• community
• happiness

I've been thinking about "community" a lot lately, mostly due to the dissertation chapter I've been working on. And this story reminded me that you don't always get to choose your community...or your mood:

“Your happiness depends not just on your choices and actions, but also on the choices and actions of people you don’t even know who are one, two and three degrees removed from you,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the study, to be published Friday in BMJ, a British journal.

Am I responsible for those that are "three degrees removed"? Am I responsible for their actions? Clearly, according to this study, I am (in DDD's words) response-able to them. I am exposed to them. This can mean terror and (according to the above study) happiness. You don't get one without the other.

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