Starved for meaning

Arthur Brooks says we are starving our right brains of love, meaning, mystery, purpose, and (thus) our whole selves of happiness… https://youtu.be/rSJQf72jlGA?is=rylTWtsfMI0oNQnx

Is “feeling loved” the key?

Sonja Lyubomirsky has been a leading researcher on the science of happiness for decades. And for just as long, people have asked her: What is the secret?

Dr. Lyubomirsky, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside, has always chafed at this question. The secret to happiness? How ridiculous and reductive.

When pressed, she told me she tends to say something along the lines of: “Connection and relationships. Positive thinking, which includes gratitude. And a sense of control in your life.”

But if she really had to choose one thing, she said, the secret to happiness is “feeling loved.”

That’s the premise of her latest book, “How to Feel Loved,” out today, which she co-wrote with Harry Reis, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who studies close relationships...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/10/well/lyubomirsky-reis-how-to-feel-loved.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

“Why should I strive for happiness?”

Looking forward to John Kaag’s October 2 MTSU Lyceum visit, when I’m sure he’ll affirm the possibility of happiness in work. I’ve decided we’ll read this book in Existentialism just before he arrives (and we’ll read how William James saved his life in CoPhi then, too).

“For Nietzsche, I consoled myself, the point was not about avoiding or even conquering suffering: he recognized, like so many philosophers before him, that suffering was a fundamental fact of human existence. But the ascetic response to suffering was to understand it as a complaint about life. My challenge—the challenge Nietzsche raises—was to embrace life with all its suffering. When he wrote, at the very end of his career, “Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified,” he meant to show that suffering does not refute life as we experience it but must be welcomed, embraced, in exactly the same way we welcome and embrace happiness. In fact, Nietzsche often sounds as though happiness is at best a kind of secondary goal. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most famous character, having spent his life in the mountains, concludes: “Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work.””

— Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John J. Kaag
https://a.co/02BXPDFc

A Happy Death by Albert Camus

“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1591380-la-mort-heureuse

“The best minds of my generation…”

…There is a war for the brightest students in America. And for decades, one side has vastly outspent the other. Every year, the consulting firms, the banks, the law firms and the venture capitalists pour fortunes into recruiting top graduates. As one early Facebook employee famously put it: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

…

https://open.substack.com/pub/rutgerbregman/p/these-harvard-students-dont-want?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

In the presence of hope

“Trudeau has produced a steady stream of fierce social criticism for nearly sixty years and has no intention of changing his tune anytime soon. He remains an eternal optimist who vows to continue to make the most of whatever breathing room he is given. As the cartoonist emphasizes, “It’s a lot easier to get through the day in the presence of hope.””

— Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography: The Cartoonist Who Turned the News into Art by Joshua Kendall
https://a.co/0crdHVEP

Defiant optimism

… Humans are future-oriented creatures. Not being able to look ahead deprives us of what matters most. Data collected in an ongoing study on people’s well-being showed that young adults across the world score low not just on happiness but on eudaemonistic well-being, including meaning, purpose and fulfilling relationships.

As an adolescent, I took solace in the saying “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” This aphorism, often attributed to Martin Luther, wasn’t about the joy of digging holes. It represented defiant optimism in the face of uncertainty. In the hardest moments of my youth, my goals gave me dignity and agency. When the present felt unbearable, my aspirations allowed me to transcend my surroundings. I think about sitting in the back seat of my rusty car, clutching an SAT book. I still bear the scars of my work ethic; I wish I’d known, like today’s youth, how to give myself more grace. But I also wish they understood how the dream itself illuminated the path a few feet ahead of me, until I stood on solid ground.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/opinion/gen-z-ambition-millennials-career.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

“it is important to activate the part of your brain that is happy about something”

Linda Holmes was an apostate Phillies fan who only recently returned to fandom for her team, and for baseball. I think she rationalizes it well here, somewhat echoing Roger Angell’s point about the crucial importance of caring— even for something as trivial as the flight of a ball or the fate of professional sports team—as a consistent feature of life.* 

“So, here’s the big question: Does this new daily, super-intense fanhood make you happy? Absolutely. The other day, when the Phillies had that walk-off hit, I said to one of the other Phillies fans: “I had honestly started to think that nothing good could happen.” And that applied both to that specific baseball game and to my team in general and in the world, right? I don’t ever want to be misunderstood as if I’m saying: “If your baseball team wins, that makes up for horrible things going on in the world.” Not true. However, I do think it is important to activate the part of your brain that is happy about something. And to keep that part of your brain active and alive. And even if it’s a little bit artificial compared to so many other things, I think it’s really important to activate those brain chemicals, really important to remember that sometimes things are fun and exciting. Sometimes, I can feel excited and happy.”

 — Big Fan: Two Friends, 82,490 Miles, and the Wild, Wonderful Sports We Love by Michael Schur, Joe Posnanski https://a.co/0gkG3PNy

==

*“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.” Five Seasons

Shallow Surfacemaxxers

Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare

…some have responded by seizing the female obsession with looks, already rooted in misogyny, and rebranding it with maximum toxicity—in other words, by becoming looksmaxxers.

Looksmaxxing is a product of the men’s-rights movement, whose adherents previously gathered in fringe corners of the internet, where they solidified their reactionary community around the conviction that women do not deserve equal rights. Now much of their thinking has infiltrated nu-conservatism, and the rest of us have been forced to learn about Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular—the king of the looksmaxxing sphere. Peters, who is twenty, looks like a hot guy in a fraternity; his most remarkable traits are his obsessive commitment to achieving this beauty—he’s used peptides, supplements, meth, hammers—and the total lack of joy it seems to bring him. (“I have, like, no regard for, like, my happiness,” he said recently, on a podcast. “Like, that seems like a very immature idea.” A few months later, he collapsed at a club after a suspected overdose.) The table of contents on the message board looksmax.org enumerates every aspect of the male physique and life style that can be quantified and improved: more than a dozen sections (Eye Area, Craniology, Penis, etc.) broken into even more arcane subtopics (“Limbal Rings Influence Facial Attractiveness,” “The Falio of a Recessed Anterior Nasal Spine”). It goes without saying, or perhaps can be gleaned from the word “craniology,” that looksmaxxers view race, sexuality, and disability from roughly the same vantage point as that of an early-twentieth-century eugenicist…

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/our-plastic-surgery-nightmare

Happy credo

If It’s not the only good, it’s still one of the better ones. “While I am opposed to all orthodox creeds, I have a creed myself; and my creed is this. Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so. The creed is somewhat short, but it is long enough for this life, strong enough for this world. If there is another world, when we get there we can make another creed.” — Robert Ingersoll Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought