Well-being doesn’t have to be a dog’s life

In preparing to write a longer story, I have recently been reading psychology books on the meaning of happiness. Although my father was a psychologist, I had never previously paid much attention to the field.

I’ve come to analyze many things from the point of view of my nearly year-old dog Feifei. From the first day I got her, I’ve taken her almost every morning to the local park, where she plays with other dogs and is petted by admirers. She gets mopey and sad if she misses even a day. Feifei thinks everybody is her friend.

If a dog growls at Feifei, she just wags her tail. Usually the barking dog walks off confused.

One key book on how to achieve a happy and meaningful life is Martin Seligman’s Flourish. Although the book does ramble a bit too much, it does a good job of explaining the scientific approach to studying happiness, which is called positive psychology. Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is considered the father of the field, argues that to be fulfilled and have a feeling of well-being a person needs PERMA — positive emotions, engagement, good relationships, meaning, and achievement.

Feifei is made happy by the R in PERMA — good relationships. Surely, the elderly dancers, singers and exercisers I see in Chinese parks are also made a lot happier by their daily relationships.

The other psychologist who impressed me is Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist — that is, a therapist — who teaches at the University of Toronto. His new book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has been number one on Amazon for weeks, even though it is a very difficult book that discusses the core philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Jung, Socrates and the Bible in depth.

Peterson is certainly not a positive psychologist. He would sternly warn Feifei that everyone is not her friend.

Much of his professional research concentrates on what Hannah Arendt, the great scholar of the Nazi Holocaust, called the “banality of evil”. Peterson studied the killers at Columbine High School as well as the Nazis and other perpetrators of mass horrors.

He also concentrates on giving tough-love advice to the sad young men who hide in their parents’ basements playing video games instead of pursuing the opportunities of life. The Japanese have so many of these perpetual children that they have a special word for them, hikikomori. But, it’s a big problem in the United States and China, too. Peterson also speaks out against the coddling, selfcenteredness, whining and anti-intellectual spirit that dominates many US and Canadian colleges today.

Peterson and the positive psychologists both emphasize that a human’s life cannot be full of well-being without meaning and achievement.