John Lanchester
speaker
548 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 27 Jun
John Lanchester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And it's why you get different answers when you ask people if they're happy in different ways.
And one of them is to do with flow.
And it came out when a man called Michael Cheeksendley-Hyde did this research on
making people fill out a questionnaire every 15 minutes for their whole day.
And the points at which people reported being happiest were the points where they were most fully absorbed.
And the whole idea of study of flow comes out of that, that people really like
work and activities and engagement that just in which they're absorbed and that's a very very important component of happiness but it's very different from the other two one of which is just nothing bad having happened to you
And it's incredibly important to not just have had a broken leg, not just had a horrible medical diagnosis, not just have someone you love going through something horrible.
The single biggest component in happiness at any given moment is just not having that bad thing going on.
But it's very different from flow, which in turn is very different from contentment.
And contentment, the third thing, is the reason why
There's a slight, not dramatic, but there's a slight rise in people's reported happiness as they're richer.
It levels off, but up to a point, richer people are a bit happier.
Not dramatically happier, doubling your income
has the same effect on your happiness as doing one voluntary activity a month.
Something to do with connecting with other people at a club or socializing.
One a month is the same as doubling your income.
But in terms of that thing about looking back over your life in general, how have things worked out for you?
That's contentment and that's the thing where the affluence tracks happiness.
And maybe that's why it's hard to write about happiness because it's actually a bucket of these different things.
Showing 441–460 of 548 · page 23 of 28
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