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Unhappy? Take this class
aiden BURKHARDT
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For how fundamental happiness is to the enjoyment of life, we often either neglect it entirely or try to achieve it in roundabout ways. We try to attain happiness by working to make lots of money, driving luxury cars, getting good grades and even falling in love.
But wouldn’t reaching it be far easier if we could cut out these middlemen? What if you could even do most of it in your head?
Enter Dr. Laurie Santos, psychology professor at Yale University and teacher of a class titled “The Science of Well-Being.” The course is offered at Yale, and if you’d rather not pay the roughly $60,000 annual tuition, you can take it online at Coursera.com for free.
This 10-week course doesn’t have to be completed in a specific time frame or in order. It’s a mix of short readings and videos that consist of Dr. Santos talking to her students about well-being.
She spends roughly the first five weeks talking about peoples’ biases — what they get wrong about happiness. Before diverging into what actually can make us happy, she introduces the term “miswanting,” which is when people harbor false ideas about what actually makes them happy.
The class is unexpectedly simple in the best way possible. Seeing that the class was taught at Yale by an extremely experienced professor, I was at first afraid I would quickly be bogged down by technical jargon and heaps of studies. But Santos makes the course equal parts enjoyable and educational.
The incorporation of jokes, optical illusions and thoughtprovoking questions helps add a nice personal flair to her class, but she is still able to answer comments and questions posed by students at the end of her lessons. Santos provides in-depth explanations for those looking for them.
One of the most interesting aspects of the course is what happens outside of it — at the beginning of each week, a set of “rewirements” are recommended, but not required, for completion. These rewirements, so called because they’re aimed at rewiring poor habits, are assignments one can implement in real life.
Some examples of rewirements include picking one or two experiences a day to truly appreciate and savor or performing weekly acts of kindness.
Although these tasks may seem simple, for me, they have been the
