you happy? Could you be happier? Gretchen Rubin was already "pretty happy" when she asked herself these very questions. In search of the answers, she started her own pursuit of happiness, which eventually became a New York Times bestseller titled, The Happiness Project. She has now written a second book, Happier at Home, based on the idea that the home is the foundation of happiness. Knowledge@Wharton recently spoke with Rubin about why happy people work more hours each week, how to make and keep happiness resolutions, how to ward off the three happiness leeches and how to start your own Happiness Project. An edited version of the transcript appears below. Knowled... posted on Aug 13 2013 (24,296 reads)

a Happy Life Different from a Meaningful One? A scientific controversy about the relationship between meaning and happiness raises fundamental questions about how to live a good life. Philosophers, researchers, spiritual leaders—they’ve all debated what makes life worth living. Is it a life filled with happiness or a life filled with purpose and meaning? Is there even a difference between the two? Think of the human rights activist who fights oppression but ends up in prison—is she happy? Or the social animal who spends his nights (and some days) jumping from party to party—is that the good life? These aren’t just academic questions. The... posted on Mar 28 2014 (35,314 reads)

decades, we've been taught that economic growth and buying more stuff will make us happy—while trashing the planet. The good news is, there’s a better kind of happy: It starts with meaningful work, loving relationships, and a thriving natural world. Photo by Tom Wang / Shutterstock. In the last 100 years, we got very confused about happiness. This is no small thing. The way we define happiness drives what we do, what we’re willing to sacrifice, and how we spend our money and our time. This confusion didn’t just happen. Advertisers spend billions spreading the illusion that more stuff will bring us happiness. And policy wonks of all pol... posted on Mar 13 2015 (34,562 reads)

tenet is one of the rare human universals, transcending differences in culture, geographic location, age, ethnicity, and gender. As the Dalai Lama put it, simply, “The purpose of life is to be happy.” That might lead to the expectation that we should all be happy, at least when circumstances afford it. Yet this is not the case. Even when people’s lives are good, many feel less than happy, and may be beset by anxiety and depression. Thus there is a paradox: The pursuit of happiness is one of the prime values people hold, and they often fall short of attaining it. There might even be a further vexing twist on this happiness paradox, by which the more fervently people pu... posted on Oct 8 2024 (2,195 reads)

think it is probably fair to assume that most Americans today consider happiness not only something that would be nice to have, but something that we really ought to have—and, moreover, something that’s within our power to bring about, if only we set our minds to it. We can be happy, we tell ourselves, teeth gritted. We should be happy. We will be happy. That is a modern article of faith. But it is also a relatively recent idea in the West which dates from the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that ushered in a dramatic shift in what human beings could legitimately hope to expect in and from their lives. People prior to the late 17th century thought happiness was a matter ... posted on Mar 7 2013 (13,568 reads)

recent years, we’ve seen an explosion of scientific research revealing precisely how positive feelings like happiness are good for us. We know that they motivate us to pursue important goals and overcome obstacles, protect us from some effects of stress, connect us closely with other people, and even stave off physical and mental ailments. This has made happiness pretty trendy. The science of happiness made the covers of Time, Oprah, and even The Economist, and it has spawned a small industry of motivational speakers, psychotherapists, and research enterprises. This website,Greater Good, features roughly 400 articles about happiness, and its parenting... posted on May 24 2012 (22,309 reads)

a world that daily throws both curiosities and crises at us, it can be difficult to discern what is important. An unexpected event can render what matters today insignificant tomorrow. How do you keep perspective? I turned to two groups—children under seven and adults over 70—to explore this question: What is important? Children, I reasoned, have relatively little to clutter their lives, and in that simplicity they might be able to hone in on what really matters. Adults with more than seven decades of experience would have deep insight into what is most worthy of attention. I expected to find patterns and did. What people left out was as telling as what they included.... posted on Oct 29 2016 (42,975 reads)

in a chapter for a forthcoming book, The Dark and Light Side of Happiness). “A lot of different research has found that these activities have positive effects,” she says, “so I think the next step is understanding how they work best and what considerations we need to think about before we mass recommend them to everyone.” Let’s call it “the fine print” of how to be happy, the little details you should consider before undertaking happiness activities. Who gets happy? People are different, and not every positive activity or combination of activities will affect people in the same ways. And so the first step in understan... posted on Aug 13 2012 (25,000 reads)

I would want to hold on to the magic of that moment but, hard as I might try, I could not grasp it for long. So I asked myself: Was I the only person? Was I some hopeless dunce who could not hold on to “the feeling” of being happy, of being elated for the sake of being? My old research habits as a scientist die hard. A lifetime of training cannot be easily dissuaded. I began to turn my investigations to this most important question: How can one hold to that incredible moment of happiness? It turns out I am not alone in this matter. Happiness — at least, the pursuit of it — has obsessed almost all of mankind, from our founding fathers to a slew of high-powered sci... posted on Jan 22 2013 (51,737 reads)

a research psychologist, had come to believe that his field was in crisis. He and his colleagues had made great progress with depression, helplessness, and anxiety, but, he realized, helping people overcome their demons is not the same thing as helping them live well. And so, in 1998, Seligman called on his colleagues to investigate what makes life fulfilling and worth living. Social scientists heeded his call, but most zeroed in on a topic that was both obvious and seemed easy to measure: happiness. Some researchers studied the benefits of happiness. Others studied its causes. Still others investigated how we can increase it in our day-to-day lives. Though positive psychology was found... posted on Jan 25 2018 (36,595 reads)

we muddle through our days, the quest for happiness looms large. In the U.S., citizens are granted three inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The kingdom of Bhutan created a national index to measure happiness. But what if searching for happiness actually prevents us from finding it? There’s reason to believe that the quest for happiness might be a recipe for misery. In a series of new studies led by psychologist Iris Mauss, the more value people placed on happiness, the less happy they became. I saw it happen to Tom, a savant who speaks half a dozen languages, from Chinese to Welsh. In college, Tom declared a major in computer science, but fou... posted on Dec 28 2015 (21,142 reads)

since 1989. Matthieu has written several books, including The Monk and the Philosopher, The Quantum and the Lotus, as well as The Art of Meditation. With Sounds True, he has released an audio learning program based on his book called Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill. In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” I spoke with Matthieu via Skype quite late at night while he was at his monastery in Nepal. We discussed the skill of happiness, as well as the conditions for happiness. We also discussed the physical and psychological effects of meditation, along with the ways to track the progress you make in your spiritual practic... posted on May 14 2013 (56,169 reads)

how the happiness levels of students in our online course vary depending on where they live. To what extent is happiness related to where you live? Which countries have the most—and least—happy residents? Are residents of wealthier countries happier? These are some of the questions we considered when analyzing data from the survey we presented to the 112,000 students who registered for our online course, “The Science of Happiness.” So far, more than 40,000 students, hailing from over 200 countries and areas of sovereignty around the world, have taken the survey. Previously, we reported on how students’ happiness levels relate to factors like age an... posted on Jan 9 2015 (35,576 reads)

things seem more American than the pursuit of happiness, but are we going about it all wrong? That’s one of the questions raised by The Myths of Happiness, the new book by Sonja Lyubomirsky. Lyubomirsky is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, and one of the leading researchers in the field of positive psychology. Her previous, best-selling book, The How of Happiness, published in 2008, is chock full of the best research-based practices for increasing happiness. The Myths of Happiness follows up on that work by explaining how our assumptions about what will and won’t bring us happiness are often flat-out wrong. Und... posted on Jun 12 2013 (27,471 reads)

the greatest paradox of human life is that although happiness is the most universal of our longings, it is unobtainable by striving. Every seeming end we seek — love, money, purpose, the perfect cappuccino — we seek as a means to happiness, and yet happiness defies the usual laws of effort and achievement: The more ferociously we try to attain it, the more it eludes us. How to break out of this paradox and transcend our self-imposed limitations in the pursuit of happiness is what artist Agnes Martin (March 22, 1912–December 16, 2004) examines in a set of notes prepared for a 1979 lecture at the University of New Mexico, Santa Fe, included in Ag... posted on Jun 6 2017 (16,374 reads)

consume, pollute, destroy and owe less; and live better, longer and more meaningfully? To do all this, we need fresh solutions that engage America’s people in redefining goals for the economy (what we want from it) as opposed to the economy’s goals (what it demands from us). An Economy Based on Quality of Life Although an economy based on a high quality of life that makes people happy may sound revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president, enshrined the pursuit of happiness  as a human right when he drafted ourDeclaration of Independence. Jefferson emphasized that America’s government was, “to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible fo... posted on Nov 20 2011 (23,734 reads)

life-changing discoveries. The other factor involves intellectual diversity. The turn from the study of human dysfunction to human strengths and virtues may have started in psychology, with the positive psychology movement, but that perspective spread to adjacent disciplines like neuroscience and criminology, and from there to fields like sociology, economics, and medicine. Across all these fields, we’re seeing more and more support for the idea that empathy, compassion, and happiness are more than you-have-it-or-not capacities, but skills that can be cultivated by individuals and by groups of people through deliberate decisions. In 2013, the UC Berkeley Greater Good S... posted on Jan 23 2014 (129,103 reads)

way to lead a joyful life is not to pursue happiness for ourselves, argues Christine Carter, but to pursue it for others “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” –Helen Keller Money doesn’t buy happiness. Obvious, right? On some abstract level, we know that money and other outward signs of success won’t ultimately make us happy—perhaps because we know wealthy or famous or powerful people who are deeply unhappy—but on another level, we don’t really believe it… or at least we don’t belie... posted on Feb 5 2015 (37,066 reads)

than a decade after Greater Good first started reporting on the science of compassion, generosity, happiness—what we call “the science of a meaningful life”—the research in our field is acquiring ever more nuance and sophistication. New studies build on and even re-interpret findings from previous years, particularly as their authors use more exacting methods, with bigger and broader data sets, and consider additional factors to explain prior results. These nuances are clearly reflected in this year’s list of our Top 10 Insights from the Science of a Meaningful Life—the fourth such list compiled by Greater Good’s editors. Indeed, many of this... posted on Jan 7 2016 (18,769 reads)

students often get stereotyped as stressed out and sleep-deprived. But at universities across the country, students are aiming to change that as they join clubs dedicated to a common, joyful purpose: spreading happiness. Eleanor Collier / Stanford Happiness Collective The Stanford Happiness Collective was started three years ago "with the goal of doing things to brighten people's days," its president, junior Eleanor Collier told TODAY. Northwestern University is home to one of the country's oldest college happiness clubs, which began unofficially in 2008 when a group of students handed out hot chocolate outside the library on a cold evening right before fin... posted on Feb 24 2016 (12,363 reads)