Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Celebrating everyday happiness

A Private History of Happiness: Ninety-Nine Moments of Joy from Around the World by George Myerson-
a remarkable compendium of seemingly unremarkable yet powerful moments of everyday bliss culled from several millennia of personal correspondence and journals by famous poets, artists, scientists, philosophers, novelists, and other thinkers, aiming to “show the enduring value and beauty of ordinary human happiness as we find it in passing moments.” What emerges is a refreshing celebration of happiness encrusted not in the bombastic language of our self-help pop psychology culture, but in the quiet humility of the real, the lived, the timeless human experience..."
From Ptolemy to George Eliot to William Blake, Celebrating the Private History of Everyday Happiness | Brain Pickings

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The pursuit of happiness a recipe for neurosis?

"Since moving to the States just shy of a year ago, I have had more conversations about my own happiness than in the whole rest of my life. The subject comes up in the park pushing swings alongside a mother I met moments before, with the man behind the fish counter in the supermarket, with my gym instructor and with our baby sitter, who arrives to put our son to bed armed with pamphlets about a nudist happiness retreat in Northern California. While the British way can be drainingly negative, The American approach to happiness can spur a debilitating anxiety. The initial sense of promise and hope is seductive, but it soon gives way to a nagging slow-burn feeling of inadequacy. Am I happy? Happy enough? As happy as everyone else? Could I be doing more about it? Even basic contentment feels like failure when pitched against capital-H Happiness. The goal is so elusive and hard to define, it’s impossible to pinpoint when it’s even been achieved — a recipe for neurosis..."

America the Anxious - NYTimes.com