Achieving hard things AND experiencing joy in the process

…  one of the most important and powerful sources of reward and resilience: our connections to others. Our brains are equipped with a social processing system that is engaged in thinking about other people's minds and helps us understandand connect with them — including people who have labored on similar causes before us. When we feel connected, it immediately produces activation in the reward system and changes our value calculations...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/06/opinion/decisions-neuroscience-brains.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The whole cake

Thinking off-loaded

I'm still going to encourage students to think creatively about how they can collaborate constructively with A.I. But Hua Hsu's essay in the current New Yorker gives pause…

"Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media…" What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? 

So: what is the purpose of a college education in the humanities, if not to teach students to think for themselves?

Tiny little joys

Happiness Doesn't Have to Be a Heavy Lift

It only takes a few minutes to boost your mood. [A boosted mood's not the same thing as happiness, but it's way better than an un-boosted one.]

"...MaryCatherine McDonald, a trauma researcher and author of "The Joy Reset," uses another term for those bright bits of happiness: tiny little joys, or T.L.J.s.

Dr. McDonald's clients have told her that their T.L.J.s include the first sip of coffee in the morning...

nyt

Yale's coursera "Science of Well-Being" course with Laurie Santos

PERMA (an acronym for Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment— the basic dimensions of psychological flourishing)...

Questionnaire... Use Your Strengths to Boost Happiness...

Americans Most Unhappy People in the World.

Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being - and how to Achieve Them (a fantastic overview of positive psychology from the father of this discipline)

Ed Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (a nice introduction to the science of well-being from one of its pioneer

Ryan Niemiec & Robert McGrath, Power of Character Strengths: Activate and Ignite Your Positive Personality (an official guide on Character Strengths)

Daniel Lerner & Alan Schlechter, U Thrive: How to Succeed in College (and Life) (a book aimed towards undergraduates which covers many of the rewirements taught in this course)

Martin Seligman’s TED Talk - The new era of positive psychology

"Thwart Hedonic Adaptation" (explanation of savoring appears in the first 8 minutes of the video)

Learn more about the science of gratitude from expert Robert Emmons

Read Robert Emmons’ book on the science of gratitude

If you ask, for example, how important is it to develop a meaningful philosophy on life? Only about half of freshmen think that that's true. The interesting thing for me,
thinking about you guys today, and some of the problems you guys experience today, is that if you look at the rates from 1967, they're kind of flipped. So, only for about 40 percent of people thought you need to
be very well off financially back in the 60s. But a lot of them thought you needed to develop a meaningful philosophy on life. So, again this interesting flip about how important finances are. And that raises this question about whether or not, money is really going to make us happier? ...

Never Worry Alone

The Power of Connection in Navigating Life's Challenges
ROBERT WALDINGER
JUN 25, 2025

In a culture that often celebrates self-reliance and individual achievement, the simple advice to "never worry alone" might seem counterintuitive. Yet, this phrase carries profound wisdom, rooted in both evolutionary biology and decades of research on human flourishing. As social creatures, we are wired to connect, to share, and to support one another. When we isolate ourselves in times of stress, we cut off one of the most powerful tools for resilience: our relationships.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which I have the privilege of directing, has been tracking lives for over 85 years. Its findings are clear: the quality of our relationships is the single most important factor in determining our health and happiness. This isn't just about having people around us—it's about the depth and warmth of those connections... (continues)

Winning the cosmic lottery

"On the whole, I don’t fear death. Instead, I fear a life where I could have accomplished more. An epitaph worthy of a tombstone comes from the nineteenth-century educator Horace Mann: 'I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.'

Our primal urge to keep looking up is surely greater than our primal urge to keep killing one another. If so, then human curiosity and wonder, the twin chariots of cosmic discovery, will ensure that starry messages continue to arrive. These insights compel us, for our short time on Earth, to become better shepherds of our own civilization. Yes, life is better than death. Life is also better than having never been born. But each of us is alive against stupendous odds. We won the lottery—only once. We get to invoke our faculties of reason to figure out how the world works. But we also get to smell the flowers. We get to bask in divine sunsets and sunrises, and gaze deeply into the night skies they cradle. We get to live, and ultimately die, in this glorious universe."

"Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization" by Neil deGrasse Tyson: https://a.co/9AHEXyH

A view from above

"You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."—Edgar D. Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut"

— Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization by Neil deGrasse Tyson
https://a.co/by8i9Dw

Materialist spirit

"I call myself a spiritual materialist. By "materialist," I mean that I believe the world is made of material stuff, and nothing more, and that material obeys rules and laws. At the same time, like many of us, I have "spiritual" experiences: feelings of connection to other human beings and to the larger cosmos, moments of communion with wild animals, the appreciation of beauty, wonder. Nature is capable of extraordinary phenomena. We human beings stand in awe of those phenomena. That's part of my view of spirituality."

— The Miraculous from the Material: Understanding the Wonders of Nature by Alan Lightman
https://a.co/7ZfKc4r

The best books on Happiness Through Negative Thinking recommended by Oliver Burkeman

Your book, The Antidote, is subtitled “Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking”. Why do you think our pursuit of happiness through positivity can lead to so much trouble?

Sometimes it is the very pursuit of happiness that stops us from achieving it. Put simply, I think many of the techniques that claim to enable us to achieve happiness don’t work. They are too focused on strenuously stamping out any trace of negativity, rather than cultivating the conditions of real happiness. The more complex and subtler idea is that happiness is impossible to aim for directly. I’m not just talking about all the bad self-help books out there – I think the “cult of optimism” is broader than that. We are all to some extent in its grip, whenever we think that the way to achieve whatever we’re trying to achieve is to go after it vigorously, and that if we believe it will all work out fine then it will... (continues)