Sunday, March 31, 2013
Friday, March 29, 2013
Beautiful nails
Being a woman means to care about the small things :) Here's one of the little feminish peasures:
Monday, March 18, 2013
Mistakes on the way to happiness (for women)
A few days ago I found a very good article - What makes women happy? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2006/jun/11/familyandrelationships6
It's a long one, but here are my favorite parts:
We should be the happiest generation of women in history. We can choose whether to have children, and when. We don't need to marry to survive, and if marriage makes us miserable, we can divorce. Interesting and rewarding careers are on offer. We can reasonably expect men to take on a proportion of domestic responsibility. For women of other generations, we would seem to be sitting in front of a smorgasbord of opportunities. Yet we're not satisfied. It's not so much that we have to make a million choices; more that, having chosen, we are haunted by the possibility that our choices might be wrong.
If you actually ask women what makes them happy, they're quite likely to say 'sex', or 'eating' or a 'cold bottle of sauvignon blanc' because sensual pleasures are still as available as they ever were. But the woman who told me that happiness was 'sitting on the sofa with my husband' seemed to be imagining a different quality of experience altogether.
'the status and role model of a mother is lower than that of a street sweeper, because any unpaid work is despised and downgraded'.
In making our decisions, we compare ourselves to other people all the time, which is why a famous experiment found that far more people would prefer to earn $50,000 in a world in which average earnings were $25,000, than $100,000 in a world in which average earnings were $250,000. We're caught in a bind: we get quite a lot of exhilaration and sense of freedom from our choices - to be fashionable or stylish, live in the city or the country, be married or stay single. Such decisions are crucial to establishing our identity. But we can't escape the fact that all these choices are made in a context, and the idea that we can identify pure preferences that express our innermost souls is absurd.
When I go out to lunch three times in a row with a friend who only pushes a lettuce leaf around her plate, I feel unhappy (and at some level, I actually hate her) because I think a) she's more interested in cultivating her thinness than having a good time with me and b) she's implying she has more self-control than I do. And also because she's probably right about that.
We are in competition with women, and we're in competition with men, and it's exhausting - and, if we pause to think about it for a minute, often ugly and demeaning. It's also a no-win situation, because there will always be someone more competent or beautiful.
One of the first things to understand is that scientists are increasingly reaching that the neural pathways in the brain for desire are separate from those for happiness. In other words, we might desire things that don't make us happy.
Love and friendship score highly on all tests of what makes people happy, although love is obviously also capable of making people very unhappy. When it goes well, love satisfies both the desire for self-fulfilment (love is a search for the self, to the very bottom) and the sometimes contradictory desire for recognition, approval and endorsement of identity. There's general agreement that it isn't necessary to be in a relationship to be happy; but in that case, you do need plenty of friends.
This helps to explain why religious people consistently report greater levels of happiness than others. Religion offers a glimpse of some thing beyond the self.