Blogs

Is Happiness a Science or a Philosophy? The question arrives, reliably, in the first week of any happiness course. A student — usually one with a background in either the hard sciences or the humanities, rarely both — raises their hand and asks it with a mixture of genuine curiosity and mild scepticism: is this actually a science? Can you really study happiness in a laboratory? Can you...

What Is the Science of Happiness, Really? People have been asking what happiness is for as long as there have been people. The ancient Greeks debated it in marble colonnades. The Vedic sages explored it in forest retreats. Medieval philosophers argued about it in candlelit manuscripts. Poets, mystics, monarchs, and monks have all taken their turn at the question — and most of them arrived at answers that...

The 5-Minute Science of Happiness Audit You Can Do Right Now Most of us spend considerable energy thinking about whether our work is going well, whether our finances are on track, whether our physical health deserves attention. We have annual performance reviews, quarterly financial check-ins, routine medical examinations. We have developed, over the course of modern life, a fairly sophisticated infrastructure for monitoring the external conditions of our...