Happiness is seeing yourself revealed in others

 

Or . . . Why I Struggle To Write Blog Posts For 25 Forms Of Happiness 

 Robert Redford, Screen Idol Turned Director and Activist, Dies at 89

... “I was born with a hard eye,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “The way I saw things, I would see what was wrong. I could see what could be better. I developed kind of a dark view of life, looking at my own country.” ...

Throughout his career, Mr. Redford pushed and questioned and then questioned and pushed. His tenaciousness served him well as early as 1969, when he was preparing to play the Sundance Kid. The president of 20th Century Fox, Richard D. Zanuck, told Mr. Redford to shave the bandit mustache he had grown for the role. He refused.

“It was authentic,” Mr. Redford told Mr. Callan, his biographer. “I got my way.”

Decades worth of research concludes that happiness is the good mood you get from social interaction

How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding: Decades of wellness studies have identified a formula for happiness, but you won’t figure it out alone

Which is fine if you're an extrovert.

But in former times happiness at its root was simply thought of as good fortune, or as escaping misfortune and accidents, which seems to me a more inclusive definition.

25% of a given population, after all, is composed of introverts, who feel drained by social interaction, not enriched. But they are just as happy to have escaped being hit by a car as any one else.

The field of psychology still seems biased toward the extroverts. 

 

 

 

In Alaska happiness is a cake from a mix

From a delightful read in The New York Times, here:

“Cake mixes are the center of our little universe,” said Cynthia Erickson, who owns the only grocery store in Tanana, an Athabascan village of 300 along the Yukon River in central Alaska. “I have four damn shelves full.”