How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, and motive in everyday life, the book explores how people strive to live well within challenging or even hostile circumstances. The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims and aspirations that are potentially conflicting, demonstrating that not every kind of happiness is seen as a worthwhile aim or evaluated in positive moral terms. In tracing this link between different conceptions of happiness and their evaluations, the book engages some of the most fundamental questions concerning human happiness: What is it and how is it achieved? Is happiness everywhere a paramount value or aim in life? How does it relate to other ideas of the good? What role does happiness play in orienting peoples' desires and life choices? Taking these questions seriously, the book draws together considerations of meaning, values, and affect, while recognizing the diversity of human ends.

This book supplies a simple, memorable, and effective formula to solve problematic behaviors in the work environment and life in general. An invaluable guidebook, it will help readers move beyond mediocrity and achieve happier, more successful lives. The Work-Life Equation: Six Key Values That Drive Happiness and Success is for the millions of people and business managers who are surrounded by bad behavior—with its attendant mediocre or unsatisfying results—at work and in their private lives, but who hope and dream for happier and more successful lives. The book begins with a frank explanation of the need for self-awareness and self-improvement, then describes how the "winning formula" and the equation for happiness and success in work-life—(H,S) = f(4C,2R)—can be applied via six types of behaviors to effect sweeping changes. The formula means Happiness and Success can be achieved by (is a function of) Cooperation, Consideration, Compassion, Courtesy, Respect, and Responsibility. The book focuses not just on the meaning of these values but also on how to "better live" them. It concludes with a self-assessment tool for the individual, team, or organization to complete that enables objective measurements of behaviors and identification of areas of potential improvement. Dismissing the familiar, corporate value clichés, the author focuses on six key values most readers probably learned as kids but have forgotten about in adulthood—or didn't realize were still apt and relevant. The book provides priceless information and guidance for all readers but will be especially appreciated by those in the corporate workplace interested in self-improvement and success, educators and business students, executives looking to shift their firm's behavioral atmosphere in a positive direction, and individuals seeking inspiration and hope in their daily lives.

Annotation How people conceive of happiness reveals much about who they are and the values they hold dear. Drawing on ethnographic insights from diverse field sites around the world, this book offers a unique window onto the ways in which people grapple with fundamental questions about how to live and what it means to be human. Developing a distinctly anthropological approach concerned less with gauging how happy people are than with how happiness figures as an idea, mood, and motive in everyday life, the book explores how people strive to live well within challenging or even hostile circumstances.The contributors explore how happiness intersects with dominant social values as well as an array of aims and aspirations that are potentially conflicting, demonstrating that not every kind of happiness is seen as a worthwhile aim or evaluated in positive moral terms. In tracing this link between different conceptions of happiness and their evaluations, the book engages some of the most fundamental questions concerning human happiness: What is it and how is it achieved? Is happiness everywhere a paramount value or aim in life? How does it relate to other ideas of the good? What role does happiness play in orienting peoples' desires and life choices? Taking these questions seriously, the book draws together considerations of meaning, values, and affect, while recognizing the diversity of human ends.

Separated by millennia, Aristotle and Sigmund Freud gave us disparate but compelling pictures of the human condition. But if, with Jonathan Lear, we scrutinize these thinkers' attempts to explain human behavior in terms of a higher principle--whether happiness or death--the pictures fall apart. Aristotle attempted to ground ethical life in human striving for happiness, yet he didn't understand what happiness is any better than we do. Happiness became an enigmatic, always unattainable, means of seducing humankind into living an ethical life. Freud fared no better when he tried to ground human striving, aggression, and destructiveness in the death drive, like Aristotle attributing purpose where none exists. Neither overarching principle can guide or govern "the remainder of life," in which our inherently disruptive unconscious moves in breaks and swerves to affect who and how we are. Lear exposes this tendency to self-disruption for what it is: an opening, an opportunity for new possibilities. His insights have profound consequences not only for analysis but for our understanding of civilization and its discontent.

The author analyzes evidence and empirical research to determine which groups are the happiest in America; and offers suggestions on how the government can help individuals maximize their happiness.

"The only self-help book you'll ever need, from a psychiatrist who will help you put aside your unrealistic wishes, stop trying to change things you can't change, and do the best with what you can control--the first steps to solving all of life's impossible problems"--

Fred Feldman presents a study of the nature and value of happiness. He offers critical discussions of the main philosophical and psychological theories of happiness, and a presentation and defense of his own theory of happiness.