At the risk of sounding like a cliched old grandpa, I think a person's ability to appreciate simple things increases as you get older. It's certainly happening to me.
My daily walk with my dog is a real treasure to me now. Definitely couldn't have said such a thing about myself ten years ago.
I heard a fun lecture once from a professor at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Their psychologists have observed a so-called positivity effect in older people, and they've got lots of studies on the subject:
“Human minds don’t process information like a computer,” says Carstensen, who was one of the first researchers to discover that older people tend to be happier. “We process what is relevant to our goals.”
And as we age, our goals tend to change — toward achieving emotional well-being, she says.
My favorite part of this article is this paragraph:
Further studies that showed a similar positivity effect in young people whose expected life spans were cut short by cancer or AIDS led to Carstensen’s current “shorter life span” explanation for the positivity effect.
This suggests that maintaining an awareness of your own mortality is a useful way to improve your happiness -- by encouraging yourself to focus on the positive -- and, paradoxically, that pretending you are going to live forever may be a recipe for unhappiness.
Samurai were encouraged to meditate on their deaths and to think, "If today were my last day, would it have been a worthy one to be my last?" When I've taken this practice I've found myself working on more important things, spending time with people I care about more, and generally being happier. Highly recommended, quick further reading:
This is interesting and timely for me, as I just had exactly that experience yesterday, Ash Wednesday. I found it strangely comforting to hear "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Interesting to see that this is a known psychological phenomenon.
I find that contemplating death has a very similar effect, -- not the way you'll die necessarily, just that you will, go in the ground, rot, and everybody and everything will move on without you.
It's very good for the ol perspective muscle, once you get over the initial freak-out of contemplating The End of You.
My Father (another old person ;) attributes this magical ability to a couple other things, too:
1. General personality; he believes most people are either "generally happy" or "generally unhappy" with regard to how they interpret both extreme (death) and everyday (sunset) events.
2. How emotionally confident one is that they've "found their place in the world" and the feelings that contribute to that peace (sense of accomplishment, etc.)
When I finally escaped our hometown, moved to Boston, and began this adventure that became a company, I soon started seeing beauty in everything. I was finally happy with where I was at that moment and nothing else mattered. I could not be upset.
Naively, I thought that might last forever; it didn't. Though not nearly as restless as I was a few years ago, it has crept back slowly and I no longer have that feeling of nirvana, if you will. I hope it comes back, though; I miss the beauty of those sunsets.
Comments
At the risk of sounding like a cliched old grandpa, I think a person's ability to appreciate simple things increases as you get older. It's certainly happening to me.
My daily walk with my dog is a real treasure to me now. Definitely couldn't have said such a thing about myself ten years ago.
I heard a fun lecture once from a professor at the Stanford Center on Longevity. Their psychologists have observed a so-called positivity effect in older people, and they've got lots of studies on the subject:
http://longevity.stanford.edu/mymind/mentalhealthandemotiona...
“Human minds don’t process information like a computer,” says Carstensen, who was one of the first researchers to discover that older people tend to be happier. “We process what is relevant to our goals.”
And as we age, our goals tend to change — toward achieving emotional well-being, she says.
My favorite part of this article is this paragraph:
Further studies that showed a similar positivity effect in young people whose expected life spans were cut short by cancer or AIDS led to Carstensen’s current “shorter life span” explanation for the positivity effect.
This suggests that maintaining an awareness of your own mortality is a useful way to improve your happiness -- by encouraging yourself to focus on the positive -- and, paradoxically, that pretending you are going to live forever may be a recipe for unhappiness.
Samurai were encouraged to meditate on their deaths and to think, "If today were my last day, would it have been a worthy one to be my last?" When I've taken this practice I've found myself working on more important things, spending time with people I care about more, and generally being happier. Highly recommended, quick further reading:
The Budoshoshinshu at Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=gzFsCPYJhqEC&printsec=f...
This is interesting and timely for me, as I just had exactly that experience yesterday, Ash Wednesday. I found it strangely comforting to hear "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return." Interesting to see that this is a known psychological phenomenon.
Thanks. I liked tdavis's non-explanation of it better.
Well, so did I! But it's over so quickly. So just in case you find yourself wanting more...
(WARNING: ANECDOTES)
I find that contemplating death has a very similar effect, -- not the way you'll die necessarily, just that you will, go in the ground, rot, and everybody and everything will move on without you.
It's very good for the ol perspective muscle, once you get over the initial freak-out of contemplating The End of You.
My Father (another old person ;) attributes this magical ability to a couple other things, too:
1. General personality; he believes most people are either "generally happy" or "generally unhappy" with regard to how they interpret both extreme (death) and everyday (sunset) events.
2. How emotionally confident one is that they've "found their place in the world" and the feelings that contribute to that peace (sense of accomplishment, etc.)
When I finally escaped our hometown, moved to Boston, and began this adventure that became a company, I soon started seeing beauty in everything. I was finally happy with where I was at that moment and nothing else mattered. I could not be upset.
Naively, I thought that might last forever; it didn't. Though not nearly as restless as I was a few years ago, it has crept back slowly and I no longer have that feeling of nirvana, if you will. I hope it comes back, though; I miss the beauty of those sunsets.