cheryl
Administrator
Staff member
13 Lessons to Make You Really, Truly Happy. Maybe. - Outside
Our writer and favorite curmudgeon completed UC Berkeley's ten-week Science of Happiness online course. Did it make him happier? Not really. But he still came away with some important, if obvious, rules to live by.
ast autumn, I enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley’s massive open online Science of Happiness course to see if I might goose my felicity quotient through an understanding of the edicts dispensed almost daily by the USA’s happiness industrial complex. The course is free. It’s Berkeley. And its instructors, Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Dacher Keltner, have been teaching the material for years. (Keltner created UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center in 2001; the online program debuted in 2014. Other online happiness courses, as far I can tell, are derivative.)
The ten-week course kicks off with a robust introduction to the science of positive psychology, followed by seven weekly modules, parsed into themes: social connection, compassion and kindness, cooperation and reconciliation, mindfulness, mental habits of happiness, gratitude, and new frontiers of happiness research (like Keltner’s pioneering work in the phenomenon called awe—more on that in a bit). A midterm and final exam make up the remaining weeks.
Our writer and favorite curmudgeon completed UC Berkeley's ten-week Science of Happiness online course. Did it make him happier? Not really. But he still came away with some important, if obvious, rules to live by.
ast autumn, I enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley’s massive open online Science of Happiness course to see if I might goose my felicity quotient through an understanding of the edicts dispensed almost daily by the USA’s happiness industrial complex. The course is free. It’s Berkeley. And its instructors, Emiliana Simon-Thomas and Dacher Keltner, have been teaching the material for years. (Keltner created UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center in 2001; the online program debuted in 2014. Other online happiness courses, as far I can tell, are derivative.)
The ten-week course kicks off with a robust introduction to the science of positive psychology, followed by seven weekly modules, parsed into themes: social connection, compassion and kindness, cooperation and reconciliation, mindfulness, mental habits of happiness, gratitude, and new frontiers of happiness research (like Keltner’s pioneering work in the phenomenon called awe—more on that in a bit). A midterm and final exam make up the remaining weeks.