Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling. - Martin E P Seligman

The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more.

Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone.

Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book — that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers — demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.

historia. El aspecto privado también necesita mostrarse. La psicología positiva hace a la gente más feliz. Enseñar la psicología positiva, investigar la psicología positiva, usar la psicología positiva en la práctica como orientador o terapeuta, poner ejercicios de psicología positiva a niños de secundaria en un aula, educar a niños pequeños con base en la psicología positiva, enseñar a sargentos de adiestramiento a fomentar el crecimiento postraumático, reunirse con otros psicólogos positivos o simplemente leer sobre la psicología positiva hace a la gente más feliz. Quienes trabajan en el campo de la psicología positiva son las personas con mayor bienestar que he conocido en mi vida.

Depression, I have argued, stems partly from an overcommitment to the self and an undercommitment to the common good.