Bringing good things into your life, whether love, career success, or something else, usually involves risk. Risk doesn’t necessarily make us happy, and a risky life is going to bring disappointment. But it can also bring bigger rewards than a life played safe.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Risk
Enjoyment of life—whether that means spending “unproductive” time with others, reading a good book, or taking a long walk—has a loftier significance than good feelings do. It is important for human agency, a life lived on purpose. Enjoyment means refusing to be managed by pleasures, nor subjugated by joyless drudgery. Pursuing it is a declaration of independence from your base impulses, be they licentious or … [ Read more ]
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subject: Personal Improvement
Enjoyment and pleasure are terms often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Pleasure happens to you; enjoyment is something that you create through your own effort. Pleasure is the lightheadedness you get from a bit of grain alcohol; enjoyment is the satisfaction of a good wine, properly understood. Pleasure is addictive and animal; enjoyment is elective and human.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Without even realizing it, many internet users mistakenly assume that cyberattackers follow conventional rules of behavior. People try to reason with trolls or appeal to their better nature. These responses are similar to how you might approach a friend who’s inadvertently insulted you, or a family member who disagrees with you about something important. But trolls are not like your loved ones, and research shows … [ Read more ]
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Social Media
How a chance encounter on a plane sparked a quest to uncover life’s meaning. Arthur C. Brooks shares research-grounded tips to help your happiness levels soar.
Authors: Arthur C. Brooks, Suzanne Hogseth | Source: IESE Insight (May2025) | Subjects: Career, Happiness, Personal Improvement
Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the tedious quotidian travails of life, and put events—including inevitable suffering—into perspective… He did not insist that his spiritual path was the only one… and allowed that even a nonreligious, purely philosophical attitude could do. But everyone, he thought, should have … [ Read more ]
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Religion
Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The people who are happiest with their lives encounter plenty of suffering too. They don’t seek it, but they also do not consider it to be some sort of sickness; nor are they afraid of it. On the contrary, they know that suffering is necessary to learn and grow. Research shows that experiences of sadness can improve memory, judgment, motivation, and goodness toward others.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Experience, Happiness, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
The author David Brooks … notes in his recent book, How to Know a Person … that a lot of people are “Diminishers,” self-involved to the point that others feel small and unseen. Such Diminishers do this by speaking primarily about themselves—something that, studies show, most people do often—and by failing to ask questions. Brooks contrasts Diminishers with “Illuminators,” who are persistently curious about others, … [ Read more ]
Authors: Arthur C. Brooks, David Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Character, Psychology | Behavior
True independence involves release from the subjugation of personal urges and weaknesses. We must stand up to our destructive desires to spend more than we have, to drink more than we should, to admire our own image, to fritter away our time, to seek the admiration of others.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
When life becomes tedious to you, [Søren Kierkegaard] argued, you don’t need to look outside for something to shake up your malaise. You need instead to look inward and find what’s missing within your own heart and soul.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We have what we call a negativity bias. That means we literally have more brain space reserved for negative emotions than we have for positive emotions. Why? Positive emotions are nice to have. Negative emotions will keep you alive.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
Unhappiness and happiness are not opposites. They’re largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. Happiness is not an absence of unhappiness nor vice versa. On the contrary, you need both happy and unhappy, negative and positive emotions all the time.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Happiness, Psychology | Behavior
You want money, power, pleasure, and fame. That’s what you want, right? If you make those things the goals, you’re in trouble. You’re in trouble. The goals are faith, family, friends, and work that serves. You can use money, power, pleasure, and fame but only as a springboard to those other things.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The real formula for satisfaction that endures is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want. Haves divided by wants.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
[Happiness is] enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning or purpose. And if you get this this enjoyment thing wrong, you’re going to get addiction. Anything that you do that feels good and you’re doing it alone again and again and again and again, [is] addiction, not happiness. Add people. Add memories. That’s the point.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Emotions are not good things and bad things. Positive and negative emotions are simply information about the outside world. You need your negative emotions because in the Pleistocene you’d be hunted down by a saber tooth tiger. And today without your negative emotions, you’d get run over by a car.
You need negative emotions. And that means you can’t be happy. What you can be with … [ Read more ]
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
We can manage our emotions by thinking about them, understanding them, getting space between what we feel and what we decide to do.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness and feelings are related, but feelings are evidence of happiness… You have to understand that those feelings that you have, they’re related to something tangible that you can understand, that you can actually manage.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior