by Bob Trowbridge

Created on: April 20, 2009

Assessing someone else's state of happiness is very difficult and probably futile. Someone that you think is very happy, perhaps the happiest person you know, might end up committing suicide. If there is one thing that human beings are good at it is hiding how they are really feeling.

So the only assessment that has any meaning is our own assessment of our state of happiness. And it must be emphasized that happiness, along with most other emotions, is seldom an ongoing emotional state. Happiness, for most of us, is something we experience occasionally.

How Accurate is Our Self-Assessment?

It might seem surprising, but our happiness self-assessment is usually off in the direction of being lower than it really is. How can something like that happen? How could we assess ourselves as being less happy than we are? Wouldn't we be more likely to assess ourselves as being happier than we are?

We might pretend to be happier than we are but we're not fooling ourselves with our own pretense. Our happiness is generally determined by our assessment of how well our life is going. So we don't assess happiness directly but see happiness as a side-effect of a life that is going well.

This is where our mis-assessment comes in.

Focusing on the Bad News

What we call the news should be called the bad news. For the most part, that is what we read, hear, and see from our media on a daily basis. I know there is lots of bad news right now because of the economy but even in "good" times in this country, the news leans very heavily toward the negative.

Why is this? It's quite simple. What makes the news is that which is unusual. There is good news too but only when it is rare or special. The rescue of the captain of the ship hijacked by Somali pirates was big news. It was very good news but it didn't make the news because it was good news. It made the news because it was an unusual situation.

What is Good about Bad News

What the media does with news stories, we do with our life assessment. That is, we tend to look at what is wrong in our lives instead of what is right. We take for granted what is working in our lives and tend to focus on what needs fixing. The overabundance of bad news tells us that bad news is unusual. Our media is over-weighted with bad news because these negative situations are unusual and therefore newsworthy.

Wonderful things are happening all over the world every day. Because they happen all the time, they are not newsworthy. People are falling in love all over the world

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