The 10 Most Important Findings From Happiness Research in the Last 20 Years A span of 20 years is short in the life of a science and long in the life of a field still working out what it is for. In 2005, the Gallup World Poll began asking ordinary people in dozens of countries a deceptively simple question — how is your life going? — and the...
The Easterlin Paradox: Why Getting Richer Doesn’t Make Countries Happier In 1974, an economist named Richard Easterlin sat down with a stack of survey data that, on its face, should have told a simple story. Wealthier people, within any given country, reported being happier than poorer people. That part fit every intuition anyone had ever had about money. But when Easterlin looked across countries, and across time within...
From Freud to Flourishing: How Psychology Finally Learned to Study Happiness In August 1998, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman told a room full of clinicians something uncomfortable: for the previous half-century, psychology had gotten very good at understanding what was wrong with people and had almost nothing systematic to say about what was right with them. It was, by any measure, a...
Why “Choose Happiness” Is the Worst Advice You Will Ever Receive A colleague once told me about the worst week of her career — a layoff round she survived by accident, her best friend on the list, her manager gone by lunchtime. Someone in HR, meaning well, sent a company-wide email urging everyone to “stay positive” and “choose happiness” during the transition. She said she read it twice,...
What Is the Difference Between Happiness and Wellbeing? A friend of mine finished a punishing month recently — a work deadline that ate her weekends, a parent’s surgery she flew home for twice, a project that finally, improbably, worked. When I asked how she was doing, she paused longer than the question warranted. “Not happy, exactly,” she said. “But I think I’m doing well.” It took me a...
Is the Science of Happiness Really a Science or a Philosophy? A student once put the challenge bluntly in the first week of a happiness course: you can philosophise about the good life all you like, but the moment you start measuring it, running experiments, and publishing findings that can be replicated or refuted, you have left philosophy behind. You are doing science. Everything after that is a...
The Science of Happiness: 12 Habits That Make You Happy Somewhere in the last few decades, a quiet but significant shift took place in psychology. For most of the twentieth century, researchers studying the human mind were almost exclusively concerned with what goes wrong — depression, anxiety, trauma, disorder. Then, beginning in the late 1990s, a small group of psychologists began asking a different question: not what makes...
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...
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