Are you really happy?

If you haven't visited Ted.com yet, you should do so immediately. A majority of the interesting innovations, groundbreaking theories and curious tidbits I've gathered over the last year have come from sitting in front of the computer and watching some of the best thinkers and do-ers in the world lecture on their projects and observations.
One of the best lectures I recently saw was Martin Seligman talking about happiness. He's definitely experienced enough to talk about the subject, having founded the field of positive psychology. After realizing that the human experience consists of more than suicide and depression, Dr. Seligman came to the conclusion that just helping people overcome negative mindsets might make them less unhappy but did not necessarily make them happy. This launched him on a campaign to understand healthy states of mind, of which happiness is obviously at the top of the list.
The real interesting, but relatively unsurprising finding that he came to is that real, lasting happiness has much less to do with filling your life with material goods than finding meaning and entrenching yourself in a positive social network. Very social people are very happy people and people that have meaning and purpose in their lives are happy people too. It's kind of sad that research needed to be done to realize what should be commonsense, but for a society that places a premium on scientific investigation it's good to know that empirical evidence backs up what anyone could have learned by watching a marathon of celebrity meltdowns on Behind The Music or E! True Hollywood Stories - money can make you happy at first, but more and more and more money doesn't make you more and more and more happy. In fact, it often seems to confuse us that more money doesn't equal more happiness and sadly it usually takes sliding into drug addiction or bankruptcy for the nouveau riche to figure that out.
Dr. Seligman has tried to apply the rigor of scientific testing to the study of happiness as much as possible and some of those tests are available online for your enjoyment and their research. While studying happiness this way can't hurt, I came away unconvinced that it could be very effective. Only time will tell I guess. If you are curious whether or not you are happy, take a couple minutes to check out the website for his positive psychology center at the University of Pennsylvania- Authentic Happiness. It's amusing at the least.