LRN CLSTR: Happiness: Books

Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Together with Dr. Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life's obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace.

In this book the author presents his concept of what well-being really is and explains the four pillars of well-being (meaning and purpose, positive emotions, relationships, and accomplishment), placing emphasis on meaning and purpose as the most important for achieving a life of fulfillment. Traditionally, the goal of psychology has been to relieve human suffering, but the goal of the Positive Psychology movement, which the author has led for fifteen years, is different. It is about actually raising the bar for the human condition.

Drawing on new research in psychology, neuroscience, and economics, the authors of Happiness and the Law assess how the law affects people's quality of life--and how it can do so in a better way. More broadly, the book proposes a comprehensive approach to assessing human welfare--well-being analysis--that is a valuable alternative to the strictly economically based cost-benefit analyses currently dominating how we evaluate public policy.

Happiness in World History traces ideas and experiences of happiness from early stages in human history, to the maturation of agricultural societies and their religious and philosophical systems, to the changes and diversities in the approach to happiness in the modern societies that began to emerge in the 18th century. In this thorough overview, Peter N. Stearns explores the interaction between psychological and historical findings about happiness, the relationship between ideas and popular experience, and the opportunity to use historical analysis to assess strengths and weaknesses of dominant contemporary notions of happiness.

The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others. Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the "happiness duty," the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy.

Happiness is on China's agenda. From Xi Jinping's ""Chinese Dream"" to online chat forums, the conspicuous references to happiness are hard to miss. This groundbreaking volume analyzes how different social groups make use of the concept and shows how closely official discourses on happiness are intertwined with popular sentiments.

In this smart and timely book, the distinguished moral philosopher Sissela Bok ponders the nature of happiness and its place in philosophical thinking and writing throughout the ages.

This book presents a fresh exploration of happiness through the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers. It introduces readers to the main currents of Greek ethical thought (Socratic living, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, Stoicism, Cynicism). It also attempts to show how certain common themes in Greek thought are essential for living a happy life in any age.

The promise of America has long been conceived as the promise of happiness. Being American is all about the opportunity to pursue one's own bliss. But what is the good life, and are we getting closer to its attainment?

In 2014, when the Russian-Latvian radio talk-show host Aleks Dubas started asking his celebrity guests to describe a personal "moment of happiness" in their lives, the results were unexpectedly frank and exhilarating. Soon the project expanded to include submissions from 2 million listeners. This book holds a collection of dozens of mini-stories about human joy.