A Happiness Expert’s Frank Advice for Joe Biden

The insatiable goals to acquire more, succeed conspicuously, and be as attractive as possible lead us to objectify one another, and even ourselves. When people see themselves as little more than their attractive bodies, jobs, or bank accounts, it brings great suffering…You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more

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But having an enviable career is one thing, and being a happy person is another.

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is o... See more

This same situation can occur for a man who has worked his whole life in a specific career and has defined himself by that career— he sees himself as a lawyer, doctor, or plumber, etc. When he retires from his career, he first has a sense of joy and release, but then the identity crisis starts, and he starts having difficulty with his sense of wort

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Because here’s the deal — if we “hustled” and climbed that big mountain and “crushed” all of our goals and made our big awesome vision board a reality, and we still found ourselves feeling trapped, drained, isolated, bored, or stressed out, we’d have to wonder… “What the hell is this shit? What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I be happy?” As we’ve discu

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The decline problem is a double whammy, then: we need ever-greater success to avoid dissatisfaction, yet our abilities to stay even are declining. No, it’s actually a triple whammy, because as we try to stay even, we wind up in patterns of addictive behavior such as workaholism, which puts strivers into unhealthy relationship patterns at the cost o

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