31 March 2010

Socializing, Walking, Marriage = Happiness

Well, David Brooks got a lot of people all a twitter in his most recent column on the subject of happiness. I think it is commonsense. Yglesias agrees and emphasizes the anti-commuting issue.
Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being...

...The United States is much richer than it was 50 years ago, but this has produced no measurable increase in overall happiness...

...The daily activities most associated with happiness are sex, socializing after work and having dinner with others. The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.

4 comments:

5chw4r7z said...

Awesome post Mike, thank you.
At first when I read the title I thought of the walk my wife and I took around downtown last night, doing nothing but enjoying each others company.
I'm going to use one of the links you provided for an upcoming post, the McDonald's post where I talked about people in the drive through looking unhappy in their dreary car-centric lives, boy did people take exception to that. I think I touched too close to home.

Quimbob said...

Interesting. He didn't mention kids.
He talked about school & career training but didn't mention the social aspect of a career.

CityKin said...

I think I had a post last year on some research showing that kids did NOT make you happier.

5chw4r7z said...

I thought I read a study that stated kids didn't increase happiness, if you were happy before, you were pretty happy after. If you were unhappy before you have kids, oh boy.