David Brooks, the conservative at the New York Times has a column out today about happiness.
Does money buy happiness….not really.
So his solution?
The overall impression from this research is that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.
The second impression is that most of us pay attention to the wrong things. Most people vastly overestimate the extent to which more money would improve our lives. Most schools and colleges spend too much time preparing students for careers and not enough preparing them to make social decisions.
Yes, lets let schools and colleges who don’t exactly prepare students for careers either, teach us about interpersonal relationships.
I’m an old crab, but it seems to me that an institution of higher learning who’s job it is, is to teach higher learning should stick with it, vs branching out into relationships. That’s what parents, marriage encounters, therapists, friends and your local bar are for….isn’t it?
Or maybe, while we add the calorie counts onto menus, we can also require that supermarkets get out of the ‘check your own self out’ so that we are forced to interact with people no matter what.
Brooks and Kathleen Parker walk around with their nose in the air not wanting to talk with commoners. They drink their chai tea and latte’s, drive their reduced emmisions cars, and cluck incessently about how stupid Sarah Palin is. I bet no one in their immediate familes has ever worn a uniform, driven a tractor, or worked in a factory.
“elites” <> (sound)