Author Topic: Oh, the sweet bird of happiness finally looks like it's in the bag!  (Read 3189 times)

Joe Carillo

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It looks like finding happiness need not be an exercise in futility after all. After 40 years of collecting data, a scholarly social science survey in the United States has definitely established that happiness springs from three major sources: genes, events, and values. With this knowledge and applying a few simple rules, people then can actually improve their lives and the lives of those around them.

BRIAN REA – THE NEW YORK TIMES

In “A Formula for Happiness,” an article that appeared in the December 14, 2013 issue of The New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks, president of the policy think-tank American Enterprise Institute, reports that the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey has found that about half of happiness is genetically determined, and that up to an additional 40 percent comes from the things that have occurred in our recent past.


THE LEGENDARY BLUEBIRD OF HAPPINESS
 

That, based on the survey that started in 1972, leaves a balance of just about 12 percent. “That might not sound like much,” Brooks observes, “but the good news is that we can bring that 12 percent under our control. It turns out that choosing to pursue four basic values of faith, family, community and work is the surest path to happiness, given that a certain percentage is genetic and not under our control in any way.”

Read Arthur C. Brooks’ “A Formula for Happiness” in The New York Times now!

OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:

Game changer. In “The Letter That Changed the Course of Modern Fiction,” an article that came out in the December 15, 2013 issue of The Daily Beast, book author and music critic Ted Gioia postulates that a single piece of unsolicited mail—sent on December 15, 1913 or 100 years ago—changed the course of English literature. That was when the American writer Ezra Pound, searching for new talent, reached out to a then 30-year-old James Joyce, a struggling Irish author in Trieste who had been facing rejection after rejection during the previous decade. That letter would put Joyce on the road to fame with the serialization of his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in a fashionable literary journal under Pound’s auspices, culminating in the publication of Joyce’s landmark novel Ulysses.

Read Ted Gioia’s “The Letter That Changed the Course of Modern Fiction” in The Daily Beast now!

Energizing math and science learning. An advocacy piece by the editorial board of The New York Times, “Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?”, presents the case of an innovative new high school in Brooklyn that energizes math and science students and links them directly to the tech industry—a promising breakthrough from American students’ profound lack of interest in the subjects abetted by incompetent teachers following outdated curriculums and textbooks.

Read “Who Says Math Has to Be Boring?” in The New York Times now!
« Last Edit: April 10, 2017, 11:41:19 AM by Joe Carillo »