Why Mind-Wandering Robs You of Happiness

""The main thing is to get what little happiness there is out of life in this war-torn world," Clare Boothe Luce advised her young daughter, "because 'these are the good old days' now." And yet most of us are conditioned to escape into the past, into the future, into our to-do lists -- to wander off away from the present, even as we chronicle the moment in real-time on various lifestreaming platforms." In this piece Maria Popova draws on a variety of sources making a provocative and oddly inspiring case: "People are less happy when they're mind-wandering, no matter what they're doing." As Popova puts it, "Strikingly enough, that mind-wandering is a cause rather than a consequence of unhappiness is at once jarring and heartening -- it suggests that by training our minds to be more fully present, we'd be honing our capacity for happiness."

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