Finland Says It Can Teach Tourists to Be Happy. Challenge Accepted.

LISTEN https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/travel/finland-happiness-challenge.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Santos

Laurie Santos, Yale's resident well-being expert and teacher of the most popular course in the university's 300-year history, reveals what it means to live a good life—and shares some books that might help us get within reach of one.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/DH04k7TpgLQ?xmt=AQGzYXbURwPDtZE5B0l7CgJgYbjd-pClRcCYgviogixQ-Q

Stoic happiness

"The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things." — Epictetus

Laurie Santos’s faves

Many of us struggle to figure out what truly makes us happy. That's why I was thrilled to chat with The New Yorker about my favorite happiness books:

- "Stumbling on Happiness" by Dan Gilbert
- "The Power of Fun" by Catherine Price
- "The Book of Delights" by Ross Gay
- "The Stoic Challenge" by William B. Irvine
- "Four Thousand Weeks" by Oliver Burkema

Read the article: https://loom.ly/hQ47hJ8

https://www.threads.net/@lauriesantosofficial/post/DHv8m6lMQJP?xmt=AQGz5rqedwuIqWo7q01sxiAZ7t8jnGubnJxXvIo-cbhXkA

A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible

"… It is a great and underappreciated talent — the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they're not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them..."

David Brooks 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/opinion/persistence-work-difficulty.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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