Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:
Yascha Mounk: I admire you as a writer, but there’s one book of yours that I sort of stumbled across again recently which I found to be deeply insightful and also personally meaningful, and that is The Happiness Curve.
How did you come to write this book? And how did you come to think about the kind of shape that people’s trajectories of life satisfaction and happiness tend to have over the course of our lives?
Jonathan Rauch: This is a very personal book. I am someone who’s had an incredibly fortunate life, just incredibly fortunate. Yet, around the time I turned 40, I began noticing a kind of persistent sense of disappointment and discontent. And I didn’t know why. I assumed it would go away, because it didn’t match with the objective circumstances of my life. But it only got worse. And then it magnified because I began feeling ungrateful, which is a terrible way to feel if you’re the luckiest person on the planet.
More here.