Tuesday, January 17, 2012

What Older People Know - " 30 Lessons for Living"

This reminds me of a book that came out in 2004 called "What Happy People Know" by Dan BAKER Ph.d that was presented as a fairly radical change in the study of human behaviour - specifically a better understanding of what constitutes "happiness".   The title struck me as rather glib if not an outright parody at the time but the radical approach was a rejection of traditional medical methods as applied in psychology that consider "unhappiness" (characterized in it's most extreme form as depression) as being caused in by a deficit of some kind - emotional or mental.  This was likened to engineers "studying bridge failures in order to understand good bridge design".  The better approach was to study and ask self-identified "happy" people why they were so and seek to gain better insights into what common attitudes and experiences made them this way. I strongly recommend it.

This new book project appears to have been born from the same method.

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