Tonight, on my way home from work, I heard a snippet of Desparado, the old Eagles song, playing on the radio.
One particular line really resonated with me:
It seems to me some fine things have been laid upon your table, but you only want the ones that you can’t get.
And I thought, man, […]
This post is for anyone who’s ever felt trapped.
Workers trapped in dead-end jobs
Spouses trapped in unfulfilling marriages
Depressives trapped in despair
Addicts trapped in a helpless cycle of substance abuse, cigarette smoking, or binge eating
Lonely people trapped in emotional isolation
Poor people shackled by poverty
Anyone old enough to read this article has […]
Okay, I’ve got today’s watercooler topic for you: Should schools teach happiness? Here’s a video for you to to review and weigh in on:
The video is a short review of a happiness program at a German high school, designed to teach young people how to be happier. Critics argue it’s a […]
Your entire life, you’ve heard various reasons why watching too much television is bad for you, and I’m about to give you one more: watching too much TV affects your happiness.
Television commercials – and often the programs themselves – purposefully make you feel unsatisfied in order to trigger your buying impulse.
After […]
It wasn’t long ago that researchers believed that every human being was born with a set “happiness point,” a fixed and unavoidable baseline level of happiness. On its face, the idea appears to have merit: Tsunami victims, amputees, and lottery winners alike eventually return to their previous emotional baselines. In other words, no matter […]
When mainstream America thinks of the stereotypical “positive person,” they envision someone with his head buried in the sand, ignoring life’s challenges, smiling like a gomer as his life falls apart.
But devil-may-care personalities do not fit my definition of a positive person. A real positive person seeks to be a positive force in the world, to make a […]
When I was a small boy, my mother had a lot of crafty things hanging on the walls: pictures of geese, cross-stitches of farm animals; that sort of thing. She also had an inspirational quotation embroidered onto white canvas, hanging on the kitchen wall, near the pantry.
Little did I know that the tattered and frayed […]
If you look in the mirror, you’ll see the most influential force in your life staring back at you, but let’s talk for just a moment about all the negative influences affecting your life from the outside: billboards selling unhealthy food, friends pushing cigarettes, pessimists hawking gloom and doom, the harassment of mean people, the […]
Internet forums are wonderful sources of information; they’re also home to flame wars, trolling, arguments, misunderstandings, and incivility. If you’re like me, you visit forums to learn, grow and connect, but mining wisdom from hostile forums sometimes feels like trying to jam a camel through the eye of a needle.
If you’re looking for a way […]
If someone doesn’t take us aside and teach us a few things (assuming we’d listen) before we graduate high school, we are doomed to learn life’s hardest lessons in the real world beyond the classroom.
With that in mind, here are 21 non-academic lessons every person should know before he or she graduates high school; if you graduated long […]
