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...
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...
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...
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