Positively Downbeat by Julia Baird

I am reading an article by Julia Baird in Newsweek magazine(5 Oct 2009) , which is well-put indeed, and I pick up here some ideas in it.

-Last year(2008), 4,000 books were published on Happiness, up from 50 in 2000.

-That's funny thing about the obsession with smiley-faced happiness: the more overtly we have studied and pursed it, the less happy we have become. And the more confusing it gets.

-Despite three decades of economic growth in America, men and women are no happier. While women were happier than men in 1972, they are not now.

-While Europeans are growing happier, especially Italian, Americans are not. This is fascinating because it is in this country(USA) that a relentless focus on "positive thinking", from prosperity theology to corporate coaching, has emerged over the past decade- and it is this country that is now more gloomy.

-Positive thinking developed both as a reaction to the negativity of Calvinism and a slave for the sick and anxious, but has, over time, been turned into a kind of blind optimism.

-The most recent findings are that wealth makes you happy but children not. So more money and fewer kids.

-The most inspiring people are those least obsessed with their own happiness, especially those who stride confidently across the globe to create, evoke change or wrest from life what they will.

-Eleanor Roosevelt believed happiness "is not a goal,, it's a byproduct." I think she might be right.

-The Dalai Lama shows you can strive to be content and remain angry about injustice.

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　Well, this is very natural: when you seek more, you are, in subtle energy, stressing the fact that you lack what you are in search for. And you "make it", unfortunately.
Self-realization downward.