The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

These notes are old and were written while reading — they don’t necessarily reflect my current views.

In the first chapter Haidt explains his (Buddha’s) elephant rider model.

He explains that often the rider only rationalises what the elephant is doing in order to justify internal consistency and being able to pretend he is in charge.

Chapter 2:

There is no reality only interpretation of it. This is an insight that great minds from Buddha over Marcus Aurelius to Shakespeare had. This insight often lead to philosophies of introspection. Buddhists practice meditation, the Stoics try to eliminate their attachments. Both of these methods try more to mitigate pain than to receive pleasure. This is due to the negativity bias, which is an evolutionary adoption to make loss feel worse than proportional gain would feel good (see prospect theory).

Chapter 3:

He talks about reciprocity as a code of conduct and its evolutionary origin, he then mentiones some weaponized reciprocity strategies from Influence (Cialdini)

Chapter 4:

In this chapter he explores hypocrisy and how it arises. He talks about the self-serving bias and our ability to rationalise our own behaviour. It is not our perception of others that is flawed but our self-perception. People that are especially bad at evaluating them self are happier.

Chapter 5:

He analysis how we are able to adapt to a lot of circumstances and return to our baseline happiness. He talks about the concept of flow and that it seems to make people happier than pure pleasure. Further, he revisits the myth of the Buddha and says that if the Buddha would have talked to the old or sick people, that he would probably find them to be quite happy. Therefore, he propose a balance between the inward focused Buddhist / Stoic approach and the outward faced modern western approach.

Chapter 6:

Love and Attachments. He talks about various concepts of love and what they have in common. The most prominent of which was the greeks conception of ever more abstract forms of love.

Chapter 7:

Virtue is a discourse on virtue ethics (which he is rather fond of). His arguments have much in common with Sandel.

Chapter 9:

Divinity is for him a concept that is tightly linked to his conception of purity as an ethical concept. He talks about hallucinogenic substances.

Chapter 10:

Happiness lies within. Is strongly connected to the chapter on virtue. He proposes that happiness comes from in between the internal and the external. Both play a part in happiness.