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I attended a talk yesterday at the University of Toronto on “The Next Big Question” Canadian Research should try to answer. The talk was sponsored by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR — never heard of it…but interesting).

This is a Canada wide tour, and in Toronto, the three questions being presented were:

• How do our genes make us healthy and sick?
• What makes people Happy? and,
• How can we build a quantum computer?

I couldn’t come in time for the first two talks, but managed to attend the third talk and the following Q&A.

The talk I attended was the one on “What makes people happy?”, by Alexander Haslam.

It was a very interesting talk. The whole theme was that today’s official measure of happiness — wealth and individual accomplishments — were totally wrong, not making us happy, and pushing society towards the more unhappiness. Alex then further argued that happiness comes from togetherness and belonging to a true community where people trust each other and work towards the “we” rather than the “I”. The “Next Big Question” he said, is how can we measure this “togetherness”, which is a better reflection of happiness. Once we’re able to measure it, we can work better to increase it.

Interesting points, backed by data, that Alex showed:

• There is a negative correlation between average salary of a city and average happiness of the population there. Toronto is at the bottom end — it has the highest salaries but the least happiness. St. John’s, Newfoundland is up there.
• The most happy neighborhood in Toronto is in Scarborough, because neighbours trust each other the most there (really? I didn’t know…). The least happy neighborhood is downtown Toronto, where there is the least trust between neighbours.
• Parent’s income has no effect on childrens’ happiness. Open communication within the family does.
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs says that “self actualization” is the ultimate thing that would make a human happy. Data however shows that this kind of individualism increases stress, burnout, and alienation.

Sure, the points are a little “fuzzy”, but I think there’s some truth in there.

Tags: happiness, individualism, research, the next big question

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