I am delighted to introduce my new podcast!
For the past several years I have taught a class at Brown University called “Happiness and the Pursuit of the Good Life.” The goal of the class is to bring positive psychology into dialogue with religious and philosophical texts in order to enrich our understanding of “the good life” and deepen and apply these insights in our own lives. This podcast is my attempt to bring this dialogue, and what I have learned from it, to a wider audience.
In the first episode, I introduce the series and focus on one common obstacle to finding our path. Many of us have been heavily socialized to seek achievement, grasping for goals that others set and needing external validation when we meet them. On some level, we know that achievement is not synonymous with the good life and that the happiness it delivers is only fleeting, yet we may have a difficult time articulating how we want to orient our lives. Here I introduce some language and concepts that may help and which we will drill into in subsequent episodes.
The second episode concerns definitions. Positive psychology is based on empirical data. Collecting such data requires the prior work of defining “happiness.” In this episode I discuss how happiness is measured but, more importantly, how the a priori definitions of happiness are hardly objective. What are we really talking about when we talk about happiness?
Click to listen to Episode 1 or Episode 2 and to view the show notes. The podcast is also available at all the usual channels (Apple, Spotify, Youtube, etc.).
Enjoy, publicize, and join the conversation!
