I’d like to start today’s post with a note on happiness, which seems to dovetail nicely with this (previously linked) study on the positive effects of optimism.
The participants, who were between the ages of 52 and 79 when the study began, were divided into three groups according to how happy and positive they felt. Although the groups differed slightly on some measures (such as age, wealth, and smoking), they were comparable in terms of ethnic makeup, education, employment status, and overall health.
Five years later, 7% of people in the least happy group had died, compared with just 4% in the happiest group and 5% in the middle group.
When the researchers controlled for age, depression, chronic diseases, health behaviors (such as exercise and alcohol consumption), and socioeconomic factors, they found that the happiest and medium-happy people were 35% and 20% less likely to have died, respectively, than their gloomier counterparts.
These findings are kind of amazing. The takeaway here is even more important–by simply being happy and thinking positively, you can live a longer and, as a matter of course in this case, a happier life.
I would extend these lines of logic by adding this simple bit from my own life, a realization I had years ago while sitting in an Eastern Philosophy class at Penn State, knee deep in the Bhagavad Gita: Don’t put hate out there.
In other words, live by The Golden Rule.
I’m not talking about the more recent Christian interpretation of the Golden Rule, which has us ‘doing to others as we would have them do unto us‘. No no no. I don’t like that one. It demands too much, this positive form of the Golden Rule. If we really embraced this idea, we’d be out there all day, doing the good stuff for others we would want done for us. It’s just not practical from a literal point of view.
The original, for my money, is much less demanding, giving it better chance of being widely adopted and, ultimately, affecting more positive change. It also has the benefit of being much more established throughout history, having appeared in virtually every mainstream religion going back over 4,000 years.
It’s always a form of this:
‘Do NOT do to others that which you would NOT like done to yourself.’
Yeah. That’s the one, the so-called negative form of the Golden Rule.
Confucius: ”Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.”
Ancient Greece: ”Do not do to others what would anger you if done to you by others.”
Ancient Egypt: ”That which you hate to be done to you, do not do to another.”
Buddhism: ”Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.”
Hinduism: ”One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self. This, in brief, is the rule of dharma. Other behavior is due to selfish desires.”
Islam: “The most righteous person is the one who consents for other people what he consents for himself, and who dislikes for them what he dislikes for himself.”
Jainism: ”Just as pain is not agreeable to you, it is so with others. Knowing this principle of equality treat other with respect and compassion.”
Judaism: ”That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.”
This very basic idea–’Don’t mess with others’–might be the earliest example of crowdsourcing in human history. That so many different religions from different parts of the world understood this notion to be important both from an individual and a cultural point of view speaks to the fundamental success of the idea.
Coupled with the recent findings on optimism and happiness, we’ve got a pretty solid roadmap for a happy, healthy existence while we’re here on the paradise that is Planet Earth.
