Chapter 7 is all about how we compare ourselves with others. He says that it wouldn't be so bad if we all compared ourselves with regular people but we compare ourselves with the few elite. The less we know about those we compare ourselves with the more dramatic the difference. His friend Joseph Telushkin says, "The only happy people I know are the people I don't know well." We are trained to hide our unhappiness from others. We say we are fine when we are not and this just keeps us from connecting with others.
Chapter 8 talks about the effect images have on us. Images are perfect and life is not. His formula for happiness is unhappiness=images - reality. There are the images that we see and the images we imagine for ourselves and our life. We can fix this by either dropping these images or changing our reality to match our images. Images can be very powerful weather they are in magazines or movies, we are surrounded by them every day. They can be both positive and negative and we need to be careful that we do not give them too much power.
Chapter 9 is about what he calls the missing tile syndrome. This he defines as fixating on what is flawed or missing no matter how small. This can cause us to miss the beauty of the entire mosaic. He said that ceilings can be perfect but life is not. Whatever trait is missing in a person we tend to deem that the most important trait. Unless we teach ourselves to concentrate on what we do have we will obsess about missing tiles and they can become insurmountable obstacles to happiness.
To overcome this he says that we need to...
- Acknowledge how powerful the missing tile syndrome is in your life
- Identify as precisely as possible what the missing tile is so you can gain clarity about what is troubling you
- Determine whether this tile is central to your happiness or if it one of your insatiable longings
Chapter 10 is all about the problems that come about when we equate happiness with success. Success by itself does not make people happy. Some people choose success because they are running away from their demons. Many successful people were happy before they became successful. You must determine why you want success, because some reasons will not make you happy. Unhappy poor people at least live with the fantasy that money will make them happy; unhappy rich people don't even have that fantasy. You also have to look at what you have to give up for success and see if that will make you unhappy. If you want a successful career but that means distancing yourself from your family then it will not lead you to happiness. We have to be careful how we define success. If our only definition is to have more money then we will not be happy. We need to define success as having a happy family with many good friends.
Chapter 11 focuses on the fact that fun does not equal happiness. Some people think that if they go on the most adventures, the coolest parties, or sleep around they will be happy. He states that fun is temporary, happiness is ongoing. Activities can help us maintain our happiness but they do not bring or create it. Many aspects of fun like food, sex, adventure, or drugs have to have an increased dose the next time to be considered fun subsequent times. Their ability to provide pleasure is diminished the following times. With all things we have to find the right balance.
I thought that Chapter 12 was interesting. It was about how many people in today's society equate lack of pain with happiness. He talks about how dangerous this line of thinking is. He says that in almost every case happiness is obtained after some pain. Many people spend their whole lives avoiding pain and they are therefore never happy. Marriage, children, school, religious commitment and volunteer work all require some pain and they can all lead us to happiness. He quotes Psalms 126:5. He says that relationship commitment can be painful to the male nature, although every study done on married men shows that they are happier, healthier and live longer lives than single men. The purpose of this life is not to avoid pain. Animals live a life of avoiding pain but they will never know happiness. The choice is ours, do we want a pain free life or a life of fulfillment.
Chapter 13 was all about our expectations. Buddhism aims to do away with both desires and expectations because pain in life comes from unfulfilled desires and expectations. Prager doesn't believe that we should do away with our desires. Some desires are unhealthy and lead us to unhappiness so we have to be really careful with them and the things we seek. He believes that minimizing our expectations is both realistic and highly desirable. The greater the expectation the greater the pain we experience. We often lower our expectations to lessen our pain in life, that way if our expectations are met we also have increased happiness.
He believes that expectations undermine gratitude. All happy people are grateful and all ungrateful people can never be happy. Gratitude is the most important component to happiness. It is largely dependent on what we do not expect to receive. A large part of religion is gratitude to God. Where we do not have full control we should not have expectations. We should have more expectations for ourselves than we do for other people. That is both for our sake and theirs. We should have hopes for our children and make certain demands of them. We should help them set goals but we should keep our expectations of them limited. Expectations of children leads to disappointment, however children should expect unconditional love from their parents.
Expectations in marriage should be limited because the more we expect from our spouses the more we take them for granted. The combination of taking them for granted and not feeling or expressing gratitude to them is fatal to most marriages.
That is all I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. :)
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