What part does altruism play in happiness?
I think that altruism is a very essential only to happiness because it almost works in life stages. The first stage is about learning to love your self. The second stage is learning to love another and the third stage is learning to love the world. So if you look at it developmentally and you recognized that altruism means that you're at a place where you can give back, you must have something within you in order to do that. So giving oneself up is very self fulfilling because it allows you to feel like you have achieved something in order to be able to give. It is an interesting process of joy that comes from benefiting another that simultaneously gives you great feeling. If you think about Eriksson's stages of development, they move through from the very beginning stages like trust versus mistrust and autonomy versus shame when you are little; and then you move through adolescence and there are a couple of other ones of identity and versus world diffusion as an adolescent. Then once you get to adulthood, the first one is intimacy versus isolation then it moves into generativity versus stagnation which is when you are really working on giving back and giving to others. So when you are generative through your work or through altruism, it then allows you to reach the final development of challenge which is the integrity versus despair. So integrity has a great deal of happiness in campus within and despair of course, it does not. So those factors and those element if you keep making those choices along the way, it allow you to continue to grow, give yourself, give to others, you are expanding into maturity and wisdom of all ages instead of feeling like you are shrinking and constructing and limiting yourself as you start to come all through.
