That is an version of The Surprise Reader, a e-newsletter wherein our editors advocate a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Enroll right here to get it each Saturday morning.
While you watch an actor accepting an Oscar, or examine a superb scientist receiving an enormous prize, you may think that they’ve discovered the important thing to happiness. Who wouldn’t be joyful, dwelling life with a lot expertise or smarts? However the relationship between intelligence and happiness is sophisticated, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2023. “The presents you possess can raise you up or pull you down; all of it depends upon how you utilize them,” he defined. In the present day’s e-newsletter explores learn how to make the most of your abilities and smarts so as to add pleasure to your life, quite than letting them chip away at what truly makes the times significant.
On Happiness and Intelligence
How Sensible Folks Can Cease Being Depressing
By Arthur C. Brooks
Intelligence could make you happier, however provided that you see it as greater than a software to get forward. (From 2023)
Easy methods to Need Much less
By Arthur C. Brooks
The key to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, cash, or stuff. (From 2022)
A New Understanding of Human Beings’ Most Primary Need
By John Kaag
The thinker Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s newest guide appears to be like past happiness because the objective of a well-lived life.
Nonetheless Curious?
- Why so many good individuals aren’t joyful: It’s a paradox, Joe Pinsker wrote in 2016: Shouldn’t probably the most completed be properly outfitted to make decisions that maximize life satisfaction?
- A brand new formulation for happiness: The happiness we search might require investing sooner than we predict—and will assist us align our expectations and actuality on the finish of life. (From 2022)
Different Diversions
PS
Each week, I ask readers to share a photograph of one thing that sparks their sense of awe on the earth. “A driver unknowingly leaves behind a factor of magnificence in recent snow,” Jane P., 60, from Portland, Oregon, writes.
I’ll proceed to characteristic your responses within the coming weeks.
— Isabel
