need to understand to make social change campaigns effective—to make them recruit people to causes we believe in instead of driving them away—is what motivates people to care about an issue.  Joe Brewer and I have plenty of ideas, but we want some personal stories.  What kind of social change do you care passionately about, and what got you engaged?

Why (and how) to focus on behavior change

Last year, we hosted a workshop called How To Bring About Large-Scale Behavior Change, taught by Joe Brewer.  It was our best-attended workshop of the year, and people loved it and seemed to leave it buzzing with ideas, so we're running it again, only this time we're going further.

The one complaint that many participants had last year was that in a one-day workshop (realistically 6½ hours after breaks are accounted for) with a lot of material to cover, there wasn't enough time for hands-on practice.  This time round, we're breaking it into 3 half-day sessions, with a couple of weeks between each so people can mull over the material, and the final one will be devoted to practice and feedback:

• On July 30, we'll start with Getting the Big Picture, covering the theoretical background from cognitive science, and examples of successful behavior change campaigns that we can learn from.
• On August 13, we'll have Tools for Social Change Campaigns, in which Joe will introduce a 'designers toolkit' for social change, applying the groundwork from part 1 to practical methods for understanding and driving the process of change.
• On September 10, we'll finish with a Design Lab for Your Campaign.  Each participant will create an action plan for a behavior change campaign, and we'll critique each others' so we can all learn from each other.

I'm really excited about this class, but we also recognise that a lot of people who are interested won't be able to make it to three separate sessions spread out in time like that.  If you're one of those people, we have an alternative for you: we're raising money to write a Designer's Manual for Large-Scale Change which will be free to download and stand alone as an introduction to the same ideas.  Here's  short video of Joe introducing the project:

We would of course very much appreciate your contribution; if you'd like to donate or read more, head over to:

http://rockethub.com/projects/1910

As with many of the classes we put on, I am sometimes asked why Sustainable Seattle is interested in promoting this particular topic.  The environmentalist angle on this is that I firmly believe that we already have all the technology we need to deal with the environmental crises looming over us, and what we really need to do is persuade people to make the right choices.  Lately we've been talking about happiness, and the links to that are are actually quite similar.  Whether we look at individuals' happiness, or the ways that each of our behavior affects everybody else's happiness, we find ourselves presented with a quite well developed body of knowledge about things we could be doing to make the world, and yet most people aren't doing them.  Many of these things are well-known and very easy, so clearly we need to get better at persuading people.

Whether your interest is in persuading people to give up smoking, drive less, get to know their neighbors or lobby politicians, you'll need to use the same insights about psychology and culture, and the same techniques based on those insights.  Why don't you join us this summer to learn how?

http://sustainableseattle.org/training/257

Thoughts about Time Inspire People to Socialize

Does thinking about time or money make you happier? A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that people who are made to think about time plan to spend more of their time with the people in their lives while people who think about money fill their schedules with work, work, and—you guessed it—more work.

To find out how thinking about time or money makes people feel, Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania designed an experiment, carried out online with adults from all over the United States, in which they concentrated on money or time. In this experiment, volunteers were asked to unscramble a series of sentences. Some participants were presented with sentences containing words related to time (e.g., “clock” and “day”), whereas others’ sentences contained words related to money (e.g., “wealth” and “dollar”). Next all participants were asked how they planned to spend their next 24 hours. The ones who had been primed to think about time planned to spend more time socializing. People who'd been primed to think about money planned to spend more time working.

She also carried out the experiment on low-income people and found that having them think about time had the same effect, but having them think about money did not. This may mean that low-income people already live concerned about and, therefore, highly focused on money, Mogilner speculates.

But Mogilner wanted to test the effect in the real world, seeing how people actually spent their time. So her research team approached people going into a café on campus to ask them to take part in a questionnaire, which included the word-scrambling task that primed them with thoughts of time or money. These individuals were then watched to see how they spent their time in the café—whether they chatted with people there or on a cell phone, or whether they worked. When they left the café, they filled out a second questionnaire about how happy and satisfied they felt. The results were similar: People who were primed to think about time spent more time socializing and were happier, while people who were primed with money spent more time with their noses buried in books and were less happy when they emerged.

Although focusing on money motivates people to work more, passing the hours working does not generally make one happy. Spending time with loved ones does, and thinking about time might motivate people to pursue these social connections. "There is so much discussion and focus on money, optimal ways to spend and save it, and the relationship between money and happiness," says Mogilner. "We're often ignoring the ultimately more important resource, which is time." She does not suggest that people stop working altogether, but she does say that people need to be reminded to make time for friends and family.

###

For more information about this study, please contact Cassie Mogilner at mogilner@wharton.upenn.edu.

The APS journal Psychological Science is the highest ranked empirical journal in psychology. For a copy of the article "The Pursuit of Happiness: Time, Money, and Social Connection" and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Keri Chiodo at 202-293-9300 or kchiodo@psychologicalscience.org.

Flow 5/1/2011 Issue 8

Flow is based on Sustainable Seattle's Happiness Initiative and is inspired by Vinyasa, which means one leading to another. Flow gives small, but important steps that can improve one's contentment amongst all nine domains of happiness. Flow is a weekly jolt of inspiration, pragmatism and a collection of local events that will raise our happiness. This month of May we are taking a look at some simple actions we can take to get our mental health on a better path. First before we get started, this month is not meant to replace professional psychological advice nor should it be used as a substitute for seeking assistance for serious problems such as depression. Psychological Well Being Issue 8 I’m a huge believer in taking actions to affect our attitude. We sometimes get so caught up in our minds that we do not make significant changes, but wallow in our emotional problems. We are going to be looking at actions that can help change our emotional states from the outside in. Use the mornings as a time for yourself. Set the alarm fifteen minutes early and enjoy the silence of the home while eating a healthy breakfast, exercising or meditating. Make lunch for the next day in the evening and when eating said lunch get out of the workplace whenever possible. Find a place of beauty and calm, or a place filled with people whichever makes you happier. Never cram food in your mouth while you sit at your desk. Make connecting with friends a priority. Nothing beats face to face interactions no matter how “busy” we claim to be. We need to make that choice to spend time with people we care about. Choose to read, write, draw, or dance as a way to not only be creative, but also to be active. Active minds are more resilient. This week slow things down and take time to appreciate all the things in your life that are going quite well. Health, employment, love of family or friends, safety, all these things we take for granted. Choose this week to pay attention. Lastly, and I can’t recommend this enough, is to keep a very safe, secure journal. Journaling allows us to get things out of our heads, explore ideas, and reconnect with ourselves. There are only three rules to journaling: never let anyone else see it, write consistently about whatever pops into your head, and NEVER let anyone else see it. Journaling is raw thoughts that do not need to go through our usual filters of society. It is extremely important that others do not see these thoughts as we are nowhere close to that amount of honesty in our relationships. This journal is for us to reflect and think and organize, not to show and tell. I would also recommend not to do this online or in the form of a blog. Once something is out in the ether of the internet, it cannot be withdrawn. Nathan Jackson Recommendations This week’s website recommendation is: The #happiness Daily This week’s book recommendation is: Pocket Sudoku by Will Shortz Sign up for the weekly newsletter. Support Flow		Flow Suggests: 5/1-5/7 2011 Climate Change and Grass Roots Organizing Environmental, Psychological Well Being, Community www.sustainableballard.org Monday, May 2, 2011 4:45-7pm Visualization Tools for Sustainability Environmental, Community Tuesday, May 3, 2011 9am-5pm www.sustainableseattle.org Susan Freinkel: Plastic, Plastic Everywhere Environmental, Cultural, Material www.townhallseattle.org Wednesday, May 4, 2011 | 7:30 – 9pm

Keep on Keeping on.

by Nathan Jackson

Sustainable Seattle has been making waves with its Happiness Initiative, the fifth iteration set of indicators, and people are noticing our work. We have been pushing forward revamping our programs and projects to reflect the results of the Happiness Initiative and we have just completed a revamped communications strategy.

We are an organization made up of tireless idealists who give so much of themselves to see these programs and projects be as successful as they can be. We put our hearts, minds and souls into this work and the work has been noticed.

The last few months media giants such as: Seattle Times, Reuters, Seattle P.I., King Five and CSR Wire have all written and spoken about our work and we continue to have hundreds of people take the happiness survey every week. We've had numerous blogs, and locally independent coverage of our work around the initiative and we have even attracted the notice of many professional counselors, psychiatrists and other human service providers.

The thing about Sustainable Seattle is that we do this work while seeking sustainable funding. We are pushing the world of indicators in a new direction just as we have in the past when we were the first organization to create regional indicators that were replicated throughout the world. We do this for the love of the work and we realize that in order to continue this important work that has enlightened and heartened so many people we need to look to our own material well being.

We are taking a different approach to nonprofit funding than many other organizations. As a 501(c)3 organization we are very mindful of tax regulations and therefore we've taken an approach that combines varying revenue streams. Most nonprofits have a financial plan that starts with individual donations then grants then corporate sponsorships and then in a few cases fee for service. We are Sustainable Seattle and we are flipping that model on its head.

We are approaching our revenue gathering from a fee for service, corporate sponsorship, grants and then individual donations perspective. We have had success with our training classes and we are rolling out in response to the overwhelming demand for such services such as: Corporate Social Responsibility (Sustainability and CSR Reports Services), forums for dreaming and initializing a more sustainable future (Dream a Sound Future), ideas and practical actions to enhance our personal happiness (The Flow Campaign) and helping people make significant changes to their own property to lower their negative impact on our fragile Puget Sound watershed (Sustainable Rain).

Our approach is to make our financial futures more sustainable and within our own control. We want to be able to keep this work going while still being able to feed ourselves and our families. We look at our financial security as a serious challenge and opportunity to create a new model for other nonprofits who perhaps view the financial side of their work as somehow lesser or base. Without a secure future for ourselves this work that is in such demand cannot continue in perpetuity. Here's where you, dear reader, come in.

We are seeking individual donors, corporate sponsorships as well as grants in combination with our fee for service work. We have many ways for the individual to get involved from the very much appreciated donation to supporting our partners such as Ideal Network to joining our Facebook Cause called Support Sustainable Seattle. We are also looking for corporate sponsorships from organizations that are aligned with our mission and values and we are seeking grants that can help finance our work as we continue to lead change and fight the good fight.

We have many different events and projects coming up as well and we would love, love, love your participation as well. Check out what we have going on in the next few months here at our shared calendar with Sustainable Ballard and Sustainable West Seattle.

The Flow Campaign 3/20-3/27 Issue 2

The new issue of the Flow Campaign is live. Please click on the image to be redirected. We are working on some technical solutions to streamline this process. In the meantime we still want you to have access to the individual actions and events coming up this week in order to strengthen your nine domains of happiness. Sign up for the weekly newsletter.

Also stay tuned for video footage of our fantastic Happiness Event. We were over capacity and had to haul in extra seating and we had to purchase additional food and supplies as the night went on. More details about the event coming soon.

Have a wonderful weekend and please check out the new projects we are launching at Sustainable Seattle.

The Flow Campaign.

Sustainable Rain.

"What's the Economy for anyway?"

Film: "What's the Economy for Anyway?"

A DOCUMENTARY FILM BY JOHN DE GRAAF, (40 min, 2010)

AND A DISCUSSION ABOUT THE SEATTLE AREA HAPPINESS INITIATIVE

With Filmmaker John De Graaf

And Laura Musikanski, Executive Director of Sustainable Seattle

LOCATION:

Keystone Congregational Church

5019 Keystone Place N., Seattle

(0.4 miles west of the I-5 NE 50th St. Exit - Metro Bus Routes 16, 26 & 44)

Directions can be found at www.meaningfulmovies.org

…for flyers & more information, please go to www.meaningfulmovies.org

Film: “WHAT’S THE ECONOMY FOR, ANYWAY?” (40 min, John de Graaf, 2010)

WITH FILMMAKER JOHN DE GRAAF AND LAURA MUSIKANSKI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF SUSTAINABLE SEATTLE

And a Discussion about the Seattle Area Happiness Initiative

Is the GDP is an adequate measure of society's well-being? Are there workable alternatives? And ...what's happiness got to do with it? In this film, produced and directed by John de Graaf of “AFFLUENZA” fame and “TAKE BACK YOUR TIME” fame and TAKE BACK YOUR TIME, ecological economist Dave Batker presents a humorous, edgy, factual, timely and highly-visual monologue about the American economy today, challenging the ways we measure economic success--especially the Gross Domestic Product--and offering an answer to the question: What's the Economy for, Anyway?

Join us following the film for a community discussion with Filmmaker John de Graaf and Laura Musikanski, Executive Director of Sustainable Seattle, about a meaningful framing of our economy, and a presentation on the recently released Happiness Survey from the Seattle Area Happiness Initiative!

Download the Flyer HERE. Please help us get the word out. Thanks!

(Event is FREE and open to the public! ...but Donations are kindly accepted).

(NOTE: The film. "WikiLeaks: The Documentary", originally announced, will hopefully be shown when screening rights are obtained at a later date.)

Measuring all that matters

I am a firm believer that only what gets measured gets fixed. Simply put, measuring and statistically reporting things draws peoples' attention to them, and society has a strong bias towards attending to problems that can be described objectively. It's a sensible enough bias—measurement allows us to know for sure whether our attempts at fixing a problem are achieving anything and good value for money—but it has terrible consequences when combined with another societal bias: our tendency to only measure things in dollars. Our society and media are obsessed with financial statistics at the expense of all others, and this leads policy makers and business leaders into the same tunnel vision, where anything that improves the financial bottom line is seen as inherently good. RFK expressed this better than I ever could, decades ago:

Over the past few years, we've seen some encouraging developments with the measurement and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions. More and more people are using carbon footprint calculators to understand their own emissions, business are starting to analyse and report their own, and with the climate bill about to go through Congress it may soon become compulsory for fossil fuel providers and major greenhouse gas emitters to measure and report their impact. But while this is progress, it's easy to get "carbon goggles" and focus on carbon emissions to the exclusion of all the other impacts that our activities have on each other.

This is why Sustainable Seattle started out as an indicator organisation, and our core is still a set of community-generated indicators that measure sustainability in a very broad, but still objectively quantifiable, sense. Our Sustainability Training And Resources program aims to give people the tools to understand and apply these indicators in their own lives and work. With this mission in mind, we've been working on developing material that introduces useful comprehensive ways of measuring impacts. The first two workshops will be in July:

• In Triple Bottom Line Reporting, on July 15-16, our Executive Director Laura Musikanski will cover the methods and reasons for a company to report its environmental and social performance along with its economic performance.
• In Life Cycle Assessment, on July 28, Rita Schenck of the Institute for Environmental Research & Education will introduce what I believe is the gold standard for measuring the complete environmental impact of a product or process, from cradle to grave.

We are also hoping to announce a Gross National Happiness talk in the near future, but details of that still need to be confirmed, so watch this space for another announcement.

Holiday Sustainability

This holiday season is the last one of the first decade of the 2000's. This is the perfect time to take some steps to reconnect with family and friends that perhaps have been drifting apart. Take the time to call someone from your past that you haven't spoken to for a long time and tell them how much they mean to you.

Healthy families and communities start in the home and in the maintenance of relationships. A simple phone call, email or holiday card can be an important first step in repairing and enhancing meaningful relationships. We need to take the time to slow down and show each other what we mean to one another.

Take time this year in this holiday season to get to know your family and friends through shared experiences instead of simply buying more and more products. Have a game night or go to a park together for a winter picnic or simply stay home and enjoy each other's company.

Be safe this holiday season and remember that the amount of inebriated drivers increases during this season from an average of one out of ten cars, to one out of four. Check your mirrors, give plenty of space and be a pleasant giving driver. Always have an out when driving and stay off the roads unless absolutely necessary.

Also remember to be responsible with your holiday decorations when you are ready to take them down. Recycle what you can, reuse your decorations next year and take your trees to recycling centers.

In King county you can follow this link for options on where to take your tree.