Like I said in my last post, happiness extends more deeply than a corporate or governmental interest in our lives. The desire to be happy motivates most individuals on a daily basis. But how can it be attained?
Some say, “fake it ‘til you make it.” Even the great Charlie Chaplin and his lyricists John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons advised, “Smile, though your heart is aching.”
But does this strategy actually work?
A recent article in the Academy of Management Journal investigated a group of bus drivers applying a cheery expression at work. Of the bus drivers that were in a bad mood and faked a smile, many reported increased negative feelings after a day of phony smiling, likely due to resenting the fakeness and fixating on their hidden negative emotions. The research refers to this as “surface acting.”
However, for those bus drivers who were able to smile by summoning a happy memory (familiar to those of us in the performance world as “The Method”), or “deep acting” they reported a sunnier disposition by the end of the day.
What can you summon to recall these happy feelings? A soda? A gadget? A yacht?
Psychology researchers at Cornell University recommend experiences and not things to foster continued happy feelings. Why so? A person’s desire to measure up to peers really diminishes satisfaction from possessions.
“You got a new CoolPhone 3? Well I just got a CoolPhone 9, complete with 35 MegaPixel camera and 40 Watt laser cannon!”
Possessions tend to pale over time, because they are stagnant and tend to get scuffed and broken. Experiences, however, become a part of who you are. The memories change with you, and you tend to hold on more to the positive aspects of even frustrating experiences long after they’ve happened.
Even if you go The World’s Largest Frying Pan and I also take a vacation to the W.L.F.P, our experiences will be different, so we can feel happy about our times there without the diminishing taint of competition.
Not sure of the things that make you go 
? Why not download this cool webcam software (.zip download) called Happy Things by Theo Watson and Kyle McDonald? When you open the program, it enables your webcam to take a picture of you every time you smile, and records the website you were looking at that made you do so. Kinda like a happiness archive!
The good Reverend Run recently tweeted, “Happiness is a sort of courage.” You’ll find no sympathy for the sedentary here. Be brave: learn something new, share something good, go out exploring, create something awesome and c’mon get happy!
