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Happiness is big business. There are hundreds of thousands of books on the subject, and billions of dollars are spent on pills and psychotiierapy visits in search of it. Yet happiness remains a temporary and, for some, an elusive state. Mental health is based on responding appropriately to experiences and, with life's ups and downs, no sane person can be 100 percent happy. So we fluctuate.
We are happy, then we are unhappy, and then we find happiness once again. We desire euphoria even though it does not have the stability of an inanimate object or the permanence of a tattoo.
Happiness research provides surprising data. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says that a year after a person wins the lottery and a year after a person becomes paraplegic and loses functions of his or her legs, their happiness quota is the same. He cites a study suggesting that, with only a few exceptions, a major life trauma longer than three months past has no impact on the subject's happiness.
CAN HAPPINESS BE MADE?
Gilbert theorizes that humans have the ability to synthesize happiness and that we adjust to create happiness. For example, in "Aging Artists on the Creativity of Their Old Age" in Creativity Research Journal (April 1997), Martin Lindauer and colleagues quote a female artist in her 60s. "I can no longer make very large projects, but making things can be rewarding also. My energy has diminished somewhat, and a lot...