Early autumn re-runs: Whither happiness?
Sunday 10 January 2021
This post seemed initially on 29 October 2008 and it is about a piece of writing in The Atlantic I'd read on a flight home the day before. Two years later, I consider the item's factors often. Now it's some sort of writing. I checked and the hyperlink nevertheless works.
On a associated subject matter, and before I dive returned into the arena of residential layout, there may be a top notch article in this month's Atlantic mag. Paul Bloom wrote a notion-scary piece at the intersection of Philosophy and Psychology. I examine it on my flight domestic to Florida the opposite day and it's been lodged in my fore brain ever since. Read his paintings right here.
But what’s more exciting, I think, is the emergence of a different perspective on happiness itself. We used to think that the hard part of the question “How can I be happy?” had to do with nailing down the definition ofhappy. But it may have more to do with the definition ofI. Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another. This theory might explain certain puzzles of everyday life, such as why addictions and compulsions are so hard to shake off, and why we insist on spending so much of our lives in worlds —like TV shows and novels and virtual-reality experiences—that don’t actually exist.