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How to be happy

How to be happy

On television and human connection

Rebecca Nicholson's avatar
Rebecca Nicholson
May 02, 2025
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How to be happy
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This is a weekly TV zine. Thanks for reading it. If you don't subscribe already, sign up and you'll get TV chat and recommendations in your inbox on Fridays (usually). Paid subscribers get access to the archives, comments and massive gratitude.

Love On The Spectrum. “I want you to be my boyfriend forever”

There's a great new long read in the New York Times, by Susan Dominus - here, have a link - all about happiness. More accurately, it's about US scientific research into the psychology of happiness, but I suspect that, like me, most readers clicked to find out if it will deliver on its headline: what is the "one big finding" that it reports? What is the trick to being happy?

In short, Sartre had it arse over tit, as he almost definitely wrote in the original French. Hell is the lack of other people. Happiness involves them: being happily married; volunteering and all the usual suspects; but also, talking to strangers:

What [Lyubomirsky] found more surprising was just how effective even ha…

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