Don’t believe it

"The most unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so."

— Henry Home, Introduction to the Art of Thinking

Loinnir

https://www.threads.net/@arealmofwonder/post/DHi5kyxsaJW?xmt=AQGz_8qBZdiNrThS54pUMMGo4cj8jGQukRqUSmeOYGx-CQ

Americans Are Unhappier Than Ever. Solo Dining May Be a Sign.

The United States slipped to its lowest ranking ever in the World Happiness Report, in part because more Americans are eating alone. Once again, the Finns came out on top.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/americans-solo-dining-happiness.html?smid=em-share

Happy humanists

Here's our patron Stephen Fry on the humanist approach to finding and creating happiness in the one life we know we have. 

❤️Happy InternationalDayofHappiness, everyone!

https://www.threads.net/@humanists_uk/post/DHawVF7PgK2?xmt=AQGz2uLuFoIXVYw1e5NCy3kvvutAH16NcuOv-Kpf6RNCKw

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

2025 World Happiness Report

Today is the #InternationalDayofHappiness, as well as the release of the 2025 World Happiness Report.

🇫🇮 Finland remain 1 for an eighth year in a row
🇨🇷 🇲🇽 Costa Rica and Mexico both enter the top 10 for the first time
🇺🇸 The United States falls to its lowest ever position

Read more ⬇️
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-03-20-world-happiness-report-2025-shows-people-are-much-kinder-we-expect

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"Delightful pessimism"

He found delight in earthquakes too.

"Perry recalled William bringing home a volume of Schopenhauer and reading “amusing specimens of his delightful pessimism.” It is perfectly characteristic of the volatile William James that he later came to loathe Schopenhauer’s pessimism, which he took as equivalent to determinism, and that he came rather delightedly to abuse the author of The World as Will and Idea. Schopenhauer’s pessimism, James wrote twenty-five years later, is “that of a dog who would rather see the world ten times worse than it is, than lose his chance of barking at it.”

"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D. Richardson : https://a.co/6NdhLig

Don’t wait

"Chasing success to find happiness may leave you waiting forever. Research shows that happiness comes first—it's the driver of success. Cultivating well-being leads to better career outcomes, including higher productivity, greater job satisfaction, and increased income.
Research by Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues reveals that happier people are more likely to achieve career success. So instead of waiting for success to make you happy, focus on what makes you happy now—and let success follow." —Laurie Santos

OUP's Guides to the Good Life

Guides to the Good Life

In accessible and friendly guides, drawing on philosophy from the ancient world through modern times, this series highlights some of the transformative ideas that philosophers have had about the good life, and the practices and ways of life that help us to pursue it. Books in the series offer philosophical guidance about how to approach the sort of everyday questions that make up the texture of our lives: What should we value in life? How can we be good to one another? How should we spend our time? How can we focus in a chaotic world? How should we think about death? How can we mend broken relationships? What does it mean to succeed in life? How should we treat our planet?

Above all, the series is dedicated to the idea that philosophy can be, as it was for hundreds of years in the ancient world, a way of life. It can enhance the ways of life we already feel pulled toward, and help us to engage with them more authentically and fully...


Living for Pleasure
An Epicurean Guide to Life
by Emily A. Austin
9780197558324
Hardcover
01 November 2022

On Being and Becoming
An Existentialist Approach to Life
by Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei
9780190913656
Hardcover
09 November 2020
Guides to the Good Life

And also from OUP:

One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment Hardcover – February 26, 2025
by Samuel Scheffler (Author)

oup 1 (800) 445-9714

“happily ever after”

"Happily ever after is only true if you have three minutes to live." 

Dan Gilbert

This quote gets right to the heart of how our minds lie to us when it comes to happiness. Our brain often think in terms of 'happily ever after.' But real life isn't a fairytale, and happiness isn't some magical spell that lasts forever. Our minds are quickly adapt— even to the best things in life. https://www.threads.net/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DFuwo8LMf8K?xmt=AQGzzc7x5XX4OHvgULk3zLZrImszyuOOiYI6x5dnoe5fMQ

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Russell’s happy merger

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life." — BertrandRussell, The Conquest of Happiness

I agree with Russell in spirit, but "personal transcendence" requires at least enough ego to generate those wider interests. I'd say you should make your interests personal and expansive. Inclusive. Connective. "Larger than yourself." Pretty sure that's what he meant anyway. Impersonal means more than merely  personal. Interpersonal. We don't need zero ego, we need a social ego that bonds us with our species and with the future of life. That's how you transcend time and mortality. Or try.

Note: he says not that the ego recedes but that its walls do.  They become permeable. The self doesn't disappear, it grows and becomes part of "universal life." The trick is to feel and embody that before shedding mortal form. It's Peter Ackroyd's "trans-end-dance, a.k.a. the dance of death" (Plato Papers).

Maria Popova: Bertrand Russell died on this day in 1970, having lived nearly a century and won the Nobel Prize, leaving us his immortal wisdom on how to grow old.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/07/03/how-to-grow-old-bertrand-russell/