Holly Burns in The New York Times:
My New Year’s resolutions have always had one thing in common: They’ve been all about me. Some years I’ve vowed to pick up my high school French again; some years I’ve sworn off impulse shopping; and some years (OK, every year) I’ve promised myself I’d go to bed earlier. The goal, though, has always been the same: to become a better, happier version of myself. But while there’s nothing wrong with self-improvement, experts say that focusing on our relationships with the people around us may go a long way to making us happier.
“Our society has treated happiness as a highly individualistic pursuit — the idea being that it’s something that you make for yourself, that you get for yourself, and you do it all alone,” said Stephanie Harrison, founder of The New Happy, an online platform that uses art and science to change how we think about happiness, and author of “New Happy: Getting Happiness Right in a World That’s Got It Wrong.” We tend to set our sights on self-focused goals, Ms. Harrison said, “almost plucking them out of thin air, thinking, ‘OK, this will be the thing that makes me happy.’” Instead, she suggested, pivot to “think about happiness as something we create together and for each other.”
More here.
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