Vice reports: At the beginning of 2022, a TikTok video of a tearful woman talking about friendship and loneliness made the rounds on Twitter. “I have people who love me and who care about me but it was so clear that I’m a Tier 2 or a Tier 3 friend and that resulted in me having to spend the last two years literally alone [during lockdown],” she says. “I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what did…
Arthur C. Brooks writes: Here’s some very bad happiness advice based on very solid happiness research: Feel important. Be happily married. Be Danish. Depending on how happiness is measured, all of these things really are associated with a happier life. But they’re unhelpful because they are not actionable in any practical way. Very few people slap their foreheads and say, “It all makes sense now—I thought a tense, angry marriage was the secret to happiness, but it isn’t!” This is…
Joshua Hicks and Frank Martela write: When we think about lives filled with meaning, we often focus on people whose grand contributions benefited humanity. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela surely felt they had a worthwhile life. But how about us ordinary people, toiling away in a typical existence? Many scholars agree that a subjectively meaningful existence often boils down to three factors: the feeling that one’s life is coherent and “makes sense,” the possession of clear…
The Observer reports: It was freezing cold the day Neil Laybourn saw a man in a T-shirt sitting on a high ledge on Waterloo Bridge and made a split-second decision that would change both their lives for ever. “It’s hard to pin down what it was that made me stop… but it would have played on my mind if I hadn’t,” he said. “That’s not how you live your life is it? You don’t just walk past when you see…
David P. Barash writes: Who feels more pain, a person or a cat? A cat or a cockroach? It’s widely assumed animal intelligence and the capacity to feel pain are positively correlated, with brainier animals more likely to feel pain, and vice versa. But what if our intuition is wrong and the opposite is true? Perhaps animals that are less intelligent feel not only as much pain but even more. Thinking about pain is psychologically challenging. It can be, well,…
Arthur C Brooks writes: Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain, summed up a life of worldly success at about age 70: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.” And the payoff? “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to…
Lori Marino writes: We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our…
David B Feldman and Benjamin W Corn write: Hope is not wishful thinking, optimism, or ‘the power of positive thinking’. There’s nothing wrong with being optimistic, of course. Research shows that optimism is associated with many beneficial outcomes. But that doesn’t mean it’s the same as hope. The Cambridge Dictionary defines optimism as ‘the feeling that in the future good things are more likely to happen than bad things’. The influential psychologists Charles Carver and Michael Scheier, who have built…
Ian Stewart writes: In Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), the mathematician Hari Seldon forecasts the collapse of the Galactic Empire using psychohistory: a calculus of the patterns that occur in the reaction of the mass of humanity to social and economic events. Initially put on trial for treason, on the grounds that his prediction encourages said collapse, Seldon is permitted to set up a research group on a secluded planet. There, he investigates how to minimise the destruction and reduce…
Judith Hoare writes: [Dr Claire] Weekes distilled her understanding of ‘nervous illness’ into a six-word mantra for overcoming anxiety: face, accept, float, let time pass. In Self-Help for Your Nerves, she said that sufferers usually spent their time counterproductively: Running away, not facing. Fighting, not accepting. Arresting and ‘listening in’, not floating past. Being impatient with time, not letting time pass. The nervously ill person usually notices each new symptom in alarm, listens-in in apprehension, and yet at the same…
Johann Hari writes: I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview Prof Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems, and he told me we need to ask if we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture” – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us. When I asked him what he would do if he was in charge of our culture and he actually wanted to…
Ariana Orvell writes: In the 2nd century CE, in the sunset of his life, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius began recording meditations on how he had lived. The questions he asked himself are the same ones many of us find ourselves asking today: how does a person live a meaningful life? How does one find resilience in the face of suffering? What does it mean to be happy? Aurelius did not intend for Meditations to be read by others, allowing…
Luke D Smillie and Milan Andrejević write: Although many moral views seem somewhat universal – most would agree that it’s generally wrong to end someone’s life – people often disagree on how to weight and prioritise different values. For instance, some would argue that ending a person’s life can be morally justifiable when other values are taken into consideration (such as in cases of voluntary assisted dying), while others would strongly disagree. Why do people routinely arrive at a different…
Alessandro Monti writes: Think back to a recent episode in which you felt as if you were being true to yourself. How would you describe what you did? Perhaps you would say that you ‘trusted your guts’ or ‘followed your heart’, rather than ‘thinking with your head’. You might also assume that these idioms involving the guts or the heart belong to an outdated folklore – that they are a poetic rather than a scientific expression of what’s happening when…
Joel E Dimsdale writes: In 1937, the longtime Bolshevik leader Georgy Pyatakov was tried in Moscow for treason, sabotage and other alleged crimes against the Soviet Union. He gave a false confession, declaring: ‘Here I stand before you in filth, crushed by my own crimes, bereft of everything through my own fault, a man who has lost his Party, who has no friends, who has lost his family, who has lost his very self.’ He was executed for his alleged…
Zaria Gorvett writes: One balmy autumn day in 2014, David Reynolds stood up to speak at an important meeting. It was taking place in Chicago City Hall – a venue so grand, it’s embellished with marble stairways, 75ft (23m) classical columns, and vaulted ceilings. As the person in charge of pest management in the city’s public buildings, among other things, Reynolds was there to discuss his annual budget. But soon after he began, an imposter appeared on one of the…