A super interesting article in the New York Times from the professor who teaches the Yale Happiness Course. I would recommend you take a read. Here's how it begins:
Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school’s most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques for living a happier life. But you could also see something melancholy in the course’s popularity: all these young high-achievers looking for something they’ve lost, or never found. Either way, the desire to lead a more fulfilled life is hardly limited to young Ivy Leaguers, and Santos turned her course into a popular podcast series “The Happiness Lab,” which quickly rose above the crowded happiness-advice field. (It has been downloaded more than 64 million times.) “Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy?” asks Santos, who is 46. “Because it takes work! Because it’s hard!”
Click here for the article.
Click through to read the one section I found most interesting
This section was particularly interesting to me.
This probably speaks more to my deficiencies as a student than anything else, but when I was in college, which is 20 years ago now, I don’t remember such a pervasive, overwhelming sense of being there solely as the next step on some ladder of achievement. What has changed? It’s surprising how different it feels. I’ll have conversations with first-year students on campus who will ask what fourth class they should take to make sure they get that job at Google by the time they’re 24. They come in planning this set of next steps, in part because that’s how they got here in the first place. They think that’s how you get the carrots. How that change happened is an incredibly interesting cultural puzzle. Some of my favorite guesses about it come from
Her argument is that years ago, only certain people, for the most part, were getting into Yale. They were mostly from a small set of prep schools. We opened that up. In theory, anyone on the planet, if they “put in enough work and are smart enough,” can get into Yale — bracketed by the real cultural boundaries, structures of racism and all the other isms, but that’s the idea. There’s also the sense that the spoils of the war are really high: If you go to Yale, that’s going to open up opportunities that won’t happen if you don’t. Lythcott-Haims’s argument is that when the spoils of war get big, there becomes a nuclear-arms race for who gets in, and that parenting has changed to push children to be thinking about this stuff. They develop this implicit belief that there is a path that’s correct, and if you can figure out the Easter eggs, you can be on it. It’s something I feel on campus so much. I assign students this book by the social scientist Alfie Kohn, who does work on how much grades and extrinsic motivations
He tells the story of giving this speech to high school students: A student raises their hand and is like, If everything you said is true, and I’m not just working for grades and trying to get into college, then what’s the purpose of life? When I assigned that chapter, I also got that question. They’re not sure what they’re supposed to get out of college other than accolade building.
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