Blogs

What the Science of Happiness Says About Money, Success, and the Things We Actually Chase There is a particular kind of conversation that happens in the margins of ambitious lives — in the taxi on the way back from a late meeting, in the quiet after the celebration has ended, in the spare moment between one goal achieved and the next one identified. It is not a conversation...

A Beginner’s Guide to the Science of Happiness: Where to Start, What to Read, What to Do Most people arrive at the Science of Happiness the same way: through a moment of honest reckoning. Perhaps it is a Sunday afternoon that should feel satisfying but somehow doesn’t. Perhaps it is the realisation, somewhere in the middle of a busy and apparently successful life, that the happiness that was...

If Happiness Is a Science, Why Are We Still So Bad at It? There is something quietly absurd about the current moment in human history. We have mapped the human genome. We have sent telescopes to the edge of the observable universe. We have built artificial intelligence systems that can pass medical licensing examinations, write legal briefs, and compose music in the style of composers dead for three...

How Is the Science of Happiness Taught in Universities? In the spring of 2018, Yale University’s course registration system briefly crashed. The cause was not a technical glitch. It was approximately 1,200 undergraduate students attempting to enrol simultaneously in a single course — “Psychology and the Good Life,” taught by Laurie Santos, a cognitive scientist who had spent her career studying decision-making and comparative psychology. The course, which...

The Indian Science of Happiness: What Vedanta, Yoga, and Modern Research Agree On When Martin Seligman stood before the American Psychological Association in 1998 and declared that psychology needed a science of human flourishing — a systematic, rigorous investigation of what allows human beings to thrive — he was proposing something that felt, to many of his colleagues, genuinely new. A reorientation of an entire discipline. A bold...

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...