From New Jersey on Cindy and I encountered a lot of ticks. We discovered the Lyme disease signature bulls eye on Cindy right before the hike ended and lined up a doctor’s appointment the morning after we returned. She is doing fine.
No bulls eye occurred for me, but other symptoms started occurring and I’ve started treatment just a couple days ago. I’m postponing plans of hiking into a different town searching for kindness for a little while; in the meantime I’m going to contribute more posts for the Be Happy movement.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A salutation of “Be Happy” encourages the very purpose of our nation’s founding. Certainly our colonial forefathers did not come across the ocean with a primary goal to “Be Safe.” The same can be said for the subsequent westward movement across the country.
Thomas Jefferson’s famous words were a derivation of John Locke’s “life, liberty and property.” The omission of “property” was deliberate and meaningful. We may have come to a point in this country where most people mistake wealth as a conduit for happiness. Unfortunately, there are voices of mass society encouraging us to think this way.
In my book Systems out of Balance I cross-examined a 2005 study by the Pew Foundation on happiness. The title and most prominent graph equated wealth with happiness in linear fashion. However, data in the appendix revealed the graph to have been manipulated to agree with their conclusion and that separate longitudinal and comparative data refuted their claim outright.
Since the seventies our standard of living allegedly doubled. I say allegedly because as I also cross-examine in the book there are some strange assumptions behind CPI and cost of living indicators. Yet be that as it may, our overall happiness as measured by a consistent survey instrument very slightly yet steadily declined since the seventies. The Pew study did make reference to this, but gets totally overruled by the title and tenor of the report. Other data also reveals we are not one of the happiest countries despite being the wealthiest.
So it’s time to turn that decline around. A commitment to wealth or “property” at the expense of “the pursuit of happiness” won’t do it for us. Standard of living, as revealed by longitudinal and comparative data, is at best irrelevant. Keeping in mind the original goals of our colonial forefathers will put us in a much better position to “Be Happy.”
