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Why do people who have many advantages in life struggle with ongoing happiness whilst others with far less to be happy about are happier?
Its common for people with many advantages, physical, mental, environmental, family etc to be unhappy and depressed.
On the other hand people with the exact opposite are often far more happy in themselves, with their lives and about the future.
I personally know a blind person, one of my very best friends who lost his sight at age 16. Now at age 24 he is the happiest guy you would ever meet, very optimistic and positive and he believes his blindness is a gift that has helped him develop other parts of himself that he may never have even been aware of.
Clearly our view of the world has a profound impact on our outlook in life but thats the confusing part. If you have a great upbringing and many of the trappings of "a great life", then how do the people with those advantages of birth and environment continue to fall short in their overall happiness yet the people with severe obstacles are often the happiest.
We can assume that the things we all focus on and value the most are what gives us our sense of self. Is the answer as simple as the quality of our values and beliefs are the driving force behind our happiness?
Would people benefit from living as say a blind person for a 3 month term so as to develop other more enduring drivers to happiness?
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Allan Macdougall 50+
There are two reasons - one might be based on a kind of blessed relief from 'sighted normality' - ie not having to do, say and think what everybody else seems to have to conform to.
As your blind friend has alluded to, there is also the theory that the loss of a vital sense such as sight or hearing, may give the person heightened capabilities in other senses.
One example is Evelyn Glennie - an extraordinarily gifted percussionist, who is profoundly deaf. Her auditory sense has shifted from hearing with her ears to feeling sounds with her body - and her gift is obviously the better for it. She has a TED talk here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/evelyn_glennie_shows_how_to_listen.html
My only experience of being blind is when my family and I had a meal at a 'blind restaurant' in Berlin, where the food was served by blind waiting staff and we ate in complete darkness. It was an amazing experience, because I actually felt that my sense of smell, taste, touch and hearing became super-sensitive. This made me enjoy the food and the ambience much more than if I had been able to see, plus the fact that everybody else was in exactly the same circumstances as me. I did not regard loss of sight as a disadvantage at all at the time, though that was in the knowledge that my sight would be returned to me afterwards. A blind person does not have that choice.
Living as a blind person for 3 months would be... well... an eye opener, actually! I'm not being flippant when I say that, because I absolutely believe that our experience of the world is not confined only to dedicated senses.