By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024.
Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...
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happiness
How great is the U.S., really?
This piece was coauthored with Travis Manuel. This is a cross-post from the Clearer Thinking blog.
According to YouGov polling, 41% of people in the United States think that it is the greatest country in the world. Others see the U.S. as a place full of arrogance, violence, and inequality. So, what's the truth?
The truth is that there isn't a single notion of what makes something the "best." To explore how great (or not) America is, we'll start by looking at the question from mu...
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Valuism and X: how Valuism sheds light on other domains – Part 5 of the sequence on Valuism
By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace
Image created using the A.I. DALL•E 2
This is the fifth and final part in my sequence of essays about my life philosophy, Valuism - here are the first, second, third, and fourth parts.
In previous posts, I've described Valuism - my life philosophy. I've also discussed how it could serve as a life philosophy for others. In this post, I discuss how a Valuist lens can help shed light on various fields and areas of inquiry.
Valuism and ...
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Ten theories for how to achieve true happiness (and useful resources for you to try them out)
This essay is cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog.
The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we've summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today.
How do you think about being truly happy?
You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine you...
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Intersecting advice from highly successful people
It's popular to read interviews and books with advice from highly successful people. But is their advice good advice? Perhaps it works for their situation, but that doesn't necessarily mean it generalizes to other circumstances. Maybe they are just overfitting to their personal life experience. Perhaps they are attributing too much of their success to the actions they happened to take rather than to factors outside of their control. And what should we make of the fact that advice often contradi...
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How resetting your psychological baseline can make your life better
This is a cross-post from ClearerThinking.org from October 6, 2020. Thanks go to Hunter Muir for editing. The piece was updated on December 14, 2022, and was cross-posted on this website on February 3, 2024.
Many of us might be feeling bad about life at the moment. One approach that may improve your mood is shifting your psychological "baseline" of what you view as normal to reflect the reality you're currently living in. This blog examines how to accept the state of things as they curre...
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The Relationship Between Personality and Life Satisfaction
What's the relationship between personality and life satisfaction? We took a stab at figuring it out!
We conducted a study of 999 people in the United States; recruited through our study platform at Positly.com. We looked for a correlation between 18 different personality traits (each trait being assessed with two questions) and life satisfaction. We examined the association each trait had with scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (a 5 question scale by Diener, Emmons, Larsen, Griffi...
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A Formula for Happiness
What does the formula for happiness look like? Here's my attempt at it:
happiness =
social-acceptance+ self-acceptance+ meaning+ hope+ pleasure+ efficacy+ resilience+ optimism
- physical-wants- pain- anxiety- loss and depression
Positives
social-acceptance = human interaction with the sort of people you want to interact with in the form of warm and trusting relationships, and the gut-level feeling that this group accepts you, likes you, and respects you
Interventions: exposure therapy if yo...
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Correlation Coefficient as a Gateway to Skepticism
The correlation coefficient as a gateway to radical skepticism:Suppose you calculate that two variables are moderately correlated. For instance, you find that self-reported happiness has a correlation r=0.32 with self-reported willpower, as I found in one of my studies.
What are the possible explanations for (or causes of) this?
A Causes B - Increasing A is a cause of increasing B but not the reverse. [e.g., more happiness causes more willpower] (2) B Causes A - Increasing B is a cause ...
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Make a Plan to Improve Your Life
Have you considered creating a plan to improve your life? If not, how about doing it right now? Or if you don't want to make one for yourself, you can use this one.
A friend asked me to help him make a plan to become happier. He is already pretty happy, but thought he could be more so. What you see below is the general life improvement plan we came up with, which should apply to most people (plus some improvements I added for this post).
Each week of the plan is an experiment, where you wo...
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