It’s February now, which means that you’ve thoroughly forgotten your New Year’s resolutions. Long gone. We understand—it happens every year. The best-laid personal improvement plans often go awry under pressure from back-to-school blues, winter snowstorms, income taxes, and—to the chagrin of the neglected all-inclusive gym membership in your wallet—chocolate. Sweet, sweet chocolate.

Of course, one of the most common New Year’s resolutions is to lose weight, to tone up those thighs, to run longer and faster, to lift more weight more times. This is only natural: America is collectively letting out more slack on its belt each year, only to fill the gap with Double Downs and Trenta caramel Frappucinos. America needs exercise resolutions, but maybe the exerciser-membership dynamic could use some reform. Or, as Good’s Cord Jefferson puts it, “what if our workout facilities started hitting us where it really counts; not in our guts, but in our pocketbooks?”

Jefferson isn’t just postulating, he’s describing the incentive structure of Gym-Pact, a Boston-based enforced fitness program. The idea is simple: Sign up for Gym-Pact and get discounts on memberships to local gyms, yoga studios, and dance centers. But there’s a hitch. When you sign up, you commit to a workout schedule—and if you don’t follow through with your fitness regimen, you’re charged a $10 per day “motivational fee.”

The developers of Gym-Pact were inspired by the pillar of behavioral economic theory that states people are more incentivized by concrete consequences than uncertain benefits. “[B]ecause many gym fees are paid for up front,” Jefferson explains, “people tend to give up on working out fairly easily, as they consider the cost sunk regardless of whether they go. But by instituting an immediate daily cost, the motivation behind the penalty drastically increases.”

Source: Good 

Image by deanetr , licensed under Creative Commons . 

I’ve been hearing about Bhutan a lot these days. Namely, I’ve been hearing about their pursuit of happiness as a country, as defined by their GNP or Gross National Happiness—the country’s answer to the almighty gross domestic product (GDP). So entrenched are we in the ubiquitous language of GDP, it’s easy to hear talk of National Happiness as synonymous with unicorns and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. How can a country hope to define its national well being in terms of happiness? It’s hard enough for us to say if we’re happy or not on an individual level, much less to try and tell the whole country, Come on, get happy!

In an interview with YES! Magazine Bhutanese Prime Minister Jigmi Y. Thinley attempts to explain how his country is pursuing the goal of happiness for all:

First, we are promoting sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development which can be measured to a larger extent through conventional metrics. 

Second is the conservation of a fragile ecology, [using] indicators of achievement, [such] as the way the green [vegetation] cover in my country has expanded over the last 25 years from below 60 to over 72 percent….

The third strategy is promotion of culture, which includes preservation of the various aspects of our culture that continue to be relevant and supportive of Bhutan’s purpose as a human civilization….

Then there is the fourth strategy—good governance [in the form of democracy]—on which the other three strategies or indicators depend.

Those are lofty goals for any nation. But, then again, no one said it would be easy. Which is exactly Andrew Guest’s point in Oregon Humanities. An associate professor of psychology at the University of Portland, Guest makes the case that “Being happy…is much more complicated than it sounds.” The modern science of happiness, Guest tells us, is known as “positive psychology” and it focuses not just on reducing suffering, but increasing happiness through psychology and psychiatry. But just how to do that is still anyone’s guess, with much of the measurement coming from the subjective perception of individuals through rating systems where they define their own happiness (e.g. 1 for not all that happy; 7 for really happy). And while there is a whole field based around studying levels of happiness, Guest points out that happiness may not change much even when an individual’s circumstances change drastically. In other words, if you define yourself as happy now, you’ll probably define yourself as happy 40 years from now.

And then there are the critics who say the very pursuit of happiness is shallow and contributes to much of the suffering in the world. Guest references books like Bright Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich and Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges, summing up their ideas—maybe over simplistically—as, “Do you think gaping economic inequalities, unjust wars, and ferocious un/underemployment are problems? Don’t worry, be happy.”

So, are there ways to pursue happiness, both as an individual and as a nation? Guest says it may “come back to a formulation that Freud famously (and perhaps apocryphally) proposed a century ago: love and work.” That is, healthy relationships and meaningful work seem to be important factors in measuring happiness. Prime Minister Thinley seems to agree, saying, “Today, Bhutanese have an appreciable sense of pride and dignity about themselves, which I think, again, is key to happiness. Family values and community vitality are things that we are promoting in a very conscious way.”

Thinley is confused by what he sees as a lack of dialogue in the U.S. about “what matters most”—happiness. “I hope that more will listen, hear, think and speak out what they have in their mind,” he says, “rather than be afraid because it is unconventional to talk about happiness.” In Professor Guest’s classroom, though, that conversation is happening. When he hears his students proclaim that they “just want to be happy,” he wants to tell them, “Happiness…is more complicated than it sounds—but it is also much more interesting.”

Source: YES! Magazine, Oregon Humanities 

Image by jmhullot, licensed under Creative Commons. 

In a recent post, Utne Reader senior editor Keith Goetzman highlighted the increasingly popular occurrence of “canned hunts,” a pay-to-shoot experience, where hunters kill tame animals in enclosed areas. The practice is disturbing to anyone who knows hunters who have respect for the act of hunting and for the animals they kill. Writing for Vermont’s Local Banquet, Robert F. Smith counts himself among such hunters. His exploration into why he hunts is reverent and voices like his are important when you see videos like the one Keith posted, where pseudo-hunters get some sort of thrill out of killing what amount to large pets.  “[W]hy hunt?” Smith asks,

Hunting is often portrayed as barbaric and cruel, and hunters are presented as ignorant yahoos with a blood lust… . Some of the televised hunting shows do little to help that image, with their canned hunts on fenced-in game ranches where hunters are driven to a stand and then pick and shoot one of dozens of trophy bucks that are drawn in to special feeding stations. I don’t know that kind of hunting… .

A hunter taps into the very core of what we are as a species. We’re the product of 2 million years of evolution as a genus, a branch off the australopithicenes, and about 400,000 years as the distinct species homo sapiens. We evolved as hunters, and have become the most effective, most adaptable and successful predators on the planet.

Hunters like Smith are of the type I grew up with, so his logic and reasoning are familiar to me. He does take the discussion a step further, though, arguing that the hunter/gatherer system that predated agriculture led to equality, while the farms and labor it takes to keep them up has led us to the class system we find today:

Hunting a deer or antelope or harvesting wild berries or nuts is only a few hours of intensive work for several days’ worth of food, while raising, feeding, watering, and protecting a herd of sheep or goats, or planting, cultivating, and harvesting a field of grain, is unending labor. While the tribal system of hunter/gatherers led to equality and leisure time, agriculture brought in slavery, religion, caste and class systems, and the plight of poor peasants and field workers that continues today around the world.

Ultimately, though, the answer to the question “Why hunt” is elemental for Smith. It’s who we are; it’s part of what makes us human: “Hunting is an ancient dance as old as life itself, written into the very core of what we are as humans.” 

Source: Vermont’s Local Banquet 

Image by Benimoto, licensed under Creative Commons.