After investigating the factors in a person's life that can best predict whether they will lead satisfied lives, a team headed by one of the UK's foremost "happiness" experts, Professor Richard Layard, has come up with an answer that may prove controversial.
How can we help people work better, feel better, and live healthier, more fulfilling, satisfied lives?
Yet, those activities are very expensive, so the value is placed somewhere else, and it is not important if elderly people live healthy, happy and satisfied lives.
My Life on a Plate India Knight Penguin, £5.99, 247pp Buy it at BOL You spend all those lonely nights fretting about the continuing non-appearance of Mr Right, plucking and tweezing and slimming yourself into virtual oblivion, listening patiently as boorish men drone on about their boring, self-satisfied lives and attempting to ignore the thunderous ticking of that infamous biological clock.
(iv.23) *"If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you were bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, but satisfied to live now according to nature, speaking heroic truth in every word that you utter, you will live happy.
The story is Ray Bradbury's The Toynbee Convector, and it goes like this: a time traveler appears bearing news of an improved future, where prosperous and satisfied humans live peacefully in harmony with nature.
He's a satisfied man living a fortunate life, singing about the trajectory from being "this scruffy, beat-up, working-class teenage troubadour" to a thoughtful, happily married father who's still getting "lotsa sexy loving," as one song puts it, and others determinedly insist.
She is Graciela Diaz: upwardly mobile waitress, Mexican immigrant soccer mom, middle-class striver, former undocumented sweatshop seamstress and now satisfied suburbanite, living with her husband and daughter in a two-story, four-bedroom stucco house with a two-car garage in a gated community north of town.
A little over 70percentt of respondents stated they were "satisfied" while living at home.
A little more than 70percentt of respondents stated they were "satisfied" while living at home.
They are not more depressed or less satisfied with their lives than parents are, they do not experience that their lives have less meaning than do parents and they are not unhappier than parents, once other factors are controlled for (see Table 3).
