Questions Sep 4

1. According to Haybron, is it credible to claim that genetics render some people incapable of being happier?

2. What do studies show about consumerist materialism and intrinsic motivation?

3. At what $ level do happiness and income "cease to show a pretty substantial link"?

4. What does an Aristotelian nature-fulfillment theory of happiness find objectionable about the experience machine scenario?

5. What do Desire theories have trouble explaining?

6. How might a philosophical theory of well-being settle the strivers vs. enjoyers debate?

Discussion Questions:

• Buddhists say desire and attachment are our great source of unhappiness. William James (see below $) says they're "imperative" and deserve to be fulfilled to the extent they can be, without shortchanging other worthy desires. What do you say?
• Aristotle said living well consists in doing something, over a lifetime, that actualizes the virtues of the rational part of the soul. Agree? What kinds of things do you think you must do, to be happy?
• Do you consider yourself genetically advantaged or disadvantaged, in the happiness sweepstakes?
• Is there anything on your Source List that Haybron omits to mention?
• Do you identify with the Epicureans, Stoics, or Buddhists in their emphasis on simplicity as prerequisite to happiness? 56 What aspects of your life have you simplified? What would you simplify if you could (but you can't)?
• Was your childhood "coddled" and "risk-free"? 58 How risk-averse are you now?
• Is happiness a choice, or isn't it? 59 If it's a "skill," how have you chosen to cultivate it? Can you fly as (relatively) imperturbably as Haybron? 61
• Can those of us who refuse to "accept things as they are" be as happy as those who do? 61
• Have you experienced great joy from volunteer & charity work?
• Do you ever feel chastened by the thought that, though you know you should be happy, you still bicker about petty things? 64
• Do you worry about becoming a "wage slave"? Since many of us must work for wages, how can you avoid that fate?
• How much of western unhappiness is a reflection of "option freedom"? 65-6
• How important to your happiness is "being in charge of your daily routines"? 67
• Do you have any use at all for an experience machine? 78
• Can you defend watching television and playing video games in a basement as other than rank pleasure-seeking fit only for dumb grazing animals? 80
• Can a Genghis Khan or a Hitler flourish and be happy? Why not? 85
• What do you think of Haybron's remarks on the treatment of animals? 89-90
• What do you think of the School of Life's "problem with our phones" and Franklin Foer's "existential threat"? (See # below)
• Post yours

Happiness wisdom from cousin Mary...

Oliver said: “I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.”
http://writersalmanac.org/
...and from Calvin & Hobbes

==
 Cypher's choice in The Matrix
==

Aristotle & eudaimonia

The principal idea with which Aristotle begins is that there are differences of opinion about what is best for human beings, and that to profit from ethical inquiry we must resolve this disagreement. He insists that ethics is not a theoretical discipline: we are asking what the good for human beings is not simply because we want to have knowledge, but because we will be better able to achieve our good if we develop a fuller understanding of what it is to flourish. In raising this question—what is the good?—Aristotle is not looking for a list of items that are good. He assumes that such a list can be compiled rather easily; most would agree, for example, that it is good to have friends, to experience pleasure, to be healthy, to be honored, and to have such virtues as courage at least to some degree. The difficult and controversial question arises when we ask whether certain of these goods are more desirable than others. Aristotle's search for the good is a search for the highest good, and he assumes that the highest good, whatever it turns out to be, has three characteristics: it is desirable for itself, it is not desirable for the sake of some other good, and all other goods are desirable for its sake.

Aristotle thinks everyone will agree that the terms “eudaimonia” (“happiness”) and “eu zên” (“living well”) designate such an end. The Greek term “eudaimon” is composed of two parts: “eu” means “well” and “daimon” means “divinity” or “spirit.” To be eudaimon is therefore to be living in a way that is well-favored by a god. But Aristotle never calls attention to this etymology in his ethical writings, and it seems to have little influence on his thinking. He regards “eudaimon” as a mere substitute for eu zên (“living well”). These terms play an evaluative role, and are not simply descriptions of someone's state of mind.

No one tries to live well for the sake of some further goal; rather, being eudaimon is the highest end, and all subordinate goals—health, wealth, and other such resources—are sought because they promote well-being, not because they are what well-being consists in. But unless we can determine which good or goods happiness consists in, it is of little use to acknowledge that it is the highest end. To resolve this issue, Aristotle asks what the ergon (“function,” “task,” “work”) of a human being is, and argues that it consists in activity of the rational part of the soul in accordance with virtue (1097b22–1098a20). One important component of this argument is expressed in terms of distinctions he makes in his psychological and biological works. The soul is analyzed into a connected series of capacities: the nutritive soul is responsible for growth and reproduction, the locomotive soul for motion, the perceptive soul for perception, and so on. The biological fact Aristotle makes use of is that human beings are the only species that has not only these lower capacities but a rational soul as well. The good of a human being must have something to do with being human; and what sets humanity off from other species, giving us the potential to live a better life, is our capacity to guide ourselves by using reason. If we use reason well, we live well as human beings; or, to be more precise, using reason well over the course of a full life is what happiness consists in. Doing anything well requires virtue or excellence, and therefore living well consists in activities caused by the rational soul in accordance with virtue or excellence.

Aristotle's conclusion about the nature of happiness is in a sense uniquely his own. No other writer or thinker had said precisely what he says about what it is to live well. But at the same time his view is not too distant from a common idea. As he himself points out, one traditional conception of happiness identifies it with virtue (1098b30–1). Aristotle's theory should be construed as a refinement of this position. He says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of the soul.

At the same time, Aristotle makes it clear that in order to be happy one must possess others goods as well—such goods as friends, wealth, and power. And one's happiness is endangered if one is severely lacking in certain advantages—if, for example, one is extremely ugly, or has lost children or good friends through death (1099a31-b6). But why so? If one's ultimate end should simply be virtuous activity, then why should it make any difference to one's happiness whether one has or lacks these other types of good? Aristotle's reply is that one's virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of other goods (1153b17–19). Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit. To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness. Nonetheless, Aristotle insists, the highest good, virtuous activity, is not something that comes to us by chance. Although we must be fortunate enough to have parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous, we ourselves share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues... (continues at SEP)
==
From THE STONE-
The Problem of ‘Living in the Present’

These days, many of us would rather not be living in the present, a time of persistent crisis, political uncertainty and fear. Not that the future looks better, shadowed by technological advances that threaten widespread unemployment and by the perils of catastrophic climate change. No wonder some are tempted by the comforts of a nostalgically imagined past.Inspiring as it seems on first inspection, the self-help slogan “live in the present” slips rapidly out of focus. What would living in the present mean? To live each day as if it were your last, without a thought for the future, is simply bad advice, a recipe for recklessness. The idea that one can make oneself invulnerable to what happens by detaching from everything but the present is an irresponsible delusion.

Despite this, there is an interpretation of living in the present, inspired by Aristotle, that can help us to confront the present crisis and the perpetual crises of struggle and failure in life. There is an insight in the self-help slogan that philosophy can redeem...

To live in the present is to appreciate the value of atelic activities like going for a walk, listening to music, spending time with family or friends. To engage in these activities is not to extinguish them from your life. Their value is not mortgaged to the future or consigned to the past, but realized here and now. It is to care about the process of what you are doing, not just projects you aim to complete... (continues... with some good comments)
==

Robert Nozick, "The Experience Machine" - original text==
#The Problem With Our Phones - SoL
==
#Franklin Foer, World Without Mind - How Tech Companies Pose an Existential Threat - npr

Journalist Franklin Foer worries that we're all losing our minds as big tech companies infiltrate every aspect of our lives.
In his new book, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Foer compares the way we feel about technology now to the way people felt about pre-made foods, like TV dinners, when they were first invented.
"And we thought that they were brilliant because they did away with pots and pans — we didn't have to go to the store to go shopping every day — and then we woke up 50 years later and realize that these products had been basically engineered to make us fat," Foer says. "And I worry that the same thing is happening now to the things that we ingest through our mind." (listen here)

==
$ William James's version of "desire theory"

From "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life"- (Also take a look at his "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," making the point that we are habitually blind and insensitive to others' desires while inflating the importance of our own, and that we ought to be more mutually accommodating.)


Take any demand however slight, which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sake, to be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists at all. Some desires, truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they bring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal demands...

Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good thing and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations, claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments; compunctions, and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.

We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there is a God as well. "The religion of humanity" affords a basis for ethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system can gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close...

Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, or keep his nerves in condition?‑-he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for Amelia, or for Henrietta?‑-both cannot be the choice of his heart. Shall he have the dear old Republican party, or a spirit of unsophistication in public affairs?‑-he cannot have both, etc. So that the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has to deal...

Aristotle's Way

 We're doing Aristotle today in my other classes. His "happiness" is flourishing, a life of virtuous rationality or eudaimonia. He differed sharply from his teacher Plato. See Existential Comics, for instance...

Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life by Edith Hall

Aristotle "developed a sophisticated, humane program for becoming a happy person, and it remains valid to this day. Aristotle provides everything you need to avoid the realization of the dying protagonist of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), that he has wasted much of his life scaling the social ladder, and putting self-interest above compassion and community values, all the while married to a woman he dislikes. Facing his imminent death, he hates his closest family members, who won't even talk to him about it. Aristotelian ethics encompass everything modern thinkers associate with subjective happiness: self-realization, finding "a meaning," and the "flow" of creative involvement with life, or "positive emotion." 1 

This book presents Aristotle's time-honored ethics in contemporary language. It applies Aristotle's lessons to several practical real-life challenges: decision-making, writing a job application, communicating in an interview, using Aristotle's chart of Virtues and Vices to analyze your own character, resisting temptation, and choosing friends and partners. 

Wherever you are in life, Aristotle's ideas can make you happier. Few philosophers, mystics, psychologists, or sociologists have ever done much more than restate his fundamental perceptions. But he stated them first, better, more clearly, and in a more holistic way than anyone subsequently. 

Each part of his prescription for being happy relates to a different phase of human life, but also intersects with all the others. Becoming subjectively happy as an individual, Aristotle insisted, is your unique and momentous responsibility. It is also a great gift—it is within most people's power, regardless of their circumstances, to decide to become happier…"

— Aristotle's Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life by Edith Hall

Questions Sep 2

 Haybron ch3-4, Life Satisfaction & Measuring Happiness

1. Is satisfaction with your life the same as thinking it's going well?

2. Does rating your life satisfaction provide reliably objective insight into your degree of happiness?

3. In what sense do "most people actually have good lives"?

4. Can the science of happiness tell us which groups tend to be happier?

5. What (verbally-expressed, non-numerical) ratio of positive over negative emotional states does happiness probably require?

6. What percentage of American college students said they'd considered suicide?

Discussion Questions (please add yours):

• Are you having wonderful life, like Wittgenstein allegedly said he did? 34
• Today, right now, where would you rate your life on a 1-10 scale? What do you think that rating says about your satisfaction and your happiness? How much has it, or will it, fluctuate in the days, weeks, and years to come?
• Do you have a good life? What will they say about you at your funeral? Will you be gratified if your children have a life comparable to yours?
• Could you be happy in Maldonia? 42 In general, are you more or less happy than the people around you?
• Do you agree with Mill's statement?  46
• Which face on the chart is yours today? 47
• Is it "impossible that 94% of Americans are happy"? 50
• 
  

==
Old Podcast
==
"Brad's Status" on Fresh Air - a new film on status anxiety and the pursuit of elusive happiness.
==
How do you Measure Happiness? The Top Questionnaires


Measuring happiness is at least as difficult as catching rare and elusive butterflies. What kind of net should we use? At the Pursuit of Happiness project, we try to collect and analyze the most scientific studies on happiness and subjective well-being (SWB). The question is, how does one evaluate what the most “scientific” studies are? Naturally, randomized and controlled studies are more reliable. These kinds of studies often require an enormous amount of effort and funding, and many studies that claim to do this are flawed in various ways.


One more major challenge to reliability is how these studies measure the happiness or SWB of their subjects. The following is a list of the most widely used and respected questionnaires. As you can see, we can discover some major differences in how they approach the issue, which reflect different definitions and perceptions of happiness.

Chasing it may not work, but neither does sitting and waiting.

Oxford Happiness Inventory (Argyle and Hill)


Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky & Lepper)

Satisfaction with Life Scale (Deiner, Emmons, Larsen and Griffin)

Panas Scale (Watson, Clark, Tellegen)

And this is Todd Kashdan’s thoughtful critique of the above scales:

The assessment of subjective well-being (issues raised by the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire)

We should mention a recent measurement of Subjective Well Being created by the OECD, as part of their very sophisticated and broad ranging survey, theBetter Life Initiative. This initiative is fascinating and includes some eye-popping graphics. To see their detailed report on SWB and the questions they used to measure it, please refer to the end note.

The strong point of both the Panas Scale and the OECD Subjective Well Being scale is that they measure both positive and negative affect, which, as one might expect, have a clear inverse correlation.

http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/science-of-happiness/measuring-happiness/
==

And speaking of Buddhists, Robert Wright's audacioiusly-titled Why Buddhism is True tackles the western secular version as a philosophy of happiness.

Honors College workshops

From Judy Albakry:

We’d greatly appreciate your help in promoting our upcoming Honors College workshops.

These sessions are essential for honors students who wish to be approved for early registration this fall for Spring 2026 registration. If students are unable to attend the workshop, there is a video they can watch instead.

 

While we’ve been reaching out via email, a brief announcement in your class would go a long way in ensuring students don’t miss this opportunity.

 

Early Registration Workshops – No RSVP needed

• September 4, 2025, 2:30 in HONR 106
• September 5, 2025, 1:00 in HONR 106
• September 5, 2025, 2:00 in HONR 106

Remind students to:

Check their MTSU email for workshop details

Contact their honors advisor with any questions

 

The A.I. Cheating Crisis

Students Hate Them. Universities Need Them. The Only Real Solution to the A.I. Cheating Crisis.

Since A.I. has made the mental effort of writing and problem solving optional, universities need new ways to require the work needed for learning.

I remember the moment I knew my approach to student use of artificial intelligence was not working.

Early in a meeting at N.Y.U.'s Abu Dhabi campus last fall, a philosophy professor, arms crossed over his chest, told me he'd tried one of the strategies my office had suggested — talking with his students about the ways A.I. could interfere with their learning — and it hadn't worked. His students had listened politely, then several of them had used A.I. to write their papers anyway. He particularly wanted me to know that "even the good students," the ones who showed up to class wanting to talk about the readings, were using A.I. to avoid work outside class.

This was a theme I'd hear over and over, listening to faculty members across disciplines at the end of the semester; even some of the students who obviously cared about the material and seemed to like the classes were no longer doing the hard work of figuring out what they wanted to say. Our A.I. strategy had assumed that encouraging engaged uses of A.I. — telling students they could use software like ChatGPT to generate practice tests to quiz themselves, explore new ideas or solicit feedback — would persuade students to forgo the lazy uses. It did not...

Clay Shirky

More on the peripatetic life

Gymnasiums of the Mind

"Followers of the Greek Aristotle were known as peripatetics because they passed their days strolling and mind-wrestling through the groves of the Academe. The Romans’ equally high opinion of walking was summed up pithily in the Latin proverb: [Solvitur ambulando] “It is solved by walking.” Nearly every philosopher-poet worth his salt has voiced similar sentiments. Erasmus recommended a little walk before supper and “after supper do the same.” Thomas Hobbes had an inkwell built into his walking stick to more easily jot down his brainstorms during his rambles. Jean- Jacques Rousseau claimed he could only meditate when walking: “When I stop, I cease to think,” he said. “My mind only works with my legs.” Søren Kierkegaard believed he’d walked himself into his best thoughts. In his brief life Henry David Thoreau walked an estimated 250,000 miles, or ten times the circumference of earth. “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits,” wrote Thoreau, “unless I spend four hours a day at least – and it is commonly more than that – sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields absolutely free from worldly engagements.” Thoreau’s landlord and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson characterized walking as “gymnastics for the mind.

In order that he might remain one of the fittest, Charles Darwin planted a 1.5 acre strip of land with hazel, birch, privet, and dogwood, and ordered a wide gravel path built around the edge. Called Sand-walk, this became Darwin’s ‘thinking path’ where he roamed every morning and afternoon with his white fox-terrier. Of Bertrand Russell, long-time friend Miles Malleson has written: “Every morning Bertie would go for an hour’s walk by himself, composing and thinking out his work for that day. He would then come back and write for the rest of the morning, smoothly, easily and without a single correction.”

None of these laggards, however, could touch Friedrich Nietzsche, who held that “all truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Rising at dawn, Nietzsche would stalk through the countryside till 11 a.m. Then, after a short break, he would set out on a two-hour hike through the forest to Lake Sils. After lunch he was off again, parasol in hand, returning home at four or five o’clock, to commence the day’s writing...

Walking, as both a mode of transportation and a recreational activity, began to fall off noticeably with the rise of the automobile, and took a major nosedive in the 1950s. Fifty plus years of automobile-centric design has reduced the number of sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly spaces to a bare minimum (particularly in the American west). All of the benefits of walking: contemplation, social intercourse, exercise, have been willingly exchanged for the dubious advantages of speed and convenience, although the automobile alone cannot be blamed for the maddening acceleration of everyday life. The modern condition is one of hurry, a perpetual rush hour that leaves little time for meditation. No wonder then that in her history of walking, Rebecca Solnit mused that “modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness,” which seems the antithesis of Wittgenstein’s observation that in the race of philosophy, the prize goes to the slowest.

If we were to compare the quantity and quality of thinkers of the early 20th century with those of today, one cannot help but notice the dearth of Einsteins, William Jameses, Eliots and Pounds, Freuds, Jungs, Keynes, Picassos, Stravinskys, Wittgensteins, Sartres, Deweys, Yeats and Joyces..."

Christopher Orlet, Philosophy Now 

Does Modern Life Sometimes Feel Hollow?

Our Good Life author has a Substack:

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertwaldinger/p/does-modern-life-sometimes-feel-hollow?r=35ogp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Learning to care

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

― Roger Angell, Game Time: A Baseball Companion

"Small stuff"

 

"An idea for a short story about, um, people in Manhattan who are constantly creating these real, unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves cos it keeps them from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about... the universe. Let's... Well, it has to be optimistic. Well, all right, why is life worth living? That's a very good question. Well, there are certain things, I guess, that make it worthwhile. Like what? OK... for me... Ooh, I would say Groucho Marx, to name one thing. And Willie Mays. And... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony. And... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues. Swedish movies, naturally. Sentimental Education by Flaubert. Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra. Those incredible apples and pears by C?anne. The crabs at Sam Wo's. Tracy's face..."

Questions Aug 28

Some of these questions will likely turn up (in one form or another) on our first exam. Reply to any of the discussion questions you like, in the comments space. OR, come up with your own comments and/or questions. Try to post at least three separate comments/questions/links prior to each class, in the comments space below.

ch1
1. Who has frequently been held up by philosophers as a paradigm of happiness?

2. What nation did Gallup find to be happiest in terms of daily experience?

3. What does Haybron say will most likely NOT be on your deathbed list of things you'd like to experience again before you go?

4. What was Aristotle's word for happiness, and what did he particularly not mean by it?

5. Which of Haybron's three happiness theories is not mainly concerned with feelings?

6. Why does Haybron consider "subjective well-being" unhelpful?


ch2
7. How does the author's Dad describe existence "on the Pond"?

8. What does Big Joe the commercial fisherman feel at the end of his working day, and how does he feel generally?

9. Your posture or stride reveals something deeper than what?

10. The author says moments like the one depicted in the photo on p.18 involve no what?

11. Who developed the notion of flow?

12. Tranquility, confidence, and expansiveness are aspects of what state of mind/body?

13. Though your temperament may be more or less fixed, your ___ may be more or less prone to change with circumstances.

14. What famous western Buddhist says happiness is an optimal state of being, much more than a feeling?

Discussion Questions (please add your own)

• Do you often, or ever, experience a state of mindless meditation? Are you happy in those moments? Or must such moments recur regularly over the course of a lifetime before such a judgment would be appropriate?
• How often do you find yourself fully engaged and absorbed in what you're doing? Do you think you could learn to experience such a state of being more frequently and reliably?
• How much attention do you pay to your posture and bodily presentation? When striding confidently do you feel more confident, when sitting erect do you feel more competent? Can acting happy make you happy?
• This isn't how most philosophers would define "rationality," but what do you think of it as a description of happiness? "When enjoying plenary freedom either in the way of motion or of thought, we are in a sort of anaesthetic state in which we might say with Walt Whitman, if we cared to say anything about ourselves at such times, " I am sufficient as I am." This feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness, — this absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it, — is what I call the Sentiment of Rationality. As soon, in short, as we are enabled from any cause whatever to think with perfect fluency, the thing we think of seems to us pro tanto rational." William James
• Do you ever experience "flow," when your absorption in a task makes the experience of the passage of time drop away? Did you experience that more when younger? (Could that be what the poet Wordsworth was talking about when he referred to intimations of immortality in childhood?)
• How do you manage your bad moods? Does it work for you to try and ignore them, and just get on with your day? Or have you learned the Stoic/Vulcan art of distancing yourself from all moods? Is it possible to achieve selective distancing, drawing closer to happy moods and away from bad ones?
• Who's the happiest person you know? What have you learned from observing them?
• Do you agree that there's never been a better time to be alive? 1 (Steven Pinker in Better Angels of Our Nature, for one, says life's never been better.)
• "Life is good" - agree? What hypothetical circumstances in your life do you imagine might reverse your opinion?
• Do you think many poor communities are happier than the average college student? 3
• How important is health, and healthcare, in your conception of happiness? 7
• Do we need a theory or definition of happiness? 10
• What do you think of Aristotle's approach? 11
• Do you have views about eastern (eg, Buddhist) approaches to happiness?
• Can you be a genuinely happy individual in an unhappy society? 13