And, if I may: what does 7% happier, 20% increase in life satisfaction exactly mean anyway? My 5% might be or feel very different than someone else's.
See, I have a hard time with all this self-help stuff. What's so difficult about it that needs hundreds of books and blogs to be expounded?
You either want to do something or you don't. Be grateful for what you have and try to improve a little at a time. Remember that everyone is out to get money from you. Try really hard not to be an asshole.
Seems like common sense to me, and everything else feels like a lot of unnecessary junk.
You're right, quantifying happiness is nonsense, but that doesn't stop people trying. I think it's a reflection of a common mindset that sees science as universally applicable.
It's really not. Science, or rather the scientific method, applies only to that which can be quantified, as otherwise you'll have no way to accurately verify the success of a scientific experiment. You can try to quantify happiness, but only superficially, it doesn't accurately describe what happiness is. For example, if I said I was 72% happy today, what does mean objectively (i.e. outside from my personal context)?
Insofar as we can never really know the internal state of anything, and yes, from chemistry, to particle physics to psychology. All we can know for sure is that a machine (we did create) spat out a bunch of numbers and a text book (written by people we don't know) said those numbers were 'correct'.
(Moreover, we already know a lot more about the measurement of internal mental states than you appear to be aware:
Measuring happiness with an MRI is the sort of folly I'm referring to. Scientific knowledge needs to be objective, happiness is subjective. To illustrate what I mean, imagine we could directly stimulate areas of the brain. If we stimulate the same areas of the brain across a group of people, do we expect the resulting experience to be exactly the same across the group?
See, I have a hard time with all this self-help stuff. What's so difficult about it that needs hundreds of books and blogs to be expounded?
You either want to do something or you don't. Be grateful for what you have and try to improve a little at a time. Remember that everyone is out to get money from you. Try really hard not to be an asshole.
Seems like common sense to me, and everything else feels like a lot of unnecessary junk.