Basic Aspirations of Human Being

CONTINUOUS HAPPINESS & PROSPERITY – A LOOK AT BASIC ASPIRATIONS OF HUMAN ASPIRATIONS

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basic-aspirations of human being

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What is Happiness:

Happiness is a mental state of well-being characterized by positive emotions of intense joy, contentment, and good life
Happiness is the positive nature of the self, happiness & the self are not different
There is no happiness in any object in the world

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According to Martin Seligman: Happiness is not just external, momentary pleasure. Martin provides the acronym PERMA to summarize many of Positive Psychology’s findings: human seems happiest when they have:

Pleasure (tasty foods)
Engagement
Relationships
Meaning
Accomplishments

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The flow of Happiness: According to Csijszent Mihail, flow refers to a state of total immersion effortless concentration & enjoyment in an activity in which one loses any sense of space, time & self. Feeling of flow directly contributes to men’s happiness in daily life. The various elements of accomplishing flow are

Clear goal.
A loss of the feeling of self-conscience
Transformed sense of time
Feedback
The balance between ability & challenge
Absence of personal control
Intrinsic reward

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Prosperity

It is the state of flourishing, thriving, success, or good fortune. Prosperity often encompasses not only wealth to varying degrees such as happiness & health. Prosperity is related to material things / physical facilities. When we are able to serve the needs of the body adequately, we feel prosperous. This prosperity is the feeling of adequacy or abundance of physical facilities.

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Competing Notions of Prosperity:

Economic notions of prosperity often compete or interact negatively with health, happiness, or spiritual notions of prosperity. For example, longer hours of work might result in an increase in certain measures of economic prosperity, but at the expense of driving people away from their preferences for shorter work hours. In Buddhism, prosperity is viewed with an emphasis on collectivism and spirituality.

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This perspective can be at odds with capitalistic notions of prosperity, due to their association with greed. Data from social surveys show that an increase in income does not result in a lasting increase in happiness; one proposed explanation for this is due to hedonic adaptation and social comparison, and a failure to anticipate these factors, resulting in people not allocating enough energy to non – financial goals such as family life and health.

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Economic growth is often seen as essential for economic prosperity, and indeed is one of the factors that is used as a measure of prosperity. The Rocky Mountain Institute has put forth an alternative point of view, that prosperity does not require growth, claiming instead that many of the problems facing communities are actually a result of growth, and that sustainable development requires abandoning the idea that growth is required for prosperity. The debate over whether economic growth is necessary for, or at odds with, human prosperity, has been active at least since the publication of Our Common Future in 1987 and has been pointed to as reflecting two opposing worldviews.

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Synergistic Notions of Prosperity:

Many distinct notions of prosperity, such as economic prosperity, health, and happiness, are correlated or even have causal effects on each other. Economic prosperity and health are well established to have a positive correlation, but the extent to which health has a causal effect on economic prosperity is unclear. There is evidence that happiness is a cause of good health, both directly through influencing behavior and the immune system, and indirectly through social relationships, work, and other factors. One study which advances a holistic definition of prosperity is the Legatum Prosperity Index.

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Ecological Perspectives:

In ecology, prosperity can refer to the extent to which a species flourishes under certain circumstances

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Prosperity is different from wealth:

Prosperity is a feeling of having more than the required physical facilities; it is not just physical facilities. Almost all of us feel that wealth alone means prosperity and try to explain this phenomenon on this nonexistent or half fact Wealth is a physical thing. It means having money or having physical facilities or both. This is a very important distinction. We mostly fail to make this distinction today. We keep working for wealth, without realizing that the basic desire is for the feeling of prosperity, to have a feeling of having enough.

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Prosperity is more acceptable to us because wealth is just a part of prosperity. We are trying to achieve happiness and prosperity accumulation and consumption of physical facilities. It is becoming anti-ecological and threatening human survival itself. A person has a lot of money but does not want to share a bit of it. The person has wealth or feel has a lot of money, but does not want to share even it. The person has wealth but feels ‘ deprived. If one feh prosperous he/she would have shared what one has since there is a lot more than enough wealth anyway.

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