Buying ‘Well being’ at Sainsbury’s

Re-assuring to know that (alongside crisps and snacks, beer, wines & spirits) even well being can be purchased at Sainsbury’s these days:

Or maybe this is a intended as a suggested congregating place for loony lefties, bleeding heart liberals and other well being nuts (…sorry…).

TV versus reading as self-imaginative activity. Is TV a ‘bad’ ?

So do you think that watching TV or reading is a better activity?

[being the type of blog posting where the author tries to work out his thoughts through writing things down. Apologies for the poorly structured 'argument' !]

An interesting context to this question comes from Robert Putnam’s ‘Bowling Alone’, which I’ve been reading recently. He talks about a decline of ’social capital’ in the USA since the 60s due to a decline in many ’social’ activities. He defines social capital in terms of:

• political engagement (e.g. at minimum, voting; having some knowledge of and interest in public affairs)
• civic engagement (being a member of a formal organisation whether PTA or Greenpeace)
• religious participation
• involvement in work-related organisations (e.g. unions, professional societies such as IEEE)
• informal social connections (going to the pub with friends, having people over for dinner)
• involvement in altruistic/philanthropic/voluntary work
• small group activities (e.g. reading groups), the Internet (e.g. Facebook).

There are a number of reasons why he thinks declining social capital a bad thing (he claims communities with higher social capital are amongst other things healthier, richer, safer. i.e. social capital is a ‘good’). But what is relevant here – what struck me- is that one of the major causes he attributes to a decline in people’s social activity is increased time spent watching TV. i.e., very crudely characterizing his argument, more time spent watching TV tends to correlate with less time engaged in social activities, which tends to go along with communities and societies being less healthy, less safe and less well-off. So (getting even cruder) TV is a ‘bad’.

(Interestingly in Richard Layard’s ‘Happiness: Lessons from a New Science’ book a similar TV = bad equation is made. TV being bad because it makes you less happy with your own life – you feel you and your friends/partner are less attractive with less interesting lives than you did before you watched glamorous actors doing their thang and you wish you had more money to buy the things you see depicted as necessary for the type of lifestyle you are being enculturated into believing you want).

But how does TV compare with reading? At one level, obviously, there is no direct visual or auditory element to reading. But beyond that, what are the differences?

• reading requires more effort (i.e. requires you be more active) than TV [true? so what?]
• reading time is more disrupted (you don’t tend to read a novel in one sitting) than TV (you do tend to watch a movie in one sitting) [is that a good thing or a bad thing?]
• both TV and radio stimulate imaginative and possibly identification activity (you encounter types of people, ways of being, activities that you perhaps wouldn’t in your everyday life) [so both are good things, right?]

You can encounter characters in books, just as much as in TV, that live glamorous lifestyles way beyond your means or station (Jane Austen to Clive Cussler). So we conclude – if we chuck out TV then books then have to follow: to take away one cause of us feeling bad about not being the people we’re not; to stop us feeling dissatisfied with who we are take away the energy that drives us, helps us imagine other ways of being.

I guess, of course, there is less advertising in books. But I don’t know if anyone has ever shown that watching BBC rather than commercial TV has a less deletricious effect on one’s sense of well-being. And there’s plenty of product placement in contemporary novels (e.g. Bret Easton Ellis, Perec) – though obviously this ignores the influence of TV on authors and the novels they write.

So is TV a bad?

I’m mixing things up here: TV may be a bad in terms of declining social capital and consequent effects. But this is only tangentially related to whether books might be as bad if people spent equivalent times reading them. And after all books tend to be much more solitary than TV – which is often watched with other people and discussed as a communal (or at least familial) activity.

So we’re left with: TV is much more appealing than reading (because lower effort, stimulating more senses?) and, apparently, more appealing than other types of social activity. So since TV has become available people have done much more of it and done less social activity. But possibly not less reading. The reading thing is a red herring. Putnam would, presumably, argue that instead of watching so much TV we should be doing more social activity. Not reading more books.

Early, unformed ideas – how change happens

For a while I’ve been pondering how big changes happen in society.

e.g. Govt brings in smoking ban on 1 July in England. So restaurants, pubs, clubs become smoke-free. Big change. Caused, ostensibly, by Govt introducing a new policy. There will be unintended consequences (pub gardens will prob become much more smokey as all the smokers will be outside. –> more passive smokers for non-smokers during Summer? / non-smokers stuck inside during Summer to avoid smoke?

But is this it so simply? Why did the Govt feel it could introduce such a draconian nanny-state policy? I don’t really know the background. Maybe there is EC legislation it had to enact? But I guess it only felt it could do this because it had done opinion polling to check that more votes wouldn’t be lost than would be won by doing it.

So the question becomes – how does the general public get to a point of feeling strongly enough about something (e.g. banning smoking) that the Govt then feels it can do something about it? i.e. it’s not just a matter of Govt acting – it’s about a general sense in the general population that this is right to be done. Who does the leading? Govt – the general public – other opinion formers (pressure groups, media, business… ?). Who is the lead?

I was wondering about this in terms of the well-being agenda (see my Compass article). But it’s a generally applicable problem. e.g. a Govt in the UK wouldn’t introduce a law banning killing animals for food – they would be voted out of office. But if we got to the point where most people felt it was wrong, and unnecessary to kill animals for food – then you could see the Govt would introduce the appropriate legislation. So the question is how to get enough people won around to your argument that it shows up in opinion polls to lead to policy change. Hence, I guess, campaigning organisations. FoE/ Greenpeace/ Peta etc.

But the power of business to set its agenda through its spend on marketing/ advertising is so strong this must be a huge challenge. I’m suddenly gaining a lot more respect for my friends who work in campaigning organisations.

Going public with ideas – article on well-being

When I started this blog I read that the typical pattern for blogs is for lots of enthusiastic posting at the start and then for regularity switfly to drop off. I’m certainly conforming to that pattern !

It also seems clearer to me now that Facebook is better designed for sem-public conversation of this type. That’s where everyone is already hanging out, so it’s a site lots of people check regularly, so more people hang out there to interact…. etc…. The classic network effect.

But I do like forcing myself to structure my ideas in this semi-public way which Facebook doesn’t quite promote. It makes things less flighty. You have to actually think things through a little. Tie things down. Commit yourself.

After my early postings about happiness – and having thought about Marco’s reply – I realized that this was an area that I wanted to explore more. So I wrote an article for Compass – where I’m volunteering a couple of days a week at the moment – to try and take these thoughts a little further. And also to get out of my comfort zone of just chatting about this stuff with friends. To put my ideas out there and see how flamed I got by putting them on a public forum amongst people with their own strong ideas and confidence to articulate them. If you’re interest the article is here - I’d be interested to know what you think.

Happiness is just around the corner!

I first saw this courtesy of Dan Rosenberg. It still seems apposite 10 years on…

… but most of us (?) still want more things equating this with happiness. Why is it so hard to change what seem to be such deeply engrained opinions on this?

Maybe things are starting to change – Richard Layard recently published a book examining how, beyond a certain level of income, more money doesn’t increase happiness. Oliver James has written in a similar vein. The Economist’s Christmas issue last year was all about why more wealth doesn’t lead to happiness…

But maybe we are too deeply indoctrinated into the consumer society to really heed these warnings?