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...
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....
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