Why Positive Psychology is so 2000 and 2021 is the Year of Optimal Happiness Psychology
Say “bye-bye” to 2020 and “hello” to 2021! We hope this year will be better than the last year, or at least, so we hope. After all, 2020 made many people unhappy, so hopefully, 2021 will be better. Especially, there is a new hope over the horizon, which is Optimal Happiness Psychology, which is about to take the stage and replace Positive Psychology as the #1 go to in terms of our emotional well-being. As such, today, I want to talk to you about some of the problems we are still facing, possible solutions we have in stock, and why we should consider Optimal Happiness as one of the leading solutions for our current states of affairs and the well-being of the general public.
2020 Was The Worst Year Ever?
Most people will agree that 2020 was not that particularly great. Besides Trump and Corona Virus dominating the news still to this day, we had a number of other international news, which made some people believe that 2020 one of the worst years in our lifetime. Specifically, Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash, wildfires devastated both California and Australia, Black Lives Matter reached international outrage, and these are only a few of the biggest international headlines.
To this point, most people are looking towards 2021 as the year where things will go back to some sort of version of normal, while some beliefs should still hold our breath.
In 2021 We Are Still Holding Our Breath
We are starting 2021 without cheers. Simply, most people are still locked at home, while COVID is still devastating human lives all over the world. We are finally rolling out some vaccines, but it seems that there will not be enough for everyone, at least not any time soon. Moreover, a new form of COVID is being discovered all over the world. Likely, it seems like current vaccines are up to the task and will be able to protect people from the new form of this virus.
And yes, Trump did it again, almost starting the long-awaited civil war in US. I’m not sure why some people are surprised, as they have been trying to do exactly that for a very long time. We are still not sure what the local and global response will be to Trump, but personally, I’d like to see something else but his face all over the news in 2021.
2021 also started with the United Kingdom finally leaving the European Union, 4 years after the Brexit referendum. Sure, some people are happy about this change. Others are less happy. For example, I personally know a few people who live abroad and are not eager to be kicked out of the EU and return home in the middle of the worst COVID outbreak.
The Future, Which is Not Looking so Great, or Does it?
On 31 December 2006, UK made its last payment debt payment it incurred during the Second World War, meaning that it took 60 years and a whole generation of people for the British to pay off war debt. This, of course, came out of every pound people paid in taxes over a whole generation of people who never participated in the war. Similarly, during 2020, governments all over the world are taking on a huge debt and printing out money to cover for loss of business created during the current outbreak. This means that in the foreseeable future, and maybe our whole lifetime, we will have to pay additional taxes to pay off the debt we have accumulated during these difficult years.
Of course, there is some optimism towards the future, looking towards some external reason that could save us. For example, today, people and businesses all over the world are receiving “free money” given by governments to save our economies. This universal basic income has been talked about for years, but people never had the courage to implement it globally. Specifically, all the way back in the 70th, 37th US President, Richard Nixon, considered giving everyone in US free money, but this idea never flew due to last-minute hesitation he felt, reinforced by some of his close advisors who simply didn’t understand this economic model [1]. Nixons optimism and hesitation towards universal basic income are understandable since superficially giving free money to people without any strings attached seems crazy, right? And yet, every single study points towards the potential effectiveness of this model, so maybe this model will still make the world a better place for everybody.
Moreover, for a while, we are hoping that some magical new technology will solve all problems and does not add to existing ones. To this point, the current best perspectives are bio-genetics or Artificial Intelligence, states Yuval Noah Hariri, bestselling author of Sapiens and Homo Deus. Sure, this is a long-shot, but the way things were even before 2020 was not particularly charming either. COVID may have overshadowed many of the problems we were facing before, but these problems are still there, for the most part. For example, we are still facing obesity, destruction of the environment, death of millions of species, over population, and a host of other problems. In the end, it was COVID that took the stage, but it could have been a different problem or a host of problems. So yes, still to this day, people don’t know how we are going to save ourselves or if we will still ultimately destroy our species and take the world with this, for this matter. We trust that perhaps we may save the day with some new yet unnamed technology, like Artificial Intelligence, while some people are still concerned that it will be these new technologies that will make the final blow. I guess only time will tell.
Future Hope is Full of Optimal Happiness
And this is where Optimal Happiness comes in. In 2000, Martin Seligman announced the creation of Positive Psychology, which would study all the different elements of the positive spectrum of psychology, and partially replace traditional psychology, which predominately studies negative emotions before that time. 20 years later, we have accumulated a huge amount of data, so now the question becomes what to do with it. One of the possible solutions is to grab all this data and combine it into something meaningful, like an optimization study. Yes, I am talking about Optimal Happiness Psychology, which started in later 2020 and is promising to make an impact in 2021.
According to Roman Russo, author of Optimal Happiness: A Study of the Happiest People Alive, during 2020, we learned Learned Helplessness, but negative emotions cost us a lot. Specifically, on average, a happy person is better than his unhappy counterpart almost in every area of life. As such, happy people are more productive, wealthier, social, healthier, they see more opportunities, take more risk, are stronger, more creative, well-spirited, and overall better human beings, compared to their negative counterparts. Even our immune system is stronger, which will help to protect you from COVID.
No surprise that “happiness trumps unhappiness any day of the week,” states Russo. This is indeed important since the current world situation will make a lot of people unhappy, which will destroy human potential and make everyone worst off unless we can liberate ourselves from these shackles of negativity and embrace our new, improved, and optimally happier selves. Respectively, the extent to which we will enjoy the above-mentioned advantages is the extent to which we are happy. In other words, we want to be as happy as we can be, or Optimally Happy.
It’s All About How We Start 2021
Lastly, there are many challenges that we will face in 2021, some of which are coming from 2020, like Trump and COVID, and many others that are still haunting us from the past. We may even face some new challenges in 2021, like Boeing 737 just now crushing in Indonesia. Still, we can wait for some future solutions and suffer meanwhile, feeling sorry for ourselves, or we can take our lives into our own hands and do something about it. In this fashion, we can learn the science and art of Optimal Happiness Psychology, which will give us tools to be maximally happy in any scenario, even when facing Armageddon. After all, why feel bad if we have the tools to be as happy as we wish we were today?
Source:
[1] Utopia for Realists: And How We Can Get There by Rutger Bregman
