Autumn break! Holiday! Happiness??

Posted by Joep Peeters on Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Hello all,

Autumn break! Holiday! Happiness??

Is everybody enjoying his/her freedom?

Does this break mean that we become a little bit more happy in life. Do we get the chance to recharge our happiness during these 7 days of no commitments? Or is it the commitments themselves that keep some of us happy? A few heavy questions about life you’ll be able to think about during this autumn break.

Why?

Today I read an item on the website http://http://www.nu.nl/,this stated that the Erasmus university in Rotterdam has published a worldmap of happiness. And apparently we(Holland) are ranked 12th, where Costa Rica is leading the charts and Zimbabwe is the least happy country in the world.

An average inhabitant of Costa Rica has 66 happy years in his life, where Zimbabwe only has 12. We as the Dutch need to deal with 60 happy years in our life. Very remarkable is that the people of Iceland have 66.4 happy years in their life. So that automatically leads to the question: How important is money in once life? Given the fact that the last few years haven't exactly been prosperous for Iceland. And just as important, how has hapiness been measured

To answer this question. Or better put, to be able to understand this question, we need to look at how this research is performed.
Technical details (Veenhoven. R.. Happy Life Years in 148 nations 2000-2009. World Database of Happiness. Rank Report 2009-2d. Internet: worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl)
1. Average enjoyment of life assessed by means of surveys in general public samples.
2. Life expectancy is estimated on the basis of civil registrations of birth and death around 2005. Source
3. Happy Life Years' is an estimate of how long and happy the average citizen will live in that nation in this era. Computation: 0-1 enjoyment of life multiplied by expected length of life.
I would like to invite you as readers of this blog to think about this, and preferably comment on this blog.

Enjoy the mind breaker for this week.

Regards,
Joep

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi guys,

When I was still studying at the Technical
University in Eindhoven I attended a lecture about happiness. They made a link between happiness and education. And nice to know: People studying HBO were the most happy ones. Maybe this explains my switch to leisure management.

Some other findings about happiness (The happiness factor BBC):
In almost every developed country, happiness levels remained largely static over the past 50 years - despite huge increase in income.
Almost half of people say that relationships are the biggest factor in making them happy (co-creation?!?!)
This being said marriage seems to be really important. According to research, the effect of a happy marriage adds an average of seven years tot the life of a man and approximately four years for a woman.

I would say: Vegas here we come!!

Cheers Rob

October 27, 2009 at 8:31 AM
Bobby Verlaan said...

An important factor in happiness I think is that people can choose how dynamic they want to live their lives (ups and downs). That they can choose how much risk they want to take. What is the avarage dynamic for Iceland compared to Zimbabwe for example?

Just something else to think about ;-)

October 28, 2009 at 5:13 PM
Kishore Menon said...

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world - Buddha

Happiness and sorrow are our own responsibility and completely within our control. Everything comes from within.

:-) kishore

November 12, 2009 at 11:18 AM

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