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Study: Happiness Won't Extend Your Life After All (latimes.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the escaping-the-unbearable-scream-that-is-silence dept.

schwit1 writes with good news for fans of living a long and ultimately unfulfilling life. Happy people live longer, a relationship that's been documented in a variety of research studies. But a new paper published in the medical journal Lancet comes to the sad conclusion that happiness isn't responsible for this observed longevity. Instead, the things that make people happy, particularly their good health, are the same things that shield them from premature death. "Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality," the study authors wrote.

4 of 108 comments (clear)

  1. Well this makes me sad by surfdaddy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hoping I'll live a long and unhappy life.

  2. But unhappiness. . . by Idou · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will certainly make it seem like your life is longer. . .

    --
    Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
  3. OK world: once and for all.. by rodia · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Two things A and B occurring together can have one of these reasons:

    1) A is a direct or indirect, exclsive or non-exclusive cause for B.
    2) same as 1) with A and B interchanged. I possibly just lost the media croud, but anyway..
    3) A and B have a common, direct or indirect, exclusive or non-exclusive, cause C (as in this story).
    4) It's just coincidence.

    Without further evidence, we just don't know which one it is; and you just jumping to conclusions because you feel like it and then being proven wrong is NOT news.

  4. Re:So once again (and again and again)... by aaaaaaargh! · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yes, but if there is no positive or negative correlation then there is also no causation, and that's what this article is about.