happiness

Planning for Happiness: Four Tips for the Happiness-Resistant

Shit will happen. And it will happen on its own timetable. There is absolutely nothing any of us can do about that. We can prepare for the worst. We can try to accrue savings accounts (I’ve often failed at this). We can nurture the friendships that nurture us. We can be responsible with our healthContinue reading “Planning for Happiness: Four Tips for the Happiness-Resistant”

Happiness Comes from the Shadows

Yesterday my coworkers and I were discussing Swedish thrillers and horror movies. “Yeah,” one of them said. “Sure, it’s one of the happiest places on earth. But what’s really behind all that happiness?” We each had our hypotheses. Mine was that alongside that highly developed happiness, there is also a highly developed id. But then,Continue reading “Happiness Comes from the Shadows”

The Gentleness of Contentment

It tiptoes in so lightly you hardly notice it. Not if you’re accustomed to gyrating mosh pits and rock stars screaming into sound systems that boom through stadiums. Not even if you’ve simply learned to read a paperback novel over friends shouting about Jane’s breakup across city streets or have learned to carry on conversationsContinue reading “The Gentleness of Contentment”

I remember the optimism of going home to someone. And how, months after the divorce, a part of me still lived back there on Roy Street. Waking to the sunrise in my attic room and thinking it was really from the second-story bay window there. How grief and change can displace one like that. AndContinue reading “Happiness”

Standard of Living

I hear a lot of talk these days about our standard of living. Everyone has something to say about it. Parents worry about their children coming out of college. Will they get a job? What sort of standard of living will this generation experience, entering the workforce already deeply in debt? Cosmopolitans worry that theContinue reading “Standard of Living”