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...
We Are Trying to Solve Poverty and World Hunger. Why Haven’t We Made Any Effort to Solve Unhappiness? In September 2015, the 193 member states of the United Nations adopted the most ambitious collective agreement in the history of international development. The Sustainable Development Goals — seventeen targets to be achieved by 2030 — committed the world’s governments to ending extreme poverty, eliminating hunger, ensuring universal access to...
The Most Misunderstood Word in Psychology: What ‘Resilience’ Actually Means Somewhere along the way, resilience became a personality trait that certain people have and others, through some combination of weakness and insufficient effort, do not. It became something you either possess — the grit, the bounce-back, the refusal to stay down — or something you are quietly told to develop, as though the prescription itself were the treatment....
The Problem With Mindfulness Apps: What They Get Right, What They Miss, and What Actually Works Somewhere between the third and fourth minute of a guided breathing exercise on a popular wellness app, delivered in the kind of voice that suggests a person who has never experienced an urgent email, a thought tends to arrive: is this actually doing anything? It is a reasonable question. The mindfulness app...
What 85 Years of Harvard Research Revealed About the One Thing That Makes Life Worth Living In 1938, a group of researchers at Harvard University began following 268 male undergraduate students. They measured their bodies, interviewed their families, analysed their handwriting, and catalogued their personality traits. Then they waited. They tracked these men through the Second World War, through the building of careers and the raising of families,...
Why the Most Important Subject at University Has No Textbook Yet Every university in the world teaches students how to think about something. The economist learns to think about markets. The engineer learns to think about systems. The physician learns to think about the body. The philosopher learns to think about arguments. These are not trivial accomplishments. They represent centuries of accumulated insight, encoded into curricula, tested through...
From Burnout to Belonging: What Indian Students Actually Need From Their Universities There is a particular silence that falls over an examination hall in India that you do not encounter in quite the same way anywhere else in the world. It is not merely the silence of concentration. It is the silence of something larger and heavier — the accumulated weight of family expectation, of years of preparation,...
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