#CURL MEANDER CROSSWORD HOW TO#

But if you make an effort to understand human happiness, formulate a plan to apply what you learn to your life, execute on it, and share what you learn with others, happiness will almost surely follow. Focusing on your dissatisfaction and wishing things were different in your life is a recipe for unhappiness if you don’t take action to put yourself on a better path. In truth, happiness requires effort, not just desire. Read: Four rules for identifying your life’s work This is not evidence that she can’t become happier, or that her wishes are bringing her down.

No doubt she wishes she were happier-but for whatever reason, she doesn’t do the work to improve her circumstances. Think of your friend who complains about her job every day but never tries to find a new one. More to the point, wishing you were happier does not mean that you are working to improve your happiness. For example, unhappy people might say they “value happiness” more than those who already possess it, just as hungry people value food more than those who are full. At first, this would seem to support the happiness paradox-that thinking about it makes it harder to get. For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 found that valuing happiness was associated with lower moods, less well-being, and more depressive symptoms under conditions of low life stress. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.” This is basically a restatement of the Stoic philosophers’ “paradox of happiness”: To attain happiness, we must not try to attain it.Ī number of scholars have set out to test this claim. I n his 1851 work American Notebooks, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally.

#CURL MEANDER CROSSWORD HOW TO#

“ How to Build a Life ” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

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