People’s most pressing worries include financial anxiety, health concerns, job insecurity, and having to do tiring and boring chores, and money can help to relieve these problems.

Because we often want to deny the importance of possessions, and because we don’t want to seem materialistic, we often don’t spend enough time and attention thinking about how possessions could boost happiness—or

I understood the demands of those dusty cardboard boxes. Even though they sat neglected and unwanted, somehow they held pieces of—himself? the past?—that couldn’t be discarded recklessly.

that passage from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton’s The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Some of our respondents were upset by our questions about special objects and told us that they were not materialists, and things mean nothing to them. It is people, not objects that count. . . . This rejection of the symboli

a true home must suit the people who live there, by incorporating the elements important to them.

Every time I walked by the shelf where we kept the handmade books my daughters made in nursery school, all swollen with glued bits of macaroni and cotton balls, I thought tenderly of those days. Standing on our kitchen counter were the three wooden models for factory gears that my mother bought us when we moved. Despite their industrial origins, th

My study of happiness taught me that, perhaps surprisingly, I tend to learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sweeping philosophies or wide-ranging research.

Finally, I’d realized that our apartment didn’t have to reveal any deep truths. I expressed myself in other ways; it was enough that my apartment was a pleasant, comfortable place to live (and had miles of bookshelves).

Neighborhood Embrace Here Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful. —Gertrude Stein, Paris France ˜ Be a tourist without leaving home ˜ Practice nonrandom acts of kindness ˜ Find my own Calcutta ( ˜ Create a secret place)