“You must not give up on being happy”

She Survived Mass Rape. Now, She's Speaking Out to Build a Better Future.

…Her story, perhaps, offers victims a different path for survival. Her message, she says, is not that they can forget everything, but "you can choose what to do with it all." The title of her book, in French, is "The Joy of Life."
…
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/gisele-pelicot-interview-hymn-to-life.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Conditions

"To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy is to set your own conditions to the events of each day. To do this is to condition circumstances, instead of being conditioned by them."
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Epicureans knew this too

"We've all experienced it: that Sunday evening moment when you emerge from an hour of phone scrolling with nothing to show for it but a vague hollow feeling. Not quite anxiety, not quite sadness—just the sense that something essential is missing. This feeling, paradoxically, defines our era of unprecedented abundance.

We live with more information, entertainment, and choices than any generation in history. Yet loneliness, anxiety, and existential confusion continue to rise. The question pressing on so many minds isn't "How do I get more?" but rather "What's it all for?" The convergence of ancient Buddhist wisdom and contemporary psychological research offers surprising—and surprisingly similar—answers

What Eight Decades of Research Reveals

Since 1938, Harvard researchers have tracked 724 individuals through their entire adult lives, conducting thousands of interviews and hundreds of medical assessments. Now continuing with their descendants, the Harvard Study of Adult Development represents the longest scientific investigation of happiness ever conducted. After 85 years, the conclusion is remarkably straightforward: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Not wealth, not fame, not achievement—the quality of our connections with others predicts both physical and mental wellbeing as we age.

This finding would have resonated deeply with the Buddha, who identified tanha—the endless craving and reaching toward the next thing—as the root of human suffering 2,500 years ago. Without research grants or brain scans, he recognized our fundamental confusion about where happiness actually resides…"

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertwaldinger/p/beyond-the-scroll?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude