From The Twilight Zone

[tadpole1025]

Whitney, I agree that it means nothing. I have to wonder though if OM knows that my X is doing that. I know if I was OM, I wouldn't be too crazy about it.

Babbling:

Found out tonight that I still can't listen to music unless it is the hard stuff. I went out to dinner tonight with 3 of my sons and had to walk out once because of the music they were playing. Damn. It's been two years and still.....

I was on Yahoo this morning and saw an interesting article right on the front page:

NEW YORK (AP) — Chimpanzees going through a midlife crisis? It sounds like a setup for a joke.

But there it is, in the title of a report published Monday in a scientific journal: "Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes."

So what do these apes do? Buy red Ferraris? Leave their mates for some cute young bonobos?

Uh, no.

"I believe no ape has ever purchased a sports car," said Andrew Oswald, an author of the study. But researchers report that captive chimps and orangutans do show the same low ebb in emotional well-being at midlife that some studies find in people.

That suggests the human tendency toward midlife discontent may have been passed on through evolution, rather than resulting simply from the hassles of modern life, said Oswald, a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England who presented his work Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A second study in the journal looks at a younger age group and finds that happiness in youth can lead to higher income a few years down the road.

More on that later. Let's get back to those apes.

Several studies have concluded that happiness in human adults tends to follow a certain course between ages 20 and 70: It starts high and declines over the years to reach a low point in the late 40s, then turns around and rises to another peak at 70. On a graph, that's a U-shaped pattern. Some researchers question whether that trend is real, but to Oswald the mystery is what causes it.

"This is one of the great patterns of human life. We're all going to slide along this U for good or ill," he said. "So what explains it?"

When he learned that others had been measuring well-being in apes, "it just seemed worth pursuing the hunch that the U might be more general than in humans," he said.

He and co-authors assembled data on 508 great apes from zoos and research centers in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Singapore and Japan. Caretakers and other observers had filled out a four-item questionnaire to assess well-being in the apes. The questions asked such things as the degree to which each animal was in a positive or negative mood, how much pleasure it got from social situations, and how successful it was in achieving goals. The raters were even asked how happy they would be if they were the animal for a week.

Sounds wacky? Oswald and his co-authors say research suggests it's a valid approach. And they found that the survey results produced that familiar U-shaped curve, adjusted to an ape's shorter lifespan.

"We find it for these creatures that don't have a mortgage and don't have to go to work and don't have marriage and all the other stuff," Oswald said. "It's as though the U shape is deep in the biology of humans" rather than a result of uniquely human experiences.

Yes, apes do have social lives, so "it could still be something human-like that we share with our social cousins," he said. "But our result does seem to push away the likelihood that it's dominantly something to do with human life."

Oswald said it's not clear what the evolutionary payoff might be from such discontent. Maybe it prods parents to be restless, "to help find new worlds for the next generation to breed," he said.

Frans de Waal, an authority in primate behavior at Emory University, cautioned that when people judge the happiness of apes, there may be a "human bias." But in an email he called the results "intuitively correct" and said the notion of biological influence over the human pattern is "an intriguing possibility."

Even happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, who thinks the U-shaped pattern in people is a statistical mirage, says she can't write off the ape result the same way. "I'm not really sure what it means," she said. "I am finding this very intriguing." Maybe it will spur more thinking about what's going on in both apes and humans, she said.

Oswald is also an author of a second report in the journal that finds new evidence that being happy can help young people earn more money later on. Prior research had also reached that conclusion, but Lyubomirsky and University of Virginia psychology professor Shige Oishi called the new work the best evidence yet.

"Wow," Oishi said in an email. "This is a very strong paper" in its approach.

Researchers drew on data from a huge sample of young Americans who were surveyed repeatedly. They were asked to rate their positive feelings such as happiness and hopefulness at age 16 and again at 18, and their satisfaction with life at 22. Researchers then compared their ratings with their income around age 29. The data came from nearly 15,000 participants at age 16, and at least 11,000 at the latter two ages.

Higher income at age 29 was consistently linked to greater happiness at the earlier ages. The least happy 16-year-olds, for example, went on to average about $10,000 a year less than the happiest. That disparity shrank by about half when the researchers statistically removed the effect of other influences such as ethnicity, health and education.

A happiness effect even appeared between siblings within their own families.

What's going on? Most likely, happiness raises productivity and helps a person work effectively with others, factors that promote success in the workplace, Oswald said. The study found that happier people were more likely to get a college degree and get hired and promoted.

Ed Diener, an authority on happiness research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said optimism probably plays a role because it helps people persist in their efforts and take on difficult goals. Since several studies, including his own, have now linked happiness to later income, that idea seems reliable, he said.

Parents should recognize that "the psychological well-being of their children is important in how well the kids will do in simple dollar terms later on," Oswald said. And unhappy people should realize that they might have to strive harder than others to focus on work and promotion rather than their unhappiness, he said.

Tad

[25yearsmlc]

Tad

Interesting article. I hope you won't stare at it and hold up the MLC label much longer b/c it's not relevant to your life now and you've spent so much time trying to answer things that I guess you think will help you feel better but I don't see that at all.

Anyhow, what I got from this article, vis a vis YOU, is that thinking more happy thoughts leads to better results ----NOT the other way around.
Where our head goes, our heart will follow, (IF we let it!)

Yes, The "fake it til you make it", actually works. Focussing on the negatives does not lead to more happiness and actually decreases our salaries too. You sound and act depressed and it stays with you and you won't shake it off.

Someone here posted to you that the "lbs literally cannot heal until the WAS..." and no offense to whoever said that, truly, but

I reject that, in toto.

WE are in charge of our happiness.Period. No one else is.


When you claim OR behave as if someone else's choices force you to feel some way, or allow/prevent your own happiness, or mood,

then you are abdicating your responsibility to yourself, to God and to your kids.

[25yearsmlc]

Here's what I mean...

Higher income at age 29 was consistently linked to greater happiness at the earlier ages. The least happy 16-year-olds, for example, went on to average about $10,000 a year less than the happiest. That disparity shrank by about half when the researchers statistically removed the effect of other influences such as ethnicity, health and education.

A happiness effect even appeared between siblings within their own families.

What's going on? Most likely, happiness raises productivity and helps a person work effectively with others, factors that promote success in the workplace, Oswald said. The study found that happier people were more likely to get a college degree and get hired and promoted.

AND


optimism probably plays a role because it helps people persist in their efforts and take on difficult goals. Since several studies, including his own, have now linked happiness to later income, that idea seems reliable,

Let her go, and have an optimistic view of where that might lead you.

OR stay rooted in fear and feelings of rejection. That's what this means to me.

Then-
The article ends with--


unhappy people should realize that they might have to strive harder than others to focus on work and promotion rather than their unhappiness, he said.


ahem, good point.

So how are those GAL activities going?

[sunshinelewis]

25 are you on the alt?
you are one smart cookie!

[iluvme55]

Thank you Renee......that was a great testimony...I really am happy with my life I have a job ...I am in good health and I have my family....."With God all things are possible" I pray you are doing well.....Irma

[tadpole1025]

Hi everyone. It has been a while.

Interesting article. I hope you won't stare at it and hold up the MLC label much longer b/c it's not relevant to your life now and you've spent so much time trying to answer things that I guess you think will help you feel better but I don't see that at all.

Not at all 25. I just found it interesting that it happens to monkeys too. I guess it shows that this crap is real.

I had a decent Thanksgiving. We ( me, S19 and S21) spent it at S19's GF's house.

I'm getting better. I know this because things don't bother me as much as they used to. They still do, but not as much.

Antonia, I believe it was you (forgive me if I'm wrong) that told me that I needed to accomplish something. Well guess what? I finished my book! It will be available exclusively in Kindle format beginning Friday and available on the Nook, Iphone, Ipad and Smartphones at the beginning of March. I don't really care if it sales much. I hope it does, but just getting it done made me feel good.

XW has been encouraging S17 to drop out of school. Can you believe that? The old W would NEVER find that acceptable. I think it is because she found out that even though he will turn 18 on December 5th, she still has to pay support until he is done with school.

Anyways, that is it for now.



Tad

[Kimmerz]

Tad congratulations!!

That's very interesting. A childhood friend of mine just got a book of his own on Kindle today too!

How do you go about getting a book on Kinde? Does it cost an arm and a leg?

[job]

Tad,
I'm very proud of you! Congratulations! Can you provide us with the name of the book? I'm reading Antonia's book now.

I'm glad you a decent Thanksgiving. I'm also glad to see you didn't stay home alone during the holiday.

For the love of Pete, your xw needs to stop encouraging your son to drop out of school. Education is more important today than it has ever been. Jobs are scarce and if you don't get a good education, you can't get a decent job or go to college. Money is definitely the root of all evil. Honestly, she needs to get her head out of the toilet and pay attention to what is important. Sorry, that's my rant of the day.

Tad, I'm happy to see you are doing better. You are going to have good and bad days, but the good days will outweigh the bad ones as you move along.

Take care.

[AntoniaB]

Tad, It was me who told you that you needed to accomplish something. This is outstanding! I'm really glad you did this. I agree, tell us the name of the book so we can find it to buy it. I'm looking forward to reading it.

It's funny how this board seems to generate writers of different sorts--or rather, that maybe some of us have been hidden writers all along, and the whole notion of the posts we write, which tend to be a form of journaling, lends itself to expression through words, and then we find we kind of need that to work through things.

I started to write a novel recently...I'd been making all these false starts and finally got a start I'm happy with and have been working on it when I can. But you remind me of me, Tad, when you say you don't care if it makes you money or anything, you just wanted to put it out there. I agree. The benefit is more from the act of "doing" and being able to reflect back and say "this is mine; I created it", than any monetary reward. But with that said, an occasional royalty check is a nice pick-me-up!

Again, looking forward to it and proud of you. I think the more you focus on things like this, the more you will gain self-confidence and self-esteem.

[mizjjd]

I am definitely interested in learning more from the aspiring writers!! Let me know your titles and I will buy your books pronto

Writing a book is something H has been nagging me about for a long time and I am giving it some attention as a 180.

Congrats to Tad and Antonia for their endeavors!