There is an idea that I think many of us carry around without ever examining it: if you want to feel better, do something nice for yourself.
There's something I have caught myself doing, and I suspect I am not alone in it.
There is a story most of us carry without quite noticing it: that by the time you hit your thirties, you are who you are.
The thing hasn't happened yet. The phone call you might have to make, the result you're waiting on, the conversation you keep rehearsing in the shower.
I think it's fair to say, some of us treat happiness and meaning as if they were the same errand.
I have a habit I never quite named. Every so often, usually when I am tired or my work is going badly, I picture a version of myself I daydream about more than I'd admit.
Sparkle is a verb we use for a performance. You sparkle at a dinner party. You sparkle in an interview.
If you have heard one number from the science of money and happiness, it is probably this one: $75,000. Past that, the story went, more money stops doing much for your day to day mood.
I will admit something I have not examined too closely until recently. For a while there, I dreaded getting older — nothing dramatic, just a low hum of unease…
I am a writer, not a psychologist, and nothing here is a diagnosis or advice. This is one person reading the research and reflecting on it.
I notice it most in the days before I go somewhere. The tabs open in the browser, the half-made list, the looking up of a restaurant I will probably never get around to visiting.
In the early 1930s, a Swiss psychiatrist wrote an essay arguing that the second half of your life is not supposed to look like the first.
Ask most people what boredom is and you get a version of the same answer: it is what happens when there is nothing to do.
The line comes from a book about writing, of all things. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard writes: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
More than 200 hours of hanging out, talking, and doing ordinary things together before someone starts to look less like a regular friend and more like a close one.
For a while in my late twenties and early thirties I half-believed the years ahead would mostly get heavier, with body and mood quietly sliding together and I am not alone in that forecast.
