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Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. In Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, Wilson suggests it would be better to relish the blues that make humans people.
The “happiness agenda” is a worldwide movement that claims that happiness is the highest good, happiness can be measured, and public policy should promote happiness. Against Happiness is a thorough and powerful critique of this program, revealing the flaws of its concept of happiness and advocating a renewed focus on equality and justice. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, this book provides both theoretical and empirical analysis of the limitations of the happiness agenda. The authors emphasize that this movement draws on a parochial, Western-centric philosophical basis and demographic sample. They show that happiness defined as subjective satisfaction or a surplus of positive emotions bears little resemblance to the richer and more nuanced concepts of the good life found in many world traditions. Cross-cultural philosophy, comparative theology, and social and cultural psychology all teach that cultures and subcultures vary in how much value they place on life satisfaction or feeling happy. Furthermore, the ideas promoted by the happiness agenda can compete with rights, justice, sustainability, and equality—and even conceal racial and gender injustice. Against Happiness argues that a better way forward requires integration of cross-cultural philosophical, ethical, and political thought with critical social science. Ultimately, the authors contend, happiness should be a secondary goal—worth pursuing only if it is contingent on the demands of justice.
Whether watching teens practice cheerleading in a surveillance video or discussing death with a shoe salesclerk, these poems ultimately find a certain joy and redemptive love. Wit and wry observation mark these disjointed narratives from an agile new voice.
Broadcasting Happiness will "inspire you and change your life." —Parade Magazine We are all broadcasters. As managers, colleagues, parents and friends, we are constantly transmitting information to the people around us, and the messages we choose to broadcast create success or hold us back. What's your broadcast? New research from the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience shows that small shifts in the way we communicate can create big ripple effects on business and educational outcomes, including 31 percent higher productivity, 25 percent better performance ratings, 37 percent higher sales, and 23 percent lower levels of stress. In Broadcasting Happiness, Michelle Gielan, former national CBS News anchor turned positive psychology researcher, shows you how changing your broadcast changes your power by sharing jaw-dropping stories and incredible research. Learn Michelle's simple research-based communication habits that have been featured in her PBS program Inspire Happiness and Oprah's 21 Days to Happiness class. Broadcasting Happiness will help you: - Inoculate your brain against stress and negativity by fact-checking challenges - Drive success by leading a conversation or communication with positivity - Rewrite debilitating thought patterns and turn them into fuel for resilience and growth - Deal with negative people in a way that lessens their power - Share bad news more effectively to increase future social capital - Create and sustain a positive culture at work or home by creating contagious optimism - Help the people you care about most move from negative to positive in seconds Broadcasting Happiness showcases how real individuals and organizations have used these techniques to achieve results that include increasing revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars, raising a school district's graduation rate by 45 percent, and shifting family gatherings from toxic to thriving. Changing your broadcast can change your life, your success, and the lives of others around you. Broadcasting Happiness will show you how!
Self-help books don't seem to work. Few of the many advantages of modern life seem capable of lifting our collective mood. Wealth—even if you can get it—doesn't necessarily lead to happiness. Romance, family life, and work often bring as much stress as joy. We can't even agree on what "happiness" means. So are we engaged in a futile pursuit? Or are we just going about it the wrong way? Looking both east and west, in bulletins from the past and from far afield, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual group of people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. Whether experimental psychologists, terrorism experts, Buddhists, hardheaded business consultants, Greek philosophers, or modern-day gurus, they argue that in our personal lives, and in society at large, it's our constant effort to be happy that is making us miserable. And that there is an alternative path to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity, and uncertainty—the very things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is the intelligent person's guide to understanding the much-misunderstood idea of happiness.
A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we’re so lousy at predicting what will make us happy – and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off? Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.
Come On, Get Happy! Everyone wants to be happy. Here in this profound volume is a road map for discovering a life filled with happiness, joy, and a sense of purpose. The Dalai Lama's basic premise is that each of us is responsible for our own health and happiness and for the health of society. He further asserts that health and happiness are within our reach—both individually and collectively. How a person thinks, behaves, and feels ultimately impacts not only their own lives, but also the society in which they live. If you desire to attain happiness, you must understand that the journey begins with you. It is only then that you can reach out and touch the lives of others and change society. In this anthology, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with characteristic wisdom, humor, and kindness, directs readers toward a happy, healthy, and peaceful life. Talking about universal themes such as compassion, peace, non-violence, secularism, and the pursuit of a healthy mind and body, he reminds us that the responsibility to change our thoughts, actions, and lives lies within our power. This is a book for fans of His Holiness, for spiritual seekers, and for those interested in the spiritual and emotional health of individuals and societies.
What if you could change your life--without changing your life? Gretchen had a good marriage, two healthy daughters, and work she loved--but one day, stuck on a city bus, she realized that time was flashing by, and she wasn’t thinking enough about the things that really mattered. “I should have a happiness project,” she decided. She spent the next year test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. Each month, she pursued a different set of resolutions: go to sleep earlier, quit nagging, forget about results, or take time to be silly. Bit by bit, she began to appreciate and amplify the happiness that already existed in her life. Written with humour and insight, Gretchen’s story will inspire you to start your own happiness project. Now in a beautiful, expanded edition, Gretchen offers a wealth of new material including happiness paradoxes and practical tips on many daily matters: being a more light-hearted parent, sticking to a fitness routine, getting your sweetheart to do chores without nagging, coping when you forget someone’s name and more.
Inspires us - in wryly gentle prose - to outgrow the impossible pursuit of happiness, and instead make peace with the perfection of the way things are. Including ourselves! Magid invites readers to consider the notion that our certainty that we are broken may be turning our (3z(Bpursuit of happiness(S3(B into a source of yet more suffering. He takes an unusual look at our (S2(Bsecret practices(S3(B (what we?re REALLY doing, when we say (S2(Bpracticing(S3(B) and (S2(Bcurative fantasies,(S3(B wherein we have ideals of what spiritual practices will "do" for us, "cure" us. In doing so, he helps us look squarely at such pitfalls of spiritual practice so that we can avoid them. Along the way, Magid lays out a rich roadmap of a new "psychological-minded Zen," which may be among the most important spiritual developments of the present day.
We is a dystopian novel written by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. Originally drafted in Russian, the book could be published only abroad. It was translated into English in 1924. Even as the book won a wide readership overseas, the author's satiric depiction led to his banishment under Joseph Stalin's regime in the then USSR. The book's depiction of life under a totalitarian state influenced the other novels of the 20th century. Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, We describes a future socialist society that has turned out to be not perfect but inhuman. Orwell claimed that Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied this. The novel is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State which assists mass surveillance. Here life is scientifically managed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by reason as the primary justification for the construct of the society. By way of formulae and equations outlined by the One State, the individual's behaviour is based on logic.