Too much emphasis on happiness has led to a dangerous misconception that unhappiness is a sign of failure. In one experiment, participants were asked to solve anagrams with or without

Steger’s research also finds that people who say they have a meaningful life tend to be optimistic about the future, extraverted, non-neurotic, agreeable, conscientious, and have high self-esteem.

The first insight from the science of happiness is that people overestimate the role of success in their own happiness. The joy of a big promotion, marriage, or a first child is relatively short-lived. It is not a big win that brings happiness. Rather, it’s the small things in life, like having a coffee with your best friend every day, that build l

Let’s assume one of the maximizers got into Cornell while the satisficer went to UVA. At the end of the first year, which one is likely to be happier? A study featuring a similar scenario found that the person who went to UVA was likely to be happier than the person who went to Cornell. It has nothing to do with UVA vs. Cornell, but rather with the

hole. As she read more about Buddhist philosophy, she noticed a similarity in its ideas to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, and she began to wonder if there were Eastern roots in the Western Enlightenment. So began her quest to link Ippolito Desideri, a Jesuit missionary to Tibet who wrote about Buddhism in 1728, with David Hume, who complete

truth: psychological research shows that trying to make others happy will make you happy, while trying to make yourself happy sometimes fails to do so. Indeed, psychologists have found that prosocial spending, writing gratitude letters, and having a satisficer (i.e., happy with good enough) mindset all promote happiness. It is possible that the mai

Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, argues that there are millions of people around the world who are toiling away their lives in meaningless jobs.

Lower your expectations. Be content with what you have, Danish wisdom advised. Like my father, many Danes cherish hygge, the coziness and small joys of life, along with the idea of a life of contentment. Does this mean that we should promote the satisficer mindset over the

Although many people think that the number of people who lead a meaningful life is small, survey data show that, in fact, most people say they do have a meaningful life. In the cleverly entitled paper “Life Is Pretty Meaningful,” Samantha Heintzelman and Laura King report that 90 percent of Americans said they have meaning in life, according to the