Our Happiness Narrative

Hi all!

I hope you are doing well and enjoying what is for some of us the start of some warm weather 🙂 I know it’s been ages since I’ve last written! Now that I have just completed the first year of my master’s program (one more to go!), I hope to dedicate more time to blogging this summer.

As someone who is fascinated by happiness research, I also wanted to share a new project and Facebook Page I have just developed known as Our Happiness Narrative, where I hope to share photos and interviews with people from various parts of the world, asking them how they define happiness and what the happiest time in their lives was. As I mention in the description I share below, this project is very much inspired by Humans of New York and my own Bucketlistories.

If you are interested in this type of page and have a moment to like the new page/help get it kick started I will be eternally grateful and happy to return the favor for any of your own pages or sites! Below is a description of Our Happiness Narrative:

 

• A search for “happiness research” on Google yields 124,000,000 results. While there is a lot of research on well-being, many of these studies use survey data to answer the question “What makes us happy?” though surprisingly few of these studies demonstrate peoples’ perceptions about happiness using personal narrative or images.

  Yet, without asking people how they define happiness, we will never fully understand how our world thinks about this subject. With a camera, pen, and notepad, I hope to provide better insight into this question, asking as many people as I can these questions about happiness:

  1). What is happiness?
  2). What was the happiest moment in your life?
  3). Is there anything that you would like to add?

  Want to add to Our Happiness Story?

  Contact me at ourhappinessnarrative@gmail.com

  
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  This site would not exist without inspiration from these sources:Humans of New York: I believe that Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York offers one of the greatest snapshots of human nature. While the stories that accompany his photos do not solely focus on happiness, many of them contribute to this story. His website and Facebook page have provided some of the biggest inspiration for this site.The Happiness Project: After studying a wealth of happiness research, Gretchen Rubin set out on a mission to determine what would make her (and others) happier, establishing resolutions each month to help her achieve this goal. I have read her book multiple times and enjoy visiting her blog, both of which were on my mind when starting this site.

  The Geography of Bliss: In this book, Eric Weiner studies ancient philosophers’ thoughts about happiness, as well as more recent happiness research, using both as he travels to some of the happiest and unhappiest places in the world to determine what makes people in these areas experience these feelings. In this travel memoir, he tries to answer this question by interviewing several people in each location, while also seeking to better understand his own unhappiness. By interviewing as many people as possible in various countries, this site hopes to expand on the type of research Weiner pursued.

  Thank you also to some of the first people who, though I question some of their philosophies, tried to understand happiness and whose ideas I used as a frame for many of my own research on happiness: Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Jeremy Bentham (perhaps best known for trying to quantify happiness), and Arthur Schopenhauer (often called the father of pessimism, but who had a few ideas of his own about this subject!)

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  Many many thanks to anyone who helps bring this page to life by liking it; you are wonderful 🙂