Top Happiness Promoter, George Ortega, Proclaims Global Age of Happiness

A top happiness researcher and promoter has made the bold proclamation that scientific research into happiness over the last fifty years is leading our world into a new “Age of Happiness.”

White Plains, NY (PRWEB) March 14, 2006 -- George Ortega, a top happiness researcher and producer of the world’s first television program entirely about happiness, has made the bold prediction that our world is rapidly advancing toward a new Age of Happiness. According to Ortega, “with our current knowledge of happiness, we can raise our global happiness level by at least twenty-five percent over the coming decade.” Following are excerpts from his treatise, which is available in full through the website of his regional cable and internet television program, The Happiness Show:

Happiness is the highest goal of every human being, and the ultimate destination of humankind. After a 2.3 million year struggle with nature, the human race is ushering in what can be confidently described as an Age of Happiness. Over the last fifty years, humanity has amassed a body of scientific knowledge about happiness that our world appears poised to now use to easily and inexpensively elevate our global happiness from its current level of under 65 percent to a much happier 85 percent or higher during the coming years.

In the mid 70’s, Michael Fordyce, a professor at a small community college in Fort Myers, Florida, concluded that the science of happiness had collected enough consistent data to justify a giant leap forward. Predicting that individuals could be taught to become much happier though classroom instruction based on happiness research findings, Fordyce conducted the world’s first happiness-increase experiment. His "Development of a program to increase personal happiness," published in 1977 in The Journal of Counseling Psychology, demonstrated conclusively that by receiving a few weeks of instruction, individuals become much happier.

In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, founded the now dominant field of “Positive Psychology,” reviving and emphasizing a long dormant recognition going back to the A.P.A.’s first president, Raymond Dodge, that "happiness is an important, if not the most important, aim of human endeavor." More recently, a new generation of researchers led by Sonja Lyubomirsky has emerged to advance the happiness-increase interventions that Fordyce pioneered.

Recognizing that this renaissance in happiness research was destined to create a wide consumer demand for greater happiness, from 2003-05, Seligman trained about 1,000 individuals to market one-to-one happiness coaching. Also in 2003, confident that happiness awareness and implementations should extend to all sectors of society, the author of this treatise created the world’s first television program entirely about happiness; The Happiness Show. To disseminate happiness information as widely as possible, he recently made over130 half-hour episodes available for free digital download and broadcast by public access and college cable television stations anywhere in the world.

Highlighting and expanding the public’s new interest in happiness, on January 17, 2005, Time magazine published a cover story on “The New Science of Happiness” that spanned sixty-four pages and became the magazine’s most requested back issue. In a world dominated by an insatiable quest for wealth, the preeminent role of happiness in our lives is also being forcefully promoted by top economists and business leaders.

In 2005, Richard Layard, founder of Europe’s leading economic institution, The London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance, published a book titled Happiness that strongly advocates a shift in our global mindset from economics and materialism to the happiness at the heart of our desires. Here we are in 2006, and happiness seems to have reached the critical mass that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book, The Tipping Point, as presaging major changes to our personal and societal landscapes.

Major documentaries that are expected to greatly amplify consumer demand for happiness will premiere as early as this year. Joel McEwen’s docu-comedy, “In Pursuit of Happiness,” narrated by Danny Glover and featuring political activists Michael Moore and Howard Zinn, pokes fun at our inefficient and ineffective efforts to buy happiness through our ever-growing consumerism. Gothem Metro Studios’ recently completed docu-drama, “The Serious Business of Happiness,” is a more philosophical work bound to stir controversy by advancing ideas about happiness that are contradicted by scientific findings.

An Age of Human Happiness is being born as people all over the world experience the revelation that behind all we strive for, such as money, success, prestige, knowledge, security and health, lies the singular goal of greater happiness. Happiness is also being increasingly recognized as more than the underlying goal of every product we buy, but a product in its own right. The business community is gearing up to meet a new consumer market for happiness through scientifically validated training. As businesses begin to advertise their new product through television commercials, infomercials and other venues, consumer demand for greater happiness through direct training should skyrocket.

Ideas have their time, and the time for a global Age of Happiness appears to have at long last arrived.

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