One of the things we lose from an insatiable desire for more is time. Or, more specifically, time for rest. As I mentioned in last week’s post on the same subject, and as crazy as it may now seem, early proponents of capitalism imagined that eventually we would become so efficient that the demand for our work would shrink and our leisure time (understood as time devoted to pursuing culturally enriching tasks) would grow. A recent study from UCLA, and as reported in the Boston Globe, indicates that’s far from the reality most U.S. households experience. In their book Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century, the researchers describe their...

I’ve been reading a fascinating book of late by just this title: How Much is Enough?: Money and the Good Life by Robert and Edward Skidelsky. This team of a father who is a political economist and son who is a philosopher has shed some very helpful light on my questions about money, happiness, and the Christian life. While I’m only about a third of the way through the book, one very interesting discovery for me has been to learn that the first proponents of capitalism actually viewed it not as the salvation of humankind but as a necessary evil to be endured until humanity evolved. I found this incredibly interesting, particularly given...

So here’s my ongoing question: if we by and large agree that spending money on ourselves doesn’t buy happiness, then why do we regularly act like it does? I think I’m arriving at an answer. Or, at least, at a partial answer. And I think that partial answer has to do with how intangible “happiness” – or, for that matter, “fulfillment,” “meaning,” or “purpose” – really is. In fact, when you get right down to it, many of the things we say we want most – whether it’s “fulfillment” or “community” or whatever – are really hard to describe. I mean, what is “community”? What does it look like? How does one...

Michael Norton holds a Ph.D. in psychology and puts his training to work while teaching at the Harvard Business School. In this fascinating TEDTalk, he shares with us a variety of experiments that convinced him and his team that you can, in fact, buy happiness. But only when spending your money on others! What I found rather astounding about this was not, actually, Michael’s conclusion. I’ve experienced that before and so, I bet, have you: the great feeling that comes from buying someone a gift, however small, or making a donation to an organization that will make a difference in someone’s life. When my kids and I...

Earlier this spring I read, and very much enjoyed, Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. Despite what the title might sound like, it’s not a self-help book. And, to tell you the truth, it’s not really about happiness. It’s actually about what makes us unhappy. In particular, it’s about why we are often so poor at predicting what will make us happy. The answer, it turns out, has a lot to do with our memories and, especially, the fragile, even malleable nature of our memories. I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of memory as something akin to a video camera, silently recording all of our experiences. It might be hard to...