Cover: Pursuing Happiness, 3rd Edition by Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

Pursuing Happiness

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Third  Edition©2027  Matthew Parfitt; Dawn Skorczewski

ISBN:9781319624453

About

Explore Big Questions About Happiness

Pursuing Happiness: A Bedford Spotlight Reader is a brief, affordable collection of readings that explores what happiness means across cultures, experiences, and perspectives. Through writing by philosophers, psychologists, spiritual leaders, ethicists, economists, and other thinkers, you’ll examine questions such as: What is happiness? What Makes People Happy? Should We Pursue Happiness? Does Happiness Vary Across Cultures? Is the Digital Age Working Against Happiness?

Designed for inquiry and discussion, the reader helps you ask thoughtful questions, analyze different viewpoints, and develop your own ideas about happiness and human experience.

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Table of Contents

About The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series

Preface for Instructors

Contents by Discipline

Contents by Theme

Introduction for Students

Chapter 1. What is Happiness

Aristotle, From Nicomachean Ethics

Selections from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Stoicism

Voltaire, The Good Brahmin

His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Sources of Happiness

Noelle Oxenhandler, Ah, But the Breezes . . .

Darrin M. McMahon, From the Happiness of Virtue to the Virtue of Happiness: 400 BC−AD 1780

Martha C. Nussbaum, Who Is the Happy Warrior? Philosophy Poses Questions to Psychology

Sara Ahmed, Happiness and Queer Politics

Zadie Smith, Joy

Chapter 2. What Makes People Happy?

Gretchen Rubin, July: Buy Some Happiness (Moved from Chapter 4)

Michael Argyle and Peter Hills, The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, If We Are So Rich, Why Aren’t We Happy?

National Academy of Sciences, Global Well-Being Ladder

Sonja Lyubomirsky, How Happy Are You and Why?

Ed Diener and Martin Seligman, Very Happy People

Denise de Ridder, Can Self-Control Make You Happy?

Susan Dominus, How Nearly a Century of Happiness Research Led to One Big Finding

Chapter 3. Should We Pursue Happiness?

Jennifer Michael Hecht, Remembering Death

Emily Esfahani Smith, There’s More to Life Than Being Happy

Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness

David Brooks, What Suffering Does

Molly Young, My Miserable Week in the “Happiest Country on Earth”

David Robson, Why It’s Time to Stop Pursuing Happiness

James Traub, Our “Pursuit of Happiness” Is Killing the Planet

Karen Karbo, Your Best Self Is Like an Imaginary Beloved

Chapter 4. Does Happiness Vary Across Cultures?

Mohsen Joshanloo and Dan Weijers, Aversion to Happiness across Cultures

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Kiyoshi Asakawa, Universal and Cultural Dimensions of Optimal Experiences

Owen Flanagan et al., Happiness and Well-Being in Contemporary China

Rémy Ngamije, Love Is a Washing Line

Hyacinth Udah et al., Ubuntu Philosophy, Values, and Principles: An Opportunity to Do Social Work Differently

World Happiness Report, Caring and Sharing: Global Analysis of Happiness and Kindness

Chapter 5. Is the Digital Age Working Against Happiness?

Paul Bloom, A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem

Jonathan Haidt, End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

Mark Coeckelbergh, The Technology: Categorized, Measured, Quantified, and Enhanced, or Why AI Knows Us Better Than Ourselves

Sam Apple, My Couples Retreat with 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them

Allison J. Pugh, The Unseen

Aimée Morrison, Meta-Writing: AI and Writing

Acknowledgements

Index of Authors and Titles

Matthew Parfitt

Matthew Parfitt (Ph.D., Boston College) is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Chair of the Division of Rhetoric at Boston University’s College of General Studies. In 2002 he received the Peyton Richter Award for interdisciplinary teaching. He is author of Writing in Response and the coeditor of Conflicts and Crises in the Composition Classroom—And What Instructors Can Do About Them and Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past.

Dawn Skorczewski

Dawn Skorczewski (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of English Emerita at Brandeis University, and Senior Lecturer at Amsterdam University College. Her books on the Holocaust include Sieg Maandag: Life and Art in the Aftermath of Bergen-Belsen (2020). and the forthcoming Arts of Invisibility, a book about Wim ten Broek, a painter who was in the Resistance. She has also written numerous articles about trauma, poetry, and self-transformation.