What a difference an "ehren" makes...

There was an interesting article in the NYT about Ms. Barbara Reich, a "home organizer" who helps the wealthy get organized and draw pleasure from their expensive belongings.

This reminded me of the excellent book "Bright-Sided..." by Barbara Ehrenreich, who examines the industry of positive thinking in USA.

Barbara Reich Organizes the Homes of New York’s Elite - NYTimes.com: "Meet Barbara Reich (rhymes with quiche), home organizer to the rich if not-quite-famous; streamliner of Hermès bracelets and Birkin bags, board games and third-grade art projects; subject of awe-filled recommendations at private school fund-raisers and cocktail parties from West End Avenue to Park. For $150 an hour, Ms. Reich, 42, a former management consultant with an M.B.A., will clear out the clutter, color-code sweaters and classify all manner of storage containers with the vaunted Brother P-touch label makers that she instructs her clients to buy. She is booked three weeks in advance....

Valerie Feigen, who co-owns the Edit boutique on Lexington Avenue — “a luxury shopping experience for women of distinction and style” — has hired Ms. Reich repeatedly over the past three years. “The perfect bag or a great pair of shoes can give you so much pleasure, but it can torture you when you don’t know where to put it,” Ms. Feigen said. “When your possessions are out of control, I think it’s very hard to be organized in general about your life. You don’t want your possessions to own you.”

Barbara Ehrenreich - Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America: "So I take it as a sign of progress that, in just the last decade or so, economists have begun to show an interest in using happiness rather than just the gross national product as a measure of an economy’s success. Happiness is, of course, a slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day but then was cheered up by a bit of good news, so what am I really? In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction—but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results, “Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine—clearly not an income effect.”2"