happiness

Meghan O'Rourke, author of The Long Goodbye, explains the experience of grieving her mother's death and how and when she started to feel like herself again.

In a grim bit of news, it turns out that being around happy people can make unhappy people feel even worse. As reported by Tara Parker-Pope in The New York Times — "Happiest Places Post Highest Suicide Rates" — places like Denmark and Sweden score high on measures of happiness and life satisfaction but also have some of the highest rates of suicide.

One day when my daughter was just an infant, my husband was pushing her around the Toronto Eaton Centre in her baby stroller. They entered an elevator together and saw an elderly man in there, who turned to my husband and said that the world would be a better place without babies like her in it. (I know. Really.)

Neil Pasricha, author of The Book of (Even More) Awesome, explains how a simple project to drag him out of the dumps changed his life forever.

Recently, I was in a small mountaintop village in Crete, watching an elderly woman work on a loom. (I know, I know. I didn't expect it, either.)