For years, I’ve puzzled each holiday season over the question of presents.  I love giving presents, and I love receiving presents.  But I don’t want to give or receive unwanted “junk” — especially since I now understand the toll that our consumer culture exacts on our environment. Nor do I want to spend more than a modest amount of money, regardless of come-ons from stores, catalogues, or the media cheerleading a holiday spending frenzy.

So what to do?  Here are some solutions that make me happier:

• Buy second-hand.
• Re-gift.
• Make presents.
• Shop local art and craft — directly from the artist, if possible.
• Support causes in your gift buying.
• Invest in shared experiences.
• Buy small — fun, meaningful, “stocking stuffers.”
• Choose items people use anyway — say, nice soaps or teas.

In recent years, two of these options have brought me great joy.  In my community, we have an annual “re-gifting” party: The Women of Maple Corner Yankee Gift Exchange.* This fun and funny event is a big hit every year, with the added benefit of forming strong community bonds among the celebrants.

And every other year, my family invests in a week at the beach instead of presents under the tree.  This experience not only relieves the pressure to buy gifts but also definitely increases happiness for all of us sharing a quiet week at the ocean.  Research has shown that experience leads to a more long-lasting happiness high than that provided by getting new stuff.

Those are my answers.  I still get to give and get, which I love (especially the giving) — in a happy, not stressful or harmful, way.  How ’bout you?  What are your choices?

* The men were also invited to join this event, but declined.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of fast-growing online shoe and apparel retailer Zappos.com, takes happiness seriously.

There’s surprise free overnight shipping upgrades for VIP customers, and a corporate face so friendly that lonely people are known to telephone Zappos’ corporate call center at all hours just to talk (the longest phone conversation so far lasted eight hours.)

Hsieh is such a rockstar that he has 1.7 million followers on his Twitter site and the retailer has landed more than once on Fortune magazine’s annual 100 Best Companies to Work For list. Two Zappos fans even got married at the business’ Henderson, Nev., offices earlier this year; there’s a video of the upbeat ceremony on the company’s website.

Since taking over as CEO, Hsieh has vowed to do whatever it takes to keep his employees, customers, and vendors happy — even if it might not seem to make the best business sense — because his strategy leads to profits in the end.

Stanford Center for Social Innovation

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Writer and explorer Dan Buettner has spent his life traveling the world in search of answers. His early life consisted of trekking throughout the world on a bicycle, covering thousands of miles in Africa, Asia, South America and beyond. His travels around the world (and on assignment for National Geographic) inspired him to discover and name the globe’s “blue zones,” the countries and societies with the longest life expectancy, the greatest happiness and other strengths. His first book to come out of this research was 2008′s The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer From the People Who’ve Lived the Longest, a prescription for life extension that became an international best-seller.

Now, Buettner is back with a new book, Thrive, which focuses on happiness in the “blue zones,” and how everyone can attain a better quality of life by following the happiest countries’ examples. Buettner spoke with Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen about his studies and how we can all infuse more joy into our lives.

NPR Weekend Edition Sunday Staff November 28, 2010

Listen or Read Transcript

Video and tips on happiness from best-selling author Dan Buettner. See Video and short Article

Economy 4.0: The case of the Community Indicators

David Brancaccio

You can catch a glimpse into how well our society’s doing with standard economic indicators like the Consumer Price Index. But one Colorado community wanted to go beyond the official statistics and get a better sense of what’s working and what’s not. Marketplace’s special correspondent David Brancaccio reports on Community Indicators.

Marketplace -  Friday, October 15, 2010 Listen to the show or Read the Transcript

LONDON (AP) — Feeling fine? Frustrated? Fantastic? The British government really wants to know.

British officials said Monday they will start measuring national happiness in addition to gauging more traditional data like income levels and fear of violent crime.

The new plan makes good on a campaign pledge by Prime Minister David Cameron, who promised during the general election earlier this year to measure subjective levels of well-being when the government is collecting citizen data.

Detailed plans have not been announced, but the new questions are expected to be formulated by National Statistician Jil Matheson late this month for inclusion in a survey next spring. She said Monday the policy change is welcome.

“There is growing international recognition that to measure national well-being and progress there is a need to develop a more comprehensive view, rather than focusing solely on gross domestic product,” she said.

The decision to look beyond simple pounds and pence measures is part of a “science of happiness” movement that has taken root in several other countries, including France and Canada, as officials and academics study the failure of rising living standards in recent decades to be accompanied by a similar rise in personal contentment.

Go to BBC Article on Prime Minister Cameron’s adoption of well-being indicators for the UK

A flurry of articles and studies from Harvard develop different aspects of the study of Happiness. Check out these articles, you will be happy you did!

Buddhism on the dinner plate

You’ve heard the old saying: Anything’s possible if you set your mind to it.

Mindfulness, the Buddhist principle of being fully aware of the present, is at the heart of Lilian Cheung’s collaborative book “Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life,” written with Thich Nhat Hanh, a renowned Buddhist monk and author of “Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.”

According to “Savor,” the practice of mindfulness is an essential tool in ending weight loss struggles for good.

“A lot of us know that we should be eating healthily and exercising to maintain our well-being, but somehow we cannot sustain our effort,” said Cheung, a nutritionist at the Harvard School of Public Health. “To control our weight, we also need to first understand who we are, how and why we arrive at this circumstance, and how we relate to food. Buddhist teachings on mindfulness help us better understand our true nature: our body, our feelings, our mind, and all that is around us.”

How to get happy

Boks relay what they’ve found in research and in life

What makes Derek and Sissela Bok happy? Family tops the list. Sharing in each other’s work also ranks high.

The former Harvard president and his wife, a current Harvard fellow, offered their perspectives on happiness, the impact it has on teaching, and their approaches to well-being in political and philosophical contexts, during a discussion on Tuesday (Sept. 28) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).

Howard Gardner, the Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, moderated the discussion.

The couple is well-schooled in the topic. Derek Bok recently penned “The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn From the New Research on Well-Being,” while his wife Sissela is the author of “Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science.”

Money spent on others can buy happiness

As anyone who has read the Declaration of Independence knows, the right to the pursuit of happiness is part of the nation’s founding creed. But when it comes to where to look for it, the instructions are less than clear.

Many think money holds the key.

For years researchers, from psychologists to economists, have examined whether there is a direct connection between one’s financial and emotional wealth.

Studies suggest that more money can lead to a significant bump in positive outlook when it brings people out of poverty, but when simply taking a person up a pay grade, there’s often only a minor change in attitude. And while the purchase of material possessions can offer a temporary lift, the effects of a new watch, car, or dress, studies show, are almost always short-lived.

But new research by one Harvard scholar implies that happiness can be found by spending money on others.

Wandering mind not a happy mind

About 47% of waking hours spent thinking about what isn’t going on

People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone Web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects’ thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert write. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn’t going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain’s default mode of operation.

Study: Key to happiness is listen to others

Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger — or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person’s experience is often more informative than your own best guess.

The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller “Stumbling on Happiness,” along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.

“If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself,” says Gilbert. “Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there.

Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has shown that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it, which leads them to make a wide variety of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at improving the accuracy with which people imagine future events have been generally unsuccessful.

So rather than trying to improve human imagination, Gilbert and his colleagues sought to eliminate it from the equation by asking people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event about which they knew absolutely nothing — except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Amazingly enough, those people made extremely accurate predictions

Happiness Can Spread Among People Like a Contagion, Study Indicates

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 5, 2008

Happiness is contagious, spreading among friends, neighbors, siblings and spouses like the flu, according to a large study that for the first time shows how emotion can ripple through clusters of people who may not even know each other.

Got Happy? Harvard Study suggests seven factors that predict personal happiness and well being

From the Atlantic – thanks to Tommo for pointing it out!

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically. Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80. Even if they had been in adequate physical shape at 50, the men who had three or fewer protective factors were three times as likely to be dead at 80 as those with four or more factors. What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.” The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63. More broadly, pessimists seemed to suffer physically in comparison with optimists, perhaps because they’re less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.

http://joeduck.com/2009/05/13/got-happy-harvard-study-suggests-seven-factors-that-predict-personal-happiness-and-well-being/ 

Just out, The Story of Electronics.
Watch The Story of Electronics, storyofelectronics.org, and learn about the electronics industry’s “design for the dump” mentality. Join us in championing product take back to spur companies to make less toxic, more easily recyclable and longer lasting products. And definitely don’t for get to visit the What You Can Do page and take action!

You can find the Story of Electronics and the other Story of videos at www.storyofstuff.org 

Also look at the teaching aids on the website. There are short humorous videos for kids about stuff and a curriculm for high school students. Very good stuff!

Infinite Party Politics

By Eric Zencey – Published: November 10, 2010 in the Times-Argus

Strong, passionately held opinions have frequently divided Americans and the politicians that represent them. The divisions have been cut by fundamental, yes-or-no questions: should some humans be allowed to hold others as slaves? Can states secede from the Union? Should money be coined in silver, easing the deflation that benefits banks and lenders and hurts farmers and borrowers? Is society responsible for establishing a minimum standard of living for its members, or should it be every man for himself? Will capital and corporations be brought under social control, or should there be free markets and less regulation? What’s it to be, less government or more?

These lines of cleavage don’t admit of much compromise, and they’ve propelled Americans into sharp, sometimes violent division more than once in the history of the Republic.

There is now a new line of cleavage emerging, although only one side of the division seems to have recognized and capitalized on the change. The question that divides the American public today cuts as deeply as did the issues of slavery, states’ rights, free silver, and the New Deal in the past. The fundamental question shaping the American political landscape today is this: Is the planet infinite or not?

The answer seems obvious — and yet nationally, the Infinite Planet Party scored a major victory at the polls.

They won because the election wasn’t framed as a referendum on physical reality, but as a report on emotional states: Do you like where the country is headed? Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, got it right when he said “Americans are voting based on symptoms, not diagnosis.” The symptoms are those of an infinite-planet system colliding with the reality of a finite planet.

The financial crisis? Debt is a claim on future production of wealth — production that has a physical element. You can’t have near-infinite growth of debt in a physically finite system without having the spasm-and-collapse of major debt repudiation every few years.

Security and immigration issues? You can’t take 60 percent of the world’s resource stream to serve less than 10 percent of its population without engendering some resentment, or attracting immigration, legal and otherwise, as people elsewhere in the world recognize a good deal when they see it.

Big government? If you’ve got big corporations cashing out the life-support systems of a finite planet and turning them into consumer products (and fat bonuses), you’re going to need big government if you want to set any kind of limits to that behavior at all. On an infinite planet? No need.

Reduced taxes? Government is a kind of overhead, and it’s easy to finance overhead when your income stream begins with oil, which was returning 100:1 in the early part of the century. (The energy of one barrel of oil invested in exploration and extraction yielded 100 in return.) With the Energy Return on Energy Invested of oil falling, we’re going to have to get used to financing all our social overhead on the return rate provided by renewable sources of energy — typically 14:1 to 18:1, compared to oil, today, at 19:1 (and falling). To get the proportional cost of overhead back to where it was in 1920, we’d have to cut government spending by 80 percent — small government, indeed.

Or consider the weather news from the summer 2010: the unprecedented heat wave in Russia, the thousand-year monsoon in Pakistan, the continuing drought in Australia and Niger and Sudan and the American Southwest. Although no particular weather event can be ascribed to man-made climate change with any certainty, the unusual weather is just what scientists have said we would see as the planet’s climate changes. These events have another common thread: they, and the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf, warn us that our economy is diminishing the ability of the planet to feed us. The monsoon floods drowned a national granary, taking it offline for a year, maybe two, maybe three. One-quarter of the annual grain crop was scorched to death in the Russian summer. No protein was harvested by the idled shrimpers and fishermen of the Gulf Coast, and stocks of seafood there may take years to rebound. Twenty million people live with “food insecurity” in Africa. The news from the summer of 2010 was this: Our globalized economy is running into limits, physical limits that we can do little to change.

Physics tells us that there are only two ways an economy can grow. It can take up a larger stream of resources—matter and energy — from the planet, or it can achieve efficiencies in the use of a constant stream. Taking up an ever-larger stream of resources is impossible on a finite planet, and yet we remain dedicated to doing this — even when, as now, doing so decreases our overall standard of well-being. In contrast, taking a steady, constant flow of uptake is possible — and possible forever, it it’s sized to fall under what the planet can sustainably give to us in the form of resources and take from us in the form of waste. With technological advances, that steady stream can lead to a constantly rising material standard of living. Because it preserves ecosystems and their services, while the infinite planet-growth model does not, the sustainability model actually produces a higher standard of living.

And there you have the emerging cleavage in America: Sustainable Society vs. Infinite Planet Politics.

Clearly, on the national scene Republicans are the Infinite Planet Party. An infinite planet has, by definition, an infinite capacity to absorb all of our effluents, green house gases included. Forty five of the 97 Republican freshmen in the House of Representatives are climate change deniers, joining the 85 already there. (Most of the rest lay low on the issue; only four House Republicans have said the phenomenon is real and the science sturdy.) One of the best ways to accommodate a healthy and efficient market economy to reality is to get prices to tell the ecological truth. The truth: cranking pollution into the atmosphere imposes costs on all of us, a cost that ought to be reflected in prices of the things that are made as the pollution is emitted. Republicans supposedly want market-based solutions, yet 86 percent of the incoming Republican Class of 2010 oppose increased taxes on polluting industries. Their position makes sense only on an infinite planet.

Majority opinion doesn’t always get physical reality right (just ask Galileo, or Darwin or climate scientist James Hansen). But had the Democrats framed the election as a referendum on Infinite Planet Theory, they’d have given Americans an opportunity to see a clearer diagnosis. And who knows? They might have succeeded in getting a mandate to bring America and its economy a little closer to reality.

Eric Zencey is a Vermont author and essayist and Visiting Associate Professor of Historical and Political Studies at Empire State College, the State University of New York. He lives in Montpelier.