Want to ‘Optimize’ Your Happiness? This Happiness Expert Says: Don’t.

Laurie Santos on what will really bring meaning and fulfillment to your life, and what won’t. 

Lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece, and there are two main types of happiness according to ancient Greek philosophers as far as I can tell: hedonic and eudaimonic. Can you explain the difference? Hedonic happiness is what a lot of laypeople mean when they say happiness — just a sense of good feeling. Often when we’re thinking of hedonic pleasure, we’re thinking of the really basic stuff: good food, good sex, a feeling of accomplishment. Eudaimonic happiness is bigger. It’s about living a good life. Happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people and from building character. If you look back at the ancient folks like Aristotle, they knew about both, but when push came to shove they were like, Go for the eudaimonic.

In ancient Greece, the big philosophical debate was also if happiness was nature or nurture. What does science say? Are certain people more predisposed to be happy? The way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins, and what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. The important thing to know, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low. It’s about the same rate as what you’d see for religiosity or risk-taking. If your parents were super religious, maybe you’re more likely to be super religious, but it’s not set in stone. That’s the message of happiness: There’s probably some component that’s a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control.

So we can learn to be happy? That’s the premise of my work...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/magazine/laurie-santos-interview.html?smid=em-share

Thinketh again

… The “good” side of his thought ledger seems to contain such stereotypically manly virtues as power and certainty and control. Every man, he writes, must “manfully control his thoughts. … Doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded.” (It’s a little like “The Secret,” but for men.) With total confidence, Allen swaggers right into some very ugly ideas. “The truth is that oppressor and slave are cooperators in ignorance,” he writes, “and, while seeming to afflict each other, are in reality afflicting themselves.” I shivered in recognition — it’s the kind of pseudo-intellectual rationalization of evil you can still find all over modern social media…

What I discovered, in my brief experiment in thinkething, is that, in the absence of clear definitions of “good” and “bad,” it is easy to prune the garden of your thoughts into self-serving shapes. But I believe we have some responsibility to make our thoughts correspond to reality — not just to expect reality to swing its huge weight around, magically, to align with our thoughts. This is especially true now, in the vortex of chaos we call 2026. Maybe this will sound like bragging, but I would rather be unhappy and weak and full of self-doubt than dishonest and cruel and puffed up with false certainty. If I ever write a self-help book, I think I will call it “As a Man Muddles Through the Disappointing Confusion of True Self-Knowledge.” Maybe, a hundred years from now, it could be a best seller, too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/magazine/man-thinketh-book.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

The Good Life Paradox

Matthew Hammerton points out that a meaningful life and a life that goes well for you might not be the same thing.

Picture two people on their deathbeds. The first lived comfortably, surrounded by loving family and friends, enjoying diverse pleasures and achievements throughout a long life. The second dedicated herself entirely to fighting injustice, achieving remarkable social change, but at great personal cost. Who lived the better life?

Your answer might depend on what you mean by ‘better’. Philosophers have long recognized that when we call a life ‘good’ we can mean different things. So we could be talking about a life’s moral goodness – how virtuous the person was – or its prudential goodness – how well the life went for the person living it. But there’s a third dimension we often overlook: how meaningful the life was. This gives us three distinct questions we can ask about any life: 1. Was it morally good? 2. Did it go well for the person living it? 3. Was it meaningful?

These questions pull in different directions. A morally exemplary life might involve suffering for others’ sake, making it less prudentially good. A meaningful life might also require sacrifices that reduce personal well-being. Understanding these tensions can help us navigate our choices about how to live.

Is Meaning Just Well-Being in Disguise?

Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. When we examine what makes lives meaningful, we find striking similarities to what makes lives go well. Theories of both meaning and well-being come in subjective and objective varieties, appealing to overlapping goods, such as love, knowledge, achievement, and aesthetic experience. This raises an uncomfortable question: Is ‘meaning in life’ just another way of talking about well-being? Perhaps then when someone complains that their life lacks meaning, they’re really just saying it lacks important components of well-being.

Consider the parallels. Subjective theories of well-being say your life goes well when you’re satisfied, your desires are fulfilled, or you experience pleasure. Some theories of meaning make identical claims about meaningfulness. Objective theories of well-being point to goods like knowledge, love, and achievement as being valuable for the person who has them. Theories of meaning point to exactly the same goods as sources of life’s significance.

This similarity is puzzling. If meaning and well-being are genuinely distinct, why do their theories look so alike? The most obvious explanation is that they’re actually the same thing – that ‘meaning’ is just a fancy way of talking about certain aspects of well-being…

https://philosophynow.org/issues/171/The_Good_Life_Paradox

The Nobel-Winning Psychologist Who Believed He Found the Secret to Happiness

James said it first.

“My father simplified his life in terms of his daily habits,” Katherine wrote, “thus eliminating the need to make little decisions about everything.” By taking the small decisions off his plate, that simplification freed his attention for the people and work that actually mattered to him...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/12/opinion/decision-making-herbert-simon.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Happy ambition

Happy ambition

"Three Big Things" (and one huge misreading)

Beware formulae. And beware statements like: [Nietzsche said] "that there is no essence to life, so the secret is to have fun and not worry too much about it." !!

Arthur’s people, and mine

Arthur has come in for some harsh bashing lately, especially in The New Yorker. It’s not all undeserved. But I’m looking forward to his Vandy commencement and residency this year (a dear family friend is graduating) and appreciate his past contributions to happiness scholarship (and popularizing). And I share his positive feeling for ambitious and aspirational students. 

 “I was born to be a college professor and, in fact, have been on campuses since I was a baby: My dad was a professor. His dad, too. For me, academia is the family business, and mine as well since I took my first professorship nearly thirty years ago. The research is interesting and rewarding, but even more, the students are my people—ambitious strivers just starting out on what promise to be terrific careers and lives. They give me energy because they always are so inspired by ideas, so purpose-driven, and so enthusiastic.” — The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness by Arthur C. Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks to join faculty at Vanderbilt

https://news.vanderbilt.edu/2026/04/23/professor-bestselling-author-arthur-c-brooks-to-join-faculty-at-vanderbilt/

Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?

In a public statement of its intentions for its Claude chatbot, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic has said that it wants Claude to be “a genuinely good, wise and virtuous agent.” The company raised the moral stakes this month, when it announcedthat its latest A.I. model, Claude Mythos Preview, poses too great a cybersecurity threat to be widely released. Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been trying to shore up the ethical foundations of its products, working with Catholic clergy and consultingwith other prominent Christians to help foster Claude’s moral and spiritual development.

Anthropic’s intentions are admirable, but the project of drawing on religion to cultivate the ethical behavior of Claude (or any other chatbot) is likely to fail. Not because there isn’t moral wisdom in Scripture, sermons and theological treatises — texts that Claude has undoubtedly already scraped from the web and integrated — but because Claude is missing a crucial mechanism by which religion fosters moral growth: a body.

While Claude might have a mind (of sorts) that can process information, it cannot meditate, fast, prostrate itself in prayer, sing hymns in a congregation or participate in other aspects of the physical life of religion. And this makes all the difference: According to the scientific literature, it’s the practice of religion — not merely the believing in it — that brings about its characteristic benefits.

There is robust data, for example, linking religion to greater health and well-being. But that link is not strong for people who merely identify themselves as believers. It’s only when people also practice a faith — attend weekly services, pray or meditate at home — that religion’s benefits become pronounced: The more people “do” religion, the happier and healthier they tend to be...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/opinion/ai-religion-morality.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

We who “do” humanism are pretty happy & healthy too, btw.