Self-awareness is an important part of happiness, but you have to be careful not to focus too much on yourself – to the point where you begin to confuse “self-awareness” for what is actually “self-indulgence.” Self-awareness is a non-judgmental form of introspection that seeks to better understand yourself. But self-indulgence is a judgmental form of [...]

Death is a part of life. We don’t always like to admit it, but it’s true. The people in our lives probably aren’t always going to be there forever, so the question is, “How will you handle the death of someone when it happens?” I believe that death doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative [...]

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term “emotional labor” to refer to professions which require individuals to express certain emotions, regardless of how they feel. The idea here is that employees are often expected to display the right emotions to properly perform their jobs. The cashier or waitress is expected to smile at you and say, [...]

One day cannot dictate the whole course of your life. Even if you feel it is the worst day of your entire existence, it is a small blip in the grand scheme of things. What happened has happened – and it is over and done with. But that is all infinitesimal compared to the billions [...]

Why do we like watching movies that make us feel depressed? This is a question that has long interested psychologists and philosophers, and a recent study published by Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick at Ohio State University may have an answer. Her research is one of the first attempts to take a scientific approach to explaining why people [...]