Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design by Charles Montgomery Read Free Book Online

always respond logically to environmental stimulus. Living near garbage dumps seems to make people much less happy than living near toxic waste sites, presumably because they can smell the dump but not the toxic threat. The devil you know is harder on happiness than the devil you don’t, at least in the short term.
    Self-reported happiness correlates with a lot of things that money cannot buy. Leisure time and shorter commutes are good. So is good health (although feeling healthy is more important than actually being healthy, and that feeling may have more to do with the quality of your friendships than with your medical plan). Believing in some kind of God helps. But so does just showing up at a church or temple—whether you believe or not—and so does participation in volunteer groups that have nothing to do with religion. The environment we live in really does matter. Public health officers working with the London borough of Greenwich compared conditions in council housing estates (subsidized housing) with all kinds of environmental factors, and they found, not surprisingly, that mold in apartments dragged people’s happiness down much more than, say, street conditions or dog poop on the sidewalks.
    But Carol Ryff, a developmental psychologist who collaborated with Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, argues that such lists still don’t get us close enough to a definition of the good life that Aristotle would endorse. Indeed, she bristles at the mere mention of the word happiness .
    “Aristotle offered us the image of a cow in the field, contentedly chewing its cud. He was absolutely clear that this is not what eudaimonia is about! It’s about getting up every day and working very hard toward goals that make your life meaningful, sometimes in ways that are not at all conducive to short-term contentment,” Ryff told me. “In fact, it may not be about contentment at all. It’s about the realization of talent and potential, and the feeling that you are able to make the most of your abilities in life.”
    Ryff came to this conclusion after conducting a unique experiment to test her point. First she created a checklist that included measures of well-being from the most respected psychologists of the last century. Her all-star eudaimonia checklist is worth listing. It includes:
    • Self-acceptance, or how well you know and regard yourself
    • Environmental mastery—your ability to navigate and thrive in the world
    • Positive relations with others
    • Personal growth throughout life
    • Sense of meaning and purpose
    • Feelings of autonomy and independence
    That list might seem as if it were ripped from a daytime talk show, but Ryff found physiological evidence for its power. She surveyed a group of women between sixty and ninety years old who rated themselves on each element of psychological well-being, then checked those results against their health. Women with high scores for Ryff’s markers of psychological well-being were much healthier than those with low scores. They had better resistance to arthritis and diabetes. They had less cortisol in their saliva, which meant not only that they were less stressed out, but that they were at lower risk for cardiovascular and other diseases. They slept longer and more deeply.
    Psychologists have long connected feelings of happiness to good health. But Ryff’s study demonstrated the synergistic power of living a meaningful, challenging, and connected life—exactly the kind that the Greeks championed and built in Athens. A bit of heroic struggle can be good for you.
    Ryff calls this ideal state “challenged thriving.” It’s one reason why some people chase their dreams amid the grit, noise, chaos, and expense of big cities such as New York, when they could have enjoyed a bigger home, more leisure time, and shorter work hours back home in Akron. It’s why, after a few days of soaking up the saltwater vistas and mild air at her place on Orcas Island in