Shouldn't the most accomplished be well equipped to make choices that maximize life satisfaction? Joe Pinsker, the associate editor of The Atlantic, would like to think of it as a paradox.
"There are three things, once one's basic needs are satisfied, that academic literature points to as the ingredients for happiness: having meaningful social relationships, being good at whatever it is one spends one's days doing, and having the freedom to make life decisions independently," Pinsker wrote. "But research into happiness has also yielded something a little less obvious: Being better educated, richer, or more accomplished doesn't do much to predict whether someone will be happy. In fact, it might mean someone is less likely to be satisfied with life."
Pinsker recently spoke to Raj Raghunathan, a professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business, who wrote a book called "If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?"
"I'm not trying to argue in the book that the scarcity mindset is either shallow or completely useless. If you're caught in a warzone, if you're in a poverty-stricken area, if you're fighting for your survival, if you're in a competitive sport like boxing, the scarcity mindset does play a very important role," Raghunathan said when asked to talk about the mental processes that are at play when people are thinking in terms of scarcity, since in his book, he was drawing a line between abundance and scarcity as huge factors that affect people's happiness.
Raghunathan also said that we are hard-wired to focus on more negative things but at the same time, seeking a sense of happiness and the desire to flourish and be the best we can be. "Ultimately, what we need in order to be happy is at some level pretty simple. It requires doing something that you find meaningful, that you can kind of get lost in on a daily basis," he says.
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