Simplicity

With the ever looming fuel and food crisis, it seems apparent that we may have to learn to be happy by living simply..or simply living. Here is a great website, even if you aren't a citizen of Dane County there is lots of good information about living with less and finding happiness that way.

www.sustaindane.org

Goodwill brings happiness to many!

As some of you may know, I am a nurse. I've spent a lot of my career with the mentally ill and developmentally disabled,so I have a personal interest in Goodwill Industries. It brings happiness to this population. It gives them meaningful work, provides them a paycheck and allows them to be useful members of society. This helps to strengthen our communities, by providing employment, reusing objects, thus decreasing the amount of stuff in our landfills, and provides clothing and household goods to the less fortunate.

According to goodwill.org, they need our help in writing to our legislators about the following bills.

Second Chance Act- It would provide states grants to offer job assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, and job training to former prisoners returning home.
We all know the number of prisoners being released is increasing all the time.

IRA Charitable Rollover Provision- Would extend a tax provision to allow US residents to make a direct contribution from an IRA to a charitable organization.

Personal Retirement Savings for Persons with Disabilities- This would allow persons with disabilities to achieve self-sufficiency through work and personal savings for retirement. The current policy actually discourages savings as people getting SSI are not allowed to have savings of over $2000.

Goodwill is really the ultimate Green Industry. They do have another issue also, because they accept drop offs they often receive electronic waste. As a non-profit agency the do have to pay for the disposal of that waste which diverts critical funds. They support legislation to encourage people to dispose of electronic waste properly. So please don't drop off your old computers and ipods at your local Goodwill.

Goodwill helps sustain the happiness of many individuals. Let's do our best to help them in their efforts to continue this much needed community service.

Disposable Society(or can we find happiness in death?)

We live in a disposable society. We throw everything away instead of fix it. This could be a source of our unhappiness. There is much satisfaction to be gotten from the effort it takes to fix something. Just like a renovation of an old house is beautiful, so might be the resurrection of an old relationship or tired marriage. Our society puts so much value on youth and newness. This is never more evident then our treatment of our senior citizens. You never see celebrities trying to look older do you? If we try to revitalize the old (Goodwill does this), we might find great bounty from the fruits of our labor.
Studies show that in general Americans are not dying the way they would like to. According to "Means to a Better End: A Report on Dying in America" 70% of the elderly wish to die at home. The reality is very different. In truth, 50% die in hospitals, and 20-25% die in nursing homes. Only 24.9% really get to die at home. What are we so afraid of?
Imagine how much money we would save as a society if we let our elders die at home. Imagine what satisfaction we might get from helping others fulfill their wish of dying at home. Could we not find some sort of happiness in knowing we did the best we could for someone? I think we could.

The Paths to Happiness

This might be interesting to some. From the book "Happiness is Overrated" by Raymond A Belliotti.

"The paths to happiness include the following:
1. adjust expectations
2. nurture relationships
3. be optimistic and appreciative
4. have faith
5. make peace, not war
6. be goal-oriented
7. prioritize
8. use leisure wisely, energize the senses eat and exercise
properly
9. go with the flow
10. be lucky"

I can't say I agree with all of them. I am just not sure how to make yourself lucky, but I do believe people who see themselves as lucky are happier. So in an ever changing world, keep this list in your mind. It might help someday as it's the little things.

Family

Families have played an important part of happiness in the past. World War II brought with it many changes in technology which had repercussions on the family unit. In his paper "Major trends affecting families in the new millennium", Robert Cliquet(general director of the Population and Family Study Centre, in Brussels) reports the following information:

"Since World War II, we have had great economic development, an oil boom,invention of the airplane, television, the Internet, modern contraception, safer abortions, women's emancipation, and large numbers of immigrants. All these events have changed the family today.
In modern culture the family has lost several of its historical functions. Survival and welfare functions have partly or even largely been taken over by the broader societal structures. It's emotional caring functions have become more prominent in a culture where the stakes of quality of life have risen considerably.
The modern family no longer depends on a large number of children to work. Now it's more individualized. An increased emphasis on material things often diverts people from family building or extending goals. Not only does this lead to a smaller number of children, but probably also to more scrutiny and hesitation with respect to the start of an enduring relationship resulting in postponements of marriage and births.
Mainstream visions of the future of families fall into one of three categories;
1. The disappearance of the family.
2. The restoration of the traditional family.
3. The persistence of further increase of family variation.

It seems most likely that we will not see a reemergence of the traditional family given the current social, economic, and cultural circumstances. Demands on intimate relationships become greater and greater. Families are much more vulnerable. Predict even more one parent families. The mother-child bond could again become the basic unit of society. The women must cope with the existing incompatibilities between gainful employment and family life, especially child care."

After reading the above information it occur ed to me that possibly some of our unhappiness could be the wish for the past traditions. Perhaps if we realistically look forward to a different sort of family, with optimism for our futures we could be more content. We will likely never see the family unit quite like it was prior to World War II, but just because the family unit has changed does not make it less desirable. Face it, our world has changed and is ever changing, we need to try to be happy with it.

Bicycles

I might be dating myself here, but remember when you were young, and all your friends would get together to ride bikes? It was really a lot of fun and helped make a neighborhood feel like home. We used to have several different routes in my neighborhood where we would race our bikes. Some of the best talks I ever had with friends were while we were riding our bikes.
How can bikes make us happier, and our world a better place? Did you know that Americans have the highest rate of car ownership in the world? Talk about carbon emissions. In some cities in Europe they are going back to bikes, due to traffic congestion and air pollution. Paris has established a city bicycle rental program. According to the book Plan B 3.0 by Lester R Brown, they now have 20,600 bikes in the city with over 1450 docking stations. You can access the bikes with a credit card and rent for a day, a week, or a month. So far the bikes are very popular. Brown quotes one biker when asked about the program, "We are no longer alone in our cars, we are sharing. It's really changed the atmosphere here; people chat at the stations and even at traffic lights."
It seems we really have built our world around cars. It is time to begin rebuilding around people. If feeling like a part of something larger then ourselves can make us happy, I think bringing more bike trails and programs into the cities can only help. Perhaps we can finally get to know our neighbors again, and at the same time help our environment. I say bring on the bikes!

Global Dimming: how it affects our happiness

By now you may have viewed the Global Dimming film. As the film says, there is a scientist from the UW Madison who was studying the effect of jet streams on our climate. The only problem was he had very little opportunity to study the air when there were no planes flying. Until September 11, when all the planes were grounded for three days. He found out that in general the earth warmed in those three days throughout the United States. So he concludes that in actuality we are getting less sun, due to the jet streams.
I started thinking how there is an increase in depression and seasonal affective disorder. As anyone who has ever worked in an office without a window can attest to, no sunlight can affect your mood. We also get a lot of our vitamin D from the sun. Vitamin D helps build bones and keeps us from suffering from fractures. It is also thought to possibly play a part in Alzheimer's.We know that people who live in the Northern parts of the world suffer more from seasonal affective disorder. So, less sunlight overall does affect our happiness.

GLOBAL DIMMING

Check out this video and then come back for a few more ideas and words on the film. How might global dimming be affecting our happiness?

http://www.documentary-film.net/

Look for the Global Dimming movie..it's interesting and you will enjoy it.

DID YOU KNOW?

In an article written by David Futrelle for Money, he said the following;

"Money won't buy happiness. Sure, in any given country at any given point in time, the rich tend to be a bit happier than the poor. But across the board increases in living standards don't seem to make people any happier. Disposable income for the average American has grown about 80% since 1972, but the percentage describing themselves as "very happy"(roughly a third) has barely budged over the years, according to the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. Why is this? As Cornell University economist Robert Frank notes, we humans are highly adaptable animals., quickly adjusting our expectations to new realities. As living standards increase, most of us respond by raising our own standards. Things that once seemed luxuries now seem necessities. Call it the "once they've seen Paris" effect. As a result, we're working harder than ever to buy stuff that satisfies us less and less."

He offers the following suggestions for getting out of this vicious cycle:
" If you can't be with the stuff you love, love the stuff your with."
" Don't buy things, buy freedom."
" Spend Selectively"

I hope this was informative..stay tuned for more information on how to make and keep yourself happy!

How did this all start?

I started this blog as a project for a Sustainable Development class I am taking at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. A final project needs to be done and I decided to do one on how to sustain our happiness.

Working as a mental health nurse, I realise that we have fewer doctors and therapists but the patients never stop coming. It got me to wondering how we can keep our minds healthy in an ever changing world. We are making more money but don't feel any better, we have more conveniences but they don't seem to matter.

What got us here? I shall try to give you some history on that. What can we do to help everyone be happier? I will try to answer some of these questions. Feel free to join in by leaving comments as dialogue is always good. So here goes!