Happiness Redefined. Thank you, Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott and I are friends.  Okay, not personally, but I follow her on Facebook.  (We did have a moment a decade ago when I shook her hand after she gave a talk up in Berkeley. But anyway.)  When her latest post popped up in my news feed this morning, a bunch of bells went […]

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How The Pursuit of Happiness Makes Us Crazy.

The last time our family got together — finding all of us in the same zipcode at the same time is a rare and wondrous feat — we hunkered down in a suite at the Holiday Inn Express (Backstory not important). With no bar or restaurant in sight, our family of foodies trekked to the […]

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Happiness is Getting Old

Here’s a little good news for anyone who’s getting older (yeah, Peter Pan, that includes you): a recent Gallup poll has found that as people get older, they get happier. You read that right. And I know, such a finding runs counter to the results of countless other studies and anecdotal asides. Not to mention […]

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Newsflash: Gloria Steinem Did NOT Cause The Happiness Gap

Before we put the happiness gap to bed, here’s a fitting last word: some smoking-smart commentary from Barbara Ehrenreich I found on Mother Jones. The piece is entited “Are Women Getting Sadder? Or are we all just getting a lot more gullible?” That should tip you off. Ehrenreich’s essay echoes a few of the points […]

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Unhappiness in the Time of Cougar Town

In all this analyzing we’ve been doing of the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness study, and the subsequent spinning of it courtesy of Marcus Buckingham and Maureen Dowd, there’s one point we’ve been pretty quick to gloss over: age. Not for long. I promise not to whine. But it does seem worthy of being addressed, […]

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The Examined Life: Happiness Redefined.

Hold the hankies, girls. Here comes the heresy. To wit, maybe we’re actually a lot happier than Marcus Buckingham et al think we are. It’s not that anyone disputes the data. Clearly, the numbers are all there, and they show that quantitatively, women rate themselves lower on the happiness scale than they did back in […]

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Women’s Declining Happiness: The Paradox That Isn’t

A study by Wharton School’s Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness” that I first wrote about in July got a lot of attention this week. First, from self-helpuru Marcus Buckingham on the Huffington Post, in a piece trumpeted as the beginning of a series, and which benefitted from some […]

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More Opportunity=Less Happiness. Wait. Really?

Wharton School’s Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers published a study in May that’s been dubbed “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.” The title kinda says it all, but the gist is that, while, 35 years ago or so, women reported being happier than men, today women–regardless of marital or employment status or whether or not […]

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It’s Not Me… It’s You.

The other day, a good friend who is Swedish emailed me a link  to post by Ann Charlott Altstadt, a Swedish writer who suggests that when life gets us down, we’d sometimes be better off ditching the trip to the yoga studio or the psychologist and seeing a sociologist instead. Funny, my friend said, but […]

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You! Don’t Change!

My sister is running a marathon. I’m thrilled for her and have no doubt she will pound out those 26.2 miles in a red-headed blaze of glory. (And without crapping her pants. Seriously, it’s, like, a thing among marathoners. And I worry about this immensely.) What’s weird is this: I’m not jealous, because I don’t […]

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