The first-ever Well Festival, hosted by the Well desk of The New York Times, runs from 9:30 a.m. Eastern to 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday. A livestream is available here. Below is the full schedule and a brief description of each of the 13 panels, covering love and relationships, the quest for joy, facing adversity, protecting…
Part of this transformation can be traced to the shift from Hutcheson’s moralized happiness principle to Jeremy Bentham’s more radically subjective one, which gained traction in the early 19th century. Bentham’s version of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” recast happiness as an arithmetic of feelings, something that could, in theory, be measured and…
This weekend, my colleagues at The New York Times Magazine are publishing a special issue all about happiness: how to define it, discover it and increase it. In particular, I loved a quiz called, “What Makes You Happy?” I had fun answering the questions, but it also made me think. It turns out that happiness…
When Lyubomirsky arrived at graduate school for social psychology at Stanford in 1989, academic research on happiness was only beginning to gain legitimacy. Ed Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who would eventually be known for his work in the field, waited until he was granted tenure before tackling the subject,…
The ferry ride from Helsinki’s city center to the island of Pihlajasaari takes only 10 minutes and deposits visitors at a playground of beaches, trails and rocky shoals excellent for sunbathing. But I had a different mission: to speak to a tree. This was meant to be a therapeutic exercise, one championed by the Finnish…
