Our lives are in the space between Isaiah Berlin’s We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss and Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, where every choice produces a quantum e...
One study estimated that people spend about one-fourth of their waking time resisting some aspect of desire—most commonly, the urge to eat, to sleep, to grab some leisure, and to pursue some kind of s...
One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.
Often, when we try repeatedly to form a habit that we desire, we fail because we want to reap its benefits without paying the price it demands. I think constantly of that stark line from John Gardner,...
Of course it's not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy, and all the rest. But for me, ask...
Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one’s entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship. You
Novelist Jean Rhys observed, One is born either to go with or to go against.
My home should calm me and energize me. It should be a comforting, quiet refuge and a place of excitement and possibility. It should call to my mind the past, the present, and the future. It should be...
My happiness project was both. I wanted to perfect my character, but given my nature, that would probably involve charts, deliverables, to-do lists, new vocabulary terms, and compulsive note taking.
Keeping a good habit costs us: it may cost time, energy, and money, and it may mean forgoing pleasures and opportunities—but not keeping a good habit also has its cost. So which cost do we want to pay...
I’ve learned to resist my inclination to meet an expectation unthinkingly, and to ask, Why am I meeting this expectation, anyway?
It’s been freeing to focus on what works for me rather than what’s wrong with me.
It’s a very unsettling and interesting exercise to think about the people in my life and to imagine myself in a minor, supporting role. How do I fit into their fates? Am I helping?
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: If I give more to myself, I can ask more from myself. Self-regard isn’t selfish.
It was interesting to have a better sense of my daily habits
Information, consequences, choice. Without lectures or micro-management or rescue.
In general, happiness doesn’t make people want to drink daiquiris on the beach; it makes them want to help rural villagers gain better access to clean water.
In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a...
In The First 20 Minutes, Gretchen Reynolds notes, I stand on one foot when I brush my teeth at night.
If we want something to count in our lives, we should figure out a way to count it.