The first person who ever told me that happiness was work was this manic-depressive artist I knew when I was in my 20s. I was like, 'What are you talking about? Happiness just happens. That's even the root of that word. How could it be work?'
I've been thinking about disowning some of my genes lately. I have a few healthy, happy, long-living optimists in my family tree - most of them fans of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, a major champion of positive thinking. But I've got plenty of ancestors who played out more tortured hands.
A lot of positive psychology is stuck in being the psychology of privilege, and I reject that.
I think there are different kinds of happiness. We know when we're happy a lot of the time, but then there are those moments that have more of an afterglow, when the happiness has more depth.
When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.
Some caregivers want to reciprocate the care they themselves received as children.
I've never been socially outgoing, but I suspect I've gotten more and more ambivalent about making new friends. I'm irritated by how-do-you-do chit-chat, but that's how new relationships usually begin.
My own habit had always been to write about the things that ticked me off in a given day. If I kept a journal at all, I kept it to vent.
New Agers have always told us that we create our own realities. Mind over matter.
I always do like seeing other people dance in their cars. It's one of the things that makes me happy.
Conventional wisdom tells us we'll only be happier after a divorce if the marriage itself was a war zone.
In our cultural history, all emotions have been more culturally acceptable to women.
I'm sure there were plenty of loving, attentive mothers in the 'me generation,' but none of them lived at my house.
When I was a kid, my mother's parenting style teetered between benign neglect and intense bouts of violence.
I don't know if my mother was a narcissist - or bi-polar or borderline. Those were words she tossed around over the years.
In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.
Looking for the perfect day is not going to make us happy, because that day isn't going to come.
Researchers warn us against walking out on married life without a dang good reason.
In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.
They say change gets more difficult as we get older - each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.
