The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Media

All about mass media

  • The media – a collective bad dream?

    One of the sessions here at the Practice of Peace conference was about the media, and after the session, I grabbed one of the participants, Doug who is a psychotherapist, and asked him a little about his views. Specifically, I wonder why negative news have a much stronger pull on us than positive news, since that goes a long way towards explaining why the media mostly carry bad news.

    He offered two insights:
    1. The media are a collective bad dream, that we need to wake up from.

    2. The media reflect whatever we repress, because what we repress is what we seek out, and what has the greatest psychological energy for us. So, if we as a culture repress our negative side, then that aspect of the world attracts us the most, and the media pick up on that. The solution therefore, is not to change the media, but to change our own perception of the world, to be more in tune with our own negative sides.

    Again, change starts with us.

  • Me on TV

    Just before I went on vacation I was interviewed on national TV on the “Good Morning Denmark” show. The topic was how to be happy at work when you return from vacation. It went very well, and you can see the entire interview here. It’s in danish, of course.

  • In the media

    My main project (happiness at work) has come to the attention of the media. It’s actually a little too soon for my taste, I’d have liked to have more results before we “go public” but hey, it’s nice that people are interested.

    Yesterday we were mentioned in Denmarks largest newspaper, in an article about how best to start work after a vacation. This is what I wrote about in an earlier post.

    And today I was live on national TV (on Good morning Denmark), being interviewed by Michael Meyerheim. I’ll try to convert it to a digital format and post it on the site.
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  • YES: I’m in Fast Company

    I was visiting my new friend Nicolai when I glanced through his July issue of Fast Company, and whaddayaknow: I’m in it! Fast Company is an extremely cool magazine. Okay, they’ve been marked by the dismal economic trends too, and their cool factor is slipping slightly, but they’re still light years in front of any other business magazine I know.

    And I’m in the july issue! Well… it’s only a letter to the magazine, but still. I wrote a comment to an article that says that we need to reconstruct business to be less vulnerable to terrorist attacks. I argue, that it’s probably better to meet your enemies with understanding and empathy than with duct tape. So now that I’ve been in the mag, I have to choose a new ambition… hmmm… Oh yeah: To get on the cover of Fast Company.

    And in a totally unrelated but equally ego-flattering development, I’m now a top1000 reviewer at Amazon; I’m actually number 599, set to break into the top500 soon. Check out some of my reviews here, here and here. You know Amazon have a good thing going, when this actually means something to me. Now: Are they very clever, or am I just a pushover?

  • Life without TV, month 3

    My name is Alexander, and I’m a TV-addict. Not a hard-core addict, I just have very little will power when it comes to resisting TV.

    If I have a TV, I’ll typically watch 2-3 hours a day on weekdays and more in the weekends. The amount of time I spend in front of the TV is totally unrelated to the quality of the programs. If I can’t find one good program, I’ll zap between 5 bad ones.

    The solution is simple: Loose the TV, and so we did. On january 2nd, my girlfriend and I packed away our TV, and it’s been sitting in the basement ever since. What follows is a report from our lives after two months without a TV.
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  • Robinson and ads

    You know guilty pleasures, right? How about guilty suffering? It’s not that you really like it, you just can’t resist it..?

    That’s how I feel about the Robinson TV-show (“Survivor” in the US). But the shows undeniable entertainment value aside, one question keeps popping up.
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