Kathleen Hillers posted this on a website called The Intention Experiment:
I just read a book called 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker. The author of the book has ms and was seeking natural healing. She was told by a “wise woman” from South Africa that if she gave a gift everyday for the next 29 days that it would have a healing effect in more ways than one. It’s a great book, but if you don’t want to read it, start giving a gift everyday and make a journal of every gift you give and the circumstances involved. If you miss a day, you have to start over because you have to keep the flow of giving constant. The gifts do not have to be materialistic. You can give some one a phone call, a ride, encouragement, whatever. I just started doing this on Feb 1st and my life is already getting better. The day before I started, I was in a panic. I couldn’t sleep, and I was completely broke . The day I started, i actually started feeling much better, and things are already looking up.
Regression to the mean, maybe. But maybe not. The idea has some plausibility: The Chinese character that means “happy” is a combination of a character that means “owe” and a character that means “again”.
Are you sure about the character? Could you please write it here?
I think it was Marcus Aurelius in Meditations who talked about how the Stoics considered gifts to be curses because they believed Fate/Fortuna would eventually take it away, leaving the giftee unhappier than before having received the gift.
The word “generosity” comes from the Latin word meaning “of noble birth”. I suppose the idea is that “well born” people are more giving than “low born” people, but then it’s easier to give resources away if you have a monopoly on them to begin with. Then there’s a Veblen aspect…people may give stuff away to prove that they have so much extra money that can afford to give the gifts.
Even better if the gifts are free or otherwise un-purchased!
I practice random acts of kindness, with a goal of helping at least 10 people a day (and at least 1 person I don’t know). I find this helps my mood toward the end of the day, when it is most likely to fall – no matter what else has happened that day, at least I’ve helped 10 people.
The new field of positive psychology concerns itself with topics such as this. I don’t have references handy, but there seems to be a fair amount of research which shows that doing charity work, or simply being nice to others, can boost your mood.
Not so much on the character. I assume you’re referring to the simplified version of huan: 欢 if it comes through. The original character was: æ¡, which (according to Wenlin) comes from guan4 雚 as a phonetic (from a picture of a heron, but not a character any more), and qian4 æ¬ “breath”, as in ha1qian4 – å“ˆæ¬ – yawn from a picture of a person with their mouth open (in the ancient version of it). So the idea that being short of breath might relate to owing makes a bit of sense.
If anything, you might want to say that breathing again -> happiness (works for me), but in etymology and ornithology the “again” probably just has something to do with the sound of the name of a bird.
But the experiment seems like a great idea.
Kevin, yes, that’s the character. Yeah, it’s a little ridiculous to think that the phonetic part of a character has something to with concepts of happiness. Thanks for the correction.