Sane and happy

“Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am sincerely happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind (and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). 

Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and un-happy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future.”

—Arthur C. Clarke 

Colombo, Sri Lanka September 19, 1996

3001: The Final Odyssey Valediction/afterword
https://a.co/0aG1eeZZ

“the pursuit of happiness” had become the pursuit of riches

Hannah Arendt’s American Education

…Thomas Jefferson’s “pursuit of happiness” retained an older sense of “public happiness,” the pleasure of participating in town meetings, councils, and congresses. That meaning faded, however, and “the pursuit of happiness” had become the pursuit of riches and, eventually, consumerism as a way of life…

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/17/hannah-arendt-life-of-the-mind-thomas-meyer-book-review-an-admirable-woman-arthur-cohen

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