People are writing blog posts about plans, goals, resolutions and such. I am reminded that like a plan that manifests some eccentricity by this guy who resolved a year ago to spend a year without getting into a car. Nice. After the revolution all media outlets will be required to report on some happy local who [...]
Giving donations is fraught with frictions of all kinds. For example my wife and I once gave some money to a nonprofit only to suffer a year of verysolicitations for more money. I think this is just amazingly and delightful. Giving Anonymously is a small nonprofit in Washington state that facilitates giving money to others [...]
Fun video by Barry Swartz author of “The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less”. Why choice makes people miserable: regret over the choice not taken, and fear of that future regret, the cost of managing a portfolio of options, the benchmark for success is raised higher, i.e. expectations escalate self blame, when the [...]
“study shows that health benefits follow from just 2 minutes of written expression. Certainly these results do not mean that spending more time expressing emotion is bad but they do show that the minimum dosage required may be lower than previously thought.” — Burton and King What we really want to know: “Is 140 characters [...]
There is a lesson here: Abstract. Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive wines slightly [...]
I read Seligman’s Authentic Happiness some time ago. He has an interesting hypothesis. The idea is that the negative emotions (fear, envy, greed, etc.) are about scarcity (win-lose) while the positive emotions are about more collective constructions (win-win). It is a bit difficult to discern which ideas in this book are well validated by good [...]
AOL recently released a huge sample of search engine queries. In a highly questionable move they tied these queries to reasonably anonomous user identifiers; for example we know that user known as #724 searched for “how to install a glue down floor”, as well as “carbol tunnel” etc. He did 366 searchs between March 1st [...]
I haven’t posted anything in my happiness category for a long time, isn’t that sad? One of those postings is about a syndrome I named stuff addiction. News on that front. It might be worse than I thought: the brain systems for liking and wanting are separate. … a drug like nicotine produces much craving [...]
A friend of mine floated a cool idea regarding humor. We all know that humor comes in various species: irony, farce, slapstick, etc. etc. But we lack a scale of how skilled a bit of humor is. There is a world of difference between the appropriate bit of humor inserted into a cocktail party and [...]
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