Experiments in Gift-Giving
Kathleen Hillers posted this on a website called The Intention Experiment:
I just read a book called 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker. The author of the book has ms and was seeking natural healing. She was told by a “wise woman” from South Africa that if she gave a gift everyday for the next 29 days that it would have a healing effect in more ways than one. It’s a great book, but if you don’t want to read it, start giving a gift everyday and make a journal of every gift you give and the circumstances involved. If you miss a day, you have to start over because you have to keep the flow of giving constant. The gifts do not have to be materialistic. You can give some one a phone call, a ride, encouragement, whatever. I just started doing this on Feb 1st and my life is already getting better. The day before I started, I was in a panic. I couldn’t sleep, and I was completely broke . The day I started, i actually started feeling much better, and things are already looking up.
Regression to the mean, maybe. But maybe not. The idea has some plausibility: The Chinese character that means “happy” is a combination of a character that means “owe” and a character that means “again”.
February 7th, 2010 at 2:05 am
Are you sure about the character? Could you please write it here?
February 7th, 2010 at 5:14 am
I think it was Marcus Aurelius in Meditations who talked about how the Stoics considered gifts to be curses because they believed Fate/Fortuna would eventually take it away, leaving the giftee unhappier than before having received the gift.
February 7th, 2010 at 7:13 am
The word “generosity” comes from the Latin word meaning “of noble birth”. I suppose the idea is that “well born” people are more giving than “low born” people, but then it’s easier to give resources away if you have a monopoly on them to begin with. Then there’s a Veblen aspect…people may give stuff away to prove that they have so much extra money that can afford to give the gifts.
February 7th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Even better if the gifts are free or otherwise un-purchased!
I practice random acts of kindness, with a goal of helping at least 10 people a day (and at least 1 person I don’t know). I find this helps my mood toward the end of the day, when it is most likely to fall - no matter what else has happened that day, at least I’ve helped 10 people.
February 7th, 2010 at 8:52 am
The new field of positive psychology concerns itself with topics such as this. I don’t have references handy, but there seems to be a fair amount of research which shows that doing charity work, or simply being nice to others, can boost your mood.
February 7th, 2010 at 8:59 am
Not so much on the character. I assume you’re referring to the simplified version of huan: 欢 if it comes through. The original character was: 歡, which (according to Wenlin) comes from guan4 雚 as a phonetic (from a picture of a heron, but not a character any more), and qian4 欠 “breath”, as in ha1qian4 - 哈欠 - yawn from a picture of a person with their mouth open (in the ancient version of it). So the idea that being short of breath might relate to owing makes a bit of sense.
If anything, you might want to say that breathing again -> happiness (works for me), but in etymology and ornithology the “again” probably just has something to do with the sound of the name of a bird.
But the experiment seems like a great idea.
February 7th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Kevin, yes, that’s the character. Yeah, it’s a little ridiculous to think that the phonetic part of a character has something to with concepts of happiness. Thanks for the correction.