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How to Live When You’re in Pain
Arthur C. Brooks: When you teach happiness, like I do, one of the biggest questions that people have initially: What is it? I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think about it. A lot of people, they assume that happiness is a feeling. A better definition of happiness is: It’s like a meal with three macronutrients. Just as a meal has macronutrients—or protein, carbohydrates, and fat—happiness is a feast with three macronutrients, and they are: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. I want to focus right now on that third macronutrient, on purpose.
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A Surprising Reason Why You Should Attend Live Theater
Could attending live theater make you a more empathetic person? Researchers recently found that after one live performance, theatergoers were more empathetic toward the issues and people portrayed in a play. And that empathy made them more likely to donate to charity. “Attending theater could be a vital way to build psychological skills, especially empathy,” says Steve Rathje, a Ph.D. student in psychology at Cambridge University and co-author of the study, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in July.
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Economic Field Experiments Complement Understanding of Judgment Bias
Field experiments in economics can serve an invaluable intellectual role alongside traditional laboratory research.
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Why Children Learn Better Than Adults
Young children seem uniquely, insatiably, marvelously curious, even at risk of life and limb. You might think that this drive to explore helps children to learn so much so quickly. But is it really true that children explore more than grown-ups and that this helps them to learn? It’s not easy to test this idea scientifically. Grown-ups and children are so different that it’s hard to compare them. But in a new study just published in the journal Cognition, the NYU cognitive scientist Emily Liquin and I found a way to give children and grown-ups exactly the same problem. Sure enough, the children explored more and learned more—but at a cost.
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Fix Burnout—Without Blowing Up Your Life
The emails are piling up, unread. Deadlines are blown. Once jovial video calls are now tense. You suspect burnout. The feeling is an increasingly common one. In a September survey of nearly 700 professionals by consulting firm Korn Ferry, 89% said they were suffering from burnout. Some workers are leaving their jobs as a result. Others are moving to other cities or making similarly drastic changes. But you don’t have to quit your job to combat burnout. There are ways to self-assess, work with your manager and improve your mental health. “There is a tendency for people to view burnout as a personal mental health issue, so it’s their problem, not anybody else’s.
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The Pandemic Is Still Making Us Feel Terrible
“How we feelin’ out there tonight?” Bo Burnham asks an imaginary audience during his comedy special Inside, which he self-filmed from a single room over the course of a year. “Heh, haha, yeahhhhh,” he says to himself. “I am not feeling good.” Following the special’s release this past May, TikTok users pounced on the clip. The sound has been used in more than 71,000 videos, amassing millions and millions of plays. Everyday users and creators alike can be found lip-synching along—sometimes gesturing to a specific stressor in their life, other times just conveying a general sense of malaise. It’s a pretty fitting time capsule of this moment in American life. ...
