That is an version of The Marvel Reader, a e-newsletter by which our editors advocate a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Join right here to get it each Saturday morning.
While you watch an actor accepting an Oscar, or examine a superb scientist receiving an enormous prize, you may think that they’ve discovered the important thing to happiness. Who wouldn’t be blissful, residing life with a lot expertise or smarts? However the relationship between intelligence and happiness is difficult, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2023. “The items you possess can raise you up or pull you down; all of it is determined by how you employ them,” he defined. In the present day’s e-newsletter explores tips on how to make the most of your abilities and smarts so as to add pleasure to your life, quite than letting them chip away at what truly makes the times significant.
On Happiness and Intelligence
How Sensible Individuals Can Cease Being Depressing
By Arthur C. Brooks
Intelligence could make you happier, however provided that you see it as greater than a software to get forward. (From 2023)
How you can Need Much less
By Arthur C. Brooks
The key to satisfaction has nothing to do with achievement, cash, or stuff. (From 2022)
A New Understanding of Human Beings’ Most Primary Need
By John Kaag
The thinker Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s newest e book seems past happiness because the aim of a well-lived life.
Nonetheless Curious?
- Why so many sensible folks aren’t blissful: It’s a paradox, Joe Pinsker wrote in 2016: Shouldn’t probably the most completed be properly geared up to make decisions that maximize life satisfaction?
- A brand new components for happiness: The happiness we search could require investing sooner than we expect—and should assist us align our expectations and actuality on the finish of life. (From 2022)
Different Diversions
PS

Each week, I ask readers to share a photograph of one thing that sparks their sense of awe on the planet. “A driver unknowingly leaves behind a factor of magnificence in contemporary snow,” Jane P., 60, from Portland, Oregon, writes.
I’ll proceed to function your responses within the coming weeks.
— Isabel
