The 7 Biggest Myths About Happiness That Science Has Debunked Human beings are extraordinarily confident about what will make them happy. They pursue particular careers, relationships, income levels, and life milestones with the conviction that attaining these things will produce the sustained positive affect they are looking for. They make sacrifices — of time, health, relationships, present experience — in the service of future states they believe will...
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...
The Science of Happiness: A Timeline From Aristotle to AI The question has never changed. Only the methods have. For as long as human beings have been capable of asking what kind of life is worth living, they have been asking it. The ancient Greeks debated it in the agora. The Vedic sages explored it in the forests of the Gangetic plain. Medieval philosophers argued about it by...
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...
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