“Harlem summer day” – photographer Leonard Freed captures the meaning of life
happiness
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Legendary psychologist Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, one of the 11 best psychology and philosophy books of 2011, on why moving to California won’t make you any happier
“Despite our global beliefs about lousy Mondays, we conclude that this belief should, in general, be abandoned,” the researchers said.
Scientists debunk the myth that Mondays are the downer of the week, which, like much of pop culture mythology, was originated by the ad industry.
You can do anything – but not everything.
David Allen, author of the modern classic Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
Is there a biological advantage to being awestruck? Jason Silva synthesizes recent research and opinion.
When fishing for happiness, catch and release.
The Happiness of Pursuit – a fascinating read on what science and philosophy can teach us about the holy grail of existence.
Every life has great meaning, but the meaning of our own can often be obscured by the fog of constant activity and plain bad habits…. Doing less leads to more love, more effectiveness and internal calmness, and a greater ability to accomplish more of what matters most — to us, and by extension to others in the world.
Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less by Marc Lesser (really)
Depression is a disorder of the ‘I,’ failing in your own eyes relative to your goals. In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.
Martin Seligman on “learned optimism,” happiness, depression, and the meaningful life
I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.
Nora Ephron on the joy of being awake to the word, and other timeless words from the beloved filmmaker, novelist, journalist, playwright, essayist, and blogger
My Wheel of Worry – Andrew Kuo visualizes the things in his life that concern him and his specific feelings about each. On the graph’s innermost ring Kuo shows what causes him anxiety in the moments before sleep (loneliness, death, money, bedbugs, and the new York Knicks); in the middle ring he charts his very specific reactions to his credit card statement; on the outermost ring, what he thinks about as he scratches a lottery ticket. In this chart and others, Kuo brings the graphic language of scientific fact to the irrational emotions associated with everyday life.
From Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects
In a relationship, one mind revises the other; one heart changes its partner. This astounding legacy of our combined status as mammals and neural beings is limbic revision: the power to remodel the emotional parts of the people we love…
Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.
[Research] points to an alternative approach [to happiness]: a ‘negative path’ to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.
Oliver Burkeman on why the key to happiness might be forgetting positive thinking and succumbing, instead, to pessimism… sort of.
One key to aging well might involve learning to let go of regrets about missed opportunities.
German researchers develop a new measure for a life lived well. Need help? See Kathryn Schulz on how to make peace with regret.
The crux of the question is what is it that we wish to achieve? Measures like Gross National Product (GNP) claim to answer this. We’re expected to be happy when it grows, and worried when it falls. But GNP is actually a very strange measure of anything. It only counts the velocity of the flow of money and stuff through the economy as they change hands in economic transactions. The more money that gets spent, conventional wisdom says, the better off we are.
But are we? If you volunteer at a home for the elderly, you’ve done nothing to increase the GNP. A divorcing cancer patient who gets in a car wreck adds handsomely to the GNP as money goes for insurance, repairs, and medical bills. But is she any better off? Clearly not.
Reframing The Global Economy To Include Happiness – on the effort to shift our measure of social well-being.
Companion read: The Happiness of Pursuit.
