If you could just switch off preferences rather than trying to satisfy them, why try to satisfy any preference?
For that matter, what distinguishes “a motivator in and of itself” from ways for a man, or any individual, to boost their self esteem? Why is seeking a mate whose looks please and impress one, while looking for a mate whose mind pleases and impresses another?
Brillyant’s comment above basically gives the answer to this: beauty doesn’t provide as much long-term happiness as the ICVPI facotrs (individual character, values, preferences, and interests).
Happiness levels in our society are stagnating because materialist desires only provide short-term fulfillment. No matter what good thing happens to you (be it a promotion, inheritance, marrying “the love of your life”, …) your happiness might raise for a certain amount of time but then drop back to its initial level. (Evidence of this is provided in both the books I cited originally.) A dating site which works like online shopping is not just creepy, but also actively diminishing happiness because it offers to much random choice and too little help in connecting with people. Just look at the graph:
So in a way it seems to be the case that in order to lastingly raise your happiness it is basically the only way to change your preferences. Be more social. Be nice to people. Be less judgmental.
I am just starting to do this and although it works for me, I am not yet ready to explain it, and haven’t read enough to recommend and summarize. But Seligman’s “Authentic Happiness” is at least a start. And “Search inside yourself” is the right thing to validate how much your preference functions has been corrupted by unhelpful external factors.
I’m not a psychologist, and I haven’t been able to find much about the validity of Dr Seligman’s theories, but he set off my personal Crank Alarm when I saw that he apparently spends time attempting to legitimize virtue ethics with (psuedo?)psychological theory.
Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) is his supposed ‘positive’ counterpart to the DSM; it evidently consists of a list of virtues like Humanity Temperance and Courage, along with subcategories (e.g. love kindness and social intelligence for Humanity) and examples of famous people who exemplified certain virtues (MLK Jr is called out as an exemplar of hope). This is an extraordinarily troubling choice on his part, for reasons I hope are self-evident.
In addition, his work on clinical depression (“Learned Helplessness”) needs someone with more psychiatric / neuroscience background to look it over. I can’t tell if it’s legit or not with my current non-expertise, but it certainly sounds fishy.
TL;DR: We should look into this guy’s work a little further before we follow his suggestions, especially since they seem in this case to be bog-standard virtue ethics.
“Learned Helplessness” and its opposite “Learned Optimism” are widely replicated results that have now become the basis for some therapeutic approaches in the academic/scientific psychology world. Seligman did a lot of work on this and got his early academy fame on this work.
The character strengths and virtues on the other hand are not based on reproducible experiments, rather literature study (as Seligman writes: “lists of virtues from all cultures”). It’s not knowledge and results, but rather trying to open up a new area and advocate real experimental research in that field. We’ll have to wait at least a decade until the results are in ;-)
Brillyant’s comment above basically gives the answer to this: beauty doesn’t provide as much long-term happiness as the ICVPI facotrs (individual character, values, preferences, and interests).
Do you have any research to back this up?
Intuitively, of course, it’s easy to see how a relationship would suffer for a lack of these things. But on the other hand, data on relationships where the partners don’t find each other at all attractive is limited as such relationships tend not to form in the first place, although no longer finding each other attractive is a commonly cited reason for relationships ending, which suggests that it counts for quite a lot for many couples.
If you could just switch off preferences rather than trying to satisfy them, why try to satisfy any preference?
For that matter, what distinguishes “a motivator in and of itself” from ways for a man, or any individual, to boost their self esteem? Why is seeking a mate whose looks please and impress one, while looking for a mate whose mind pleases and impresses another?
Brillyant’s comment above basically gives the answer to this: beauty doesn’t provide as much long-term happiness as the ICVPI facotrs (individual character, values, preferences, and interests).
Happiness levels in our society are stagnating because materialist desires only provide short-term fulfillment. No matter what good thing happens to you (be it a promotion, inheritance, marrying “the love of your life”, …) your happiness might raise for a certain amount of time but then drop back to its initial level. (Evidence of this is provided in both the books I cited originally.) A dating site which works like online shopping is not just creepy, but also actively diminishing happiness because it offers to much random choice and too little help in connecting with people. Just look at the graph:
So in a way it seems to be the case that in order to lastingly raise your happiness it is basically the only way to change your preferences. Be more social. Be nice to people. Be less judgmental.
I am just starting to do this and although it works for me, I am not yet ready to explain it, and haven’t read enough to recommend and summarize. But Seligman’s “Authentic Happiness” is at least a start. And “Search inside yourself” is the right thing to validate how much your preference functions has been corrupted by unhelpful external factors.
I’m not a psychologist, and I haven’t been able to find much about the validity of Dr Seligman’s theories, but he set off my personal Crank Alarm when I saw that he apparently spends time attempting to legitimize virtue ethics with (psuedo?)psychological theory.
Character Strengths and Virtues (CSV) is his supposed ‘positive’ counterpart to the DSM; it evidently consists of a list of virtues like Humanity Temperance and Courage, along with subcategories (e.g. love kindness and social intelligence for Humanity) and examples of famous people who exemplified certain virtues (MLK Jr is called out as an exemplar of hope). This is an extraordinarily troubling choice on his part, for reasons I hope are self-evident.
In addition, his work on clinical depression (“Learned Helplessness”) needs someone with more psychiatric / neuroscience background to look it over. I can’t tell if it’s legit or not with my current non-expertise, but it certainly sounds fishy.
TL;DR: We should look into this guy’s work a little further before we follow his suggestions, especially since they seem in this case to be bog-standard virtue ethics.
“Learned Helplessness” and its opposite “Learned Optimism” are widely replicated results that have now become the basis for some therapeutic approaches in the academic/scientific psychology world. Seligman did a lot of work on this and got his early academy fame on this work. The character strengths and virtues on the other hand are not based on reproducible experiments, rather literature study (as Seligman writes: “lists of virtues from all cultures”). It’s not knowledge and results, but rather trying to open up a new area and advocate real experimental research in that field. We’ll have to wait at least a decade until the results are in ;-)
Do you have any research to back this up?
Intuitively, of course, it’s easy to see how a relationship would suffer for a lack of these things. But on the other hand, data on relationships where the partners don’t find each other at all attractive is limited as such relationships tend not to form in the first place, although no longer finding each other attractive is a commonly cited reason for relationships ending, which suggests that it counts for quite a lot for many couples.