Meaning and happiness: Looking at the big picture

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Meaning and happinessLooking at the big picture

• Richard Eckersley
• National Centre for Epidemiology
• and Population Health, ANU
• nceph.anu.edu.au
• Australia 21 fellow and director
• www.australia21.org.au

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Our wellbeing is shaped by our genes, our
personal circumstances and choices, the social
conditions we live in, and the complex ways in
which all these things interact.
Source Eckersley, 2007
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Being human and human wellbeing

• Dimensions of human health and wellbeing
• Material food, water, shelter, sleep, activity.
• Social friends, family, community.
• Cultural reasons to live.
• Spiritual psychic connectedness to the world.

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Contributors to wellbeing

• What you have/do
• Marriage
• Friends
• Work
• Money
• Diet
• Activity
• Sleep
• Leisure
• Religion

• Who you are
• Personality
• Optimism
• Trust
• Self-respect
• Autonomy
• Gratitude / Kindness
• Goals
• Worldview
• Spirituality

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All in all, wellbeing comes from being connected
and engaged, from being suspended in a web of
relationships and interests personal, social,
spiritual. These give meaning to our lives. The
intimacy, belonging and support provided by close
personal relationships seem to matter most
isolation exacts the highest price.
Source Eckersley, 2005
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Finding happinesspersonal social perspectives
Happiness

• Personal
• Western
• Eastern

• Social
• Political
• Cultural

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Personal approaches

• Western
• Follow your dream be who you want to be realise
  your destiny.
• Bending universe to your will.
• Eastern
• Living in the moment going with the flow
  acceptance, surrender.
• At one, in harmony, with universe.

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Many people make life unnecessarily difficult
for themselves by dissipating power and energy
through fuming and fretting.We do not realise
how accelerated the rate of our lives has become,
or the speed at which we are driving ourselves.
Many people are destroying their physical bodies
and they are tearing their minds and souls to
shreds as well.
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Social approach

• Political
• Social change through policy and programs.
• How problems are addressed depends on how they
  are represented (Bacchi).
• Cultural
• Worldviews, beliefs, values, stories.
• Determines what can be known and done.

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The power of stories
young people need to be able to create stories
or narratives that allow them to make sense of
the world and their place in it. This is
important to their wellbeing and to Australias
future. The opportunity to talk about the world
and themselves is an essential ingredient of this
process. Eckersley et al, 2007
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What religion is
Whatever else religion does, it relates a view
of the ultimate nature of reality to a set of
ideas of how man is well-advisedto live.
Clifford Geertz
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What religion is
Religion is not merely a belief in an ultimate
reality or in an ultimate ideal. Religion is a
momentous possibilitythat what is highest in
spirit is also deepest in nature... a conserver
and increaser of values ... that the things that
matter most are not at the mercy of the things
that matter least. Gates of Prayer
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What religion does
Religious belief and practice enhance health and
wellbeing. The benefits to wellbeing flow from
the social support, existential meaning, sense of
purpose, coherent belief system and moral code
that religion provides. All these things can
be found in other ways, although perhaps less
easily religions package many of the
ingredients of health and wellbeing.
Source Eckersley, 2007
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Religion US stands out
Source Pew 2002
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Male youth suicide trendsby country, 1950-2000
Source Eckersley 2002
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Youth suicide and freedomAn international
comparison
()
Source Eckersley and Dear, 2002
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Against religion

• Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation.
• Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto.
• Tamas Pataki, Against Religion.
• Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great.
• Richard Dawkin, Root of All Evil.

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Science religion

• The road to peace between science and religion
  requires that
• Science accept other ways of interpreting the
  world.
• Religion abandon notions of God as a supernatural
  being who controls the universe, even our lives.

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An indigenous worldview
Spiritual life was much more significant than
material life for the Australian Aboriginal
people.It is in the mind and the creativity of
the spirit in the intangible rather than the
tangible artefacts that Aboriginal society
stands out.This created a psychology that was
completely disinterested in acquiring and
possessing material things. Karl-Erik
Sveiby and Tex Skuthorpe Treading Lightly, 2006
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Suspicions of the Apocalypse

• We are responding in three ways to global
  developments
• Nihilism abandonment of belief decadence
  rules spiritually desiccated.
• Fundamentalism retreat to certain belief dogma
  rules spiritually corrupted.
• Activism transformation of belief hope rules
  spiritually renewed.

Source Eckersley, 2005
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Five Cosmologies

• In the past
• enchanted world alive with powers, gods
• sacred universe of Christianity
• mechanical Newtons clockwork universe
• organic universe as cosmic dance of energy
• Now
• creative universe as self-organising and
  creative process

Source Kenny, 2001
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Taking control of our future
We are all now faced with a radical moral
choice. We can step confidently into a new realm
of creative freedom and take full, democratic
responsibility for that future, or,
alternatively, retreat into a blind and
irresponsible dependence on moral authorities
whowill confidently claim that they have a
mandate from God, nature, history or the market
to define that future for us. Denis Kenny,
moral philosopher
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A shift in our worldview?

• At least 25 of Americans and Europeans are
  cultural creatives
• up from less than 5 in 1960s.
• disenchanted with consumerism, status displays,
  glaring social inequalities, hedonism and
  cynicism.
• care about the environment, relationships, peace,
  social justice, spirituality and self-expression.
• a coalescence of social movements that are
  changing how people understand the world .

Source Ray and Anderson, 2000
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What is new is that the largest movement in
human history has built itself without being
masterminded from above. This is why I use the
metaphor of this movement being humanity's immune
response to political corruption, economic
disease, and ecological degradation. The movement
is not merely a network it is a complex and
self-organizing system. Paul
Hawken Blessed Unrest, 2007
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.We do not see education as the primary means of
resolving social problems.It cannot
automatically make (young people) wise, but it
can point them in the direction of
wisdom. the most appropriate long term
approach for promoting young peoples education
in meaning, identity and spirituality is not to
create curriculum spaceit is to educate teachers
in relation to their own grasp of issues in these
three areas. Marisa Crawford Graham
Rossiter Reasons for Living (ACER 2006)