How much salary do you think people feel happiness most with ? It seems to be around $75,000 statistically according to the research which was done in U.S. When I heard of this, I thought that it makes sense to me even in Japan as average value, but it depends on where you live and how old you are when it comes to know detail of breakdown, which was not described there in a reference. From my viewpoint, $75,000 would not be enough for living around Tokyo if you have a family with children. Especially housing cost is much higher in Tokyo than in other places for sure as it is same with the San Francisco bay area. I would say that $75,000 might be good enough as an average number for a man who is around 35 years old with a wife and two children in other places . As is always said, there are two aspects which make you feel whether you are living happily or not. Those are definitely personal life and work, but I have to admit that these two things are related and affect each other actually. If you feel stress in an office or if you make mistakes, it definitely affects your personal life. Vice versa, practically. Depending on people who especially think negatively, once something negative happens either personal life or work, negative feedback loop also happens and people feel stuck. On the other hand, people who always think positively don't enter the loop. Amazingly such people don't take negative as negative rather positive. I have watched a documentary video about happiness in Netflix before, although I forget the title name. The documentary focus on what's keys for people who say that they are happy, how happiness affects human life and finally try to understand how people living longer think. The summary of the document which I understood are three points.
Try to eat healthily
Try to think happily
Try to think positively
These look simple and obvious, but it's not easy to make these habits. Making them habits is very important point. Regarding work, there are different perspectives with which people feel happy, depending on people. If there are 100 people, there might be 100 ways of thinking. I personally have three things of which I feel happy.
Autonomy
Purpose
Progress
I feel happy when I do work autonomously with having purposes and feel progress as a result.
Psychologically, there are 5 hierarchical of a pyramid to define human need. It says that human satisfaction has 5 levels in our daily life and it gets difficult to satisfy yourself from bottom to top. First level is basically what people need to live at least. Level 2 is also what people need to live normally. Level 3 is relationship satisfaction. Level 4 is esteem like how you are regarded and respected. Level 5 is top one and what successful people need to satisfy themselves. You can associate personal life and work life with those levels.
I would say that I'm in the middle of level 4. From my expectation for myself, I'm not happy about that, but I have to take this positively.
This is a story which I have experienced one month ago in a bus. It was the early February and was very cold evening around 8pm. I just came back to a station to which I live close, from the dinner with my wife in Roppongi, and we decided t use buy to go home because it was very cold, even though we usually walk for 20min to my apartment as an exercise. When we got on the bus, there were not so many peoples in the bus and the bus closed the door and left the started the bus station. Just after the bus moved, I heard yell from the front place in the bus but did not know who yelled. It was not a word but yell just like animals. Soon after that, I noticed that a girl sitting just behind the driver seat showed something wrong at first and her body was getting cramp from her head to her foot. I immediately felt that I needed to help her and unconsciously came to her and supported her boy and asked the driver to stop the bus immediately and to do emergency call. She actually frothed at the mouth when I saw her face. I'm actually used to emergency situation from many experience, but the driver was a little bit panicked unfortunately, but he managed to be able to call for an ambulance. Fortunatelly, there is a hospital close to the station, so it just took about 10 min to come. While we were waiting the ambulance to come, I thought that we had to contact her family to tell her condition and know what to do just in case that this was chronic situation for her. When I opened her wallet, I soon recognized that this was unfortunately chronic because she had a card which tells an emergency contact phone number of her mother in the case that she has something wrong. In order to contact her mother, I found her cell phone and checked the history, and found her mother number easily because she just called her mother just 30 min before. I was supporting her body,s so I asked my wife to call to her mother. When my wife called, her mother soon answered and told my wife that she has family doctor just exactly at the hospital which is close to the station and her mother would go there soon. When the ambulance arrived, she had already stopped cramp, but she still looked like unconscious but looked fine at the same time. At that time, I did not know what she suffered from, but it might be epilepsy by comparing her condition and what I checked in the internet. What was the saddest thing after that is that her mother tone was as if she was sick of her daughter's condition according to my wife. This world is not fair from the time when we are born as it is recognized by many peoples. I was born healthy, but she was born with a health problem. She has to live with it forever. Because of that, her activity would be limited to fear that the cramp happens. I personally admit that our life is determined to some extent by the condition with which we are born. If you are born in poor family, there is a less chance that you would be able to get a good education. I'm still wondering who helped her if I had not been there. At least nobody tried to help me support her in the bus. How unfair this world is.
I lived in San Jose in California before and I thought that it is great weather there, but it is so as well in San Diego. I had a colleague who used to go to San Diego every weekend and said that San Diego is the best place for living. Now I understand it a little bit.
I had been to the San Diego airport, but it was just transit. I went to San Diego finally last month by business trip for two days, but I felt that the weather was great more than I feel usually because I stayed at San Francisco before going to San Diego and it rained and it was cold. This was business trip so I did not have much time to enjoy San Diego, but I had a chance to go out for lunch for almost two hours and enjoyed a good lunch at a restaurant close to a beach. I thought that if I got used to this weather, I would not be able to live in Tokyo in terms of weather. However, I saw a dark side a little bit when I came back to a hotel. It was just before the sun set and was not dark yet. When I got out of a rent car and waiting for my colleagues to do something, I felt someones get close to me. A woman and a small child came to me and I soon realized that they were homeless and would ask me money. My thought was true and she said something that she needs money indirectly, but I said that I can not help you and didn't give money. I'm not sure what's right or wrong regarding this, but I'm still wondering if I should have given money to her because she looked so desperate and sad when I said so unlike homeless peoples in San Francisco who are very aggressive to get money. If I came back to the time when I said so, I would call her when she showed her back to me and was about to go somewhere ,and give her some money.
Have you ever seen a hole like this before ? I had never seen this until I saw this on the screen of Bing.
Bing is a search engine of Microsoft (probably), and is naturally the default search engine of the Internet Exploer. I'm using Chrome at home and Firefox at the office, but open IE once a day for work to fill in what time I come to and leave the office every day with an internal web page. This kind of internal pages usually works only with IE. My IE setting is default setting and don't feel like customizing it, so I see the screen of Bing every day when I do daily work for that. I, however, like one feature of Bing more than any other search engine. My favorite feature is that Bing shows us a daily picture with some explanation, and this picture is usually amazing picture which I have never seen until I see it on the screen of Bing. I found the most interesting picture on the daily screen last week, that is the picture shown above. This seems like a hole in dam to adjust the amount of water because water is usually adjusted by opening and closing the gate of dam. I'm not sure why this image intrigues me, but it might be because this look like mysterious hole which never exists naturally and I would never be able to come out once I fall. I found the video of the hole below. It's worth watching how it works.
Did you watch this ? It's super scary for me just by imaging falling into this hole ... Picture link
