Rhetoric Race and Religion
Much ink, film, and many ones and zeros have been spilled on the topic of how to be happy lately. Science has given us some clues, often subdividing “happiness” into smaller parts: the importance of relationships and social connection, the positive effects of optimism. This sort of research gets a lot of attention when it comes out, as unhappy or even just vaguely dissatisfied people clamor for a fix. Maybe if we can unravel all the threads of happiness’s snarled tapestry and see how they fit together, we’ll finally be able to weave our own lives into a reasonable facsimile thereof.
We’ve seen before that perhaps the most important thread—more important than diet or exercise or the easy but often-unfulfilling happiness of a booze-soaked evening—is the feeling that your life means something, that you have purpose. How to get that, of course, is another knot to untangle.
A recent study in Psychological Science takes a global look at the quest for meaning, analyzing data from the Gallup World Poll to determine where people feel meaning, and how they found it. The survey data comes from 132 countries in 2007—the researchers specifically looked at self-reported meaning in life, religiosity, fertility rates, GDP, and suicide rates (from the World Health Organization).
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