My friend Chloe is a person who both actively pursues joy and finds it in everyday life. It’s a wonderful trait to have. So it made absolute sense today when she posted on Facebook that she’d signed up for a massive open online course (MOOC, which sounds like an insult but in this case it isn’t) from UC Berkeley, called The Science of Happiness.
Being both interested in the concept of “positive psychology” and being in need of a new thing for the day, I signed up as well. Hopefully this is a situation of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery.
I suppose I’ve attempted the pursuit of happiness in the past. I read The Happiness Project, and it has its value (and would probably have more if I actually applied the practices), but I think I will have a better appreciation for the tenets of positive psychology when they’re backed up by scientific explanations and Ph.D’s.
And, really, let’s not kid ourselves. I will henceforth refer to The Greater Good Science Center as “The Institute of Kumbaya,” but aside from that, it is very cool that there are people who are actually studying happiness in this manner. Maybe if we had a better understanding of it, there would be fewer assholes in the world.
And really, that should be a universal goal.
The Something New Project 