There is this great little story on the TED Radio Hour where researcher Matt Killingsworth shares about a discovery in the area of happyness. Killingsworth created a way for people to answer a few questions, track happiness and get reports. Fittingly it is called Trackyourhappiness.org.
One of the discoveries that Killingsworth made with all this data is that people are more likely to be unhappy when our minds are wandering or drifting away from what we are doing. Or put another way, if we want to be happy we need to practice being present in the moment.
Killingsworth goes on to share in the podcast that people have debated what makes us happy for generations and his research give quantifiable data to the "true" answers.
While this research is fascinating, it strikes me as another example where we value the voice of those who are living over the voice of those who have died.
Killingsworth research depends on thousands of people in real time giving feedback to their happiness level, then his team crunches the data to discover trends. Brilliant, but if you listen to billions of people of the past, you can plainly see what Killingsworth "discovered".
One of the significant drawbacks to our current addiction to the "new" and the "now" is that we discount the voice of the those who are "old" and "then". For all the great advances of the newest toys and ideas, should we be also concerned that we are putting a disproportionate amount of weight in the voices that happen to be alive right now?