Waldinger on happiness

 

A message from the William James Society

Enjoy your summer AND help ameliorate our world: we at the William James Society approve this message. wjsociety.org … @wjsociety.bsky.social

https://substack.com/@philoliver/note/c-137901371?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

New you

Writer Olga Khazan felt stuck—anxious, overworked, and joyless—so she set out to redesign her personality. In her book "Me, But Better," she explores how stepping outside her comfort zone changed her life, and how science says personality isn't as fixed as we think.

https://cbsn.ws/4kLyEtS

The carousel of happiness

Amid the chaos of Vietnam, Marine Corporal Scott Harrison clung to a vision of a carousel in a mountain meadow. Decades later, he brought it to life in Colorado. Now, his Carousel of Happiness spins to spread joy.

https://cbsn.ws/4eZ8G4E

Experience: the real thing

… Croesus thought that his wealth and royal blood made him the happiest man in the world, but Solon disabused him, pointing out that if – given the brevity of human life – he really wished to be happy, he should think seriously about what would make him so. 'Call no man happy until he is dead,' Solon said, meaning one of two things: that you cannot estimate whether a life was happy until it is complete, all its triumphs and sorrows counted to see which has the majority; or, that life is so full of suffering that its absence is the greater blessing. This latter interpretation is suggested by Solon's mention of the youthful brothers Cleobis and Biton, whose mother Cydippe begged Hera the Queen of the Gods to give them the greatest gift possible, whereupon Hera immediately gave them an easeful death.

I tell my students all this, and they shrug their shoulders; when young we are immortal; old Greeks and old age mean nothing. So I ask them how many months, at age 20, they have already had; those who can multiply are shocked to find that 20x12 = 240. 240 out of 960! Worse, out of the 620 waking months! Having thus secured their attention, I tell them the good news, speaking ex officio as a chair-holding Professor of Philosophy, that there is no such thing as time. By this I mean that the real thing is experience, not time; that time is elastic around experience, so the more experience you have, the more time you have. Here are two proofs: (1) Go for a romantic weekend with someone you really fancy to somewhere really lovely, and while you are there you are there forever; yet on the Monday after your return the weekend will seem to have passed in a flash. (2) If you do exactly the same thing at every moment of every day – rise at the same hour, eat the same breakfast, read the same words on the same page, etc., over and over, all your days, how many days do you live? One.

It follows that to live richly in experience, with enthusiasm, with passion, with goals to strive for and mountains to climb, you live not 960 months but 960 lifetimes, or more. Why waste time scrolling your phone, arguing, hungover, regretting without learning from regrets?
…

A.C. Grayling
https://open.substack.com/pub/acgrayling/p/a-thousand-months?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Will we let AI decide for us?

Philosopher-Builders will not…

https://youtu.be/H_g0RSSo0ho?si=M18OIVYFVQzXWTTN

Meaning

"So the insights are: firstly, emotions matter to thinking about how you should live your life, and, secondly, the brain matters to thinking about emotions."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/paul-thagard-meaning-of-life/

In the way

There's always a sunrise and always a sunset and it's up to you to choose to be there for it,' said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty." -Cheryl Strayed

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