The Pursuit Of Happiness Martin Seligman Summary

Martin Seligman started with a brief history of psychology. The last half century, psychology worked inside the disease model. Some successes include: making fourteen of the disorders treatable and two are curable. In addition, the science of mental illness concepts developed and psychologists invented drug treatments to solve certain mental disorders. Unfortunately, psychology made three critical mistakes: psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologist forgetting people had freewill; psychologists forgot about making undisturbed people happier and more satisfied, and they never developed solutions to make people happier. In the last decade, psychology has focused on the more positive aspects of psychology.
In his study, Dr. Seligman identified three different happy lives. The first is the pleasant life, this is where a person tries to gain as much pleasure as possible. Unfortunately, this life is partially heritable and happiness quickly reaches diminishing returns. The second is the good life; a person in this life …show more content…
Waldinger wouldn’t be surprised by this finding; because going to the pub with friends increases your social connections. Readers of this article should be careful that they focus on not just the number of friends they meet at the bar, but if they have good quality of friends that they can spend time with outside the bar too. This article states, “That in 1951, there were 73,421 pubs in England and Wales and by 2014, the number had declined to 51,900.” With the rise of the internet many of the young people may be choosing to stay at home rather than go out to the pubs. This trend could lead the British population becoming less sociable and happy in the long run. Maybe the pubs could run an ad campaign showing the relationship building and how going to bar can build social