Students value happiness, we should too

Academic staff can learn from Yale students�� prioritisation of happiness (��Yale students flock to 바카라사이트 pursuit of happiness��, News, 22 February). Their record-breaking enrolment in 바카라사이트 Psychology and 바카라사이트 Good Life course sends a clear message: happiness is important not despite 바카라사이트 demanding nature of our work, but because of it.

The high stress, demanding workloads and achievement mindset reported by 바카라사이트 students are familiar to most academics �C 바카라사이트 majority of whom report poor mental health and high stress. Teaching workshops all over 바카라사이트 world to academics, we hear much about 바카라사이트 damaging effects of 바카라사이트 deprioritisation of happiness. Faced with ever-increasing demands, corporatisation, casualisation and metric-driven comparisons, in addition to reduced budgets, happiness seems hollow and impossible to most. Sacrificed for getting ahead, getting a job or just plain getting through, happiness is cast aside by most as trite and trivial.

Yet as we explain in our forthcoming book, How To Be a Happy Academic, 바카라사이트 reluctance of today��s academic workers and workplaces to seek happiness contrasts with millennia of scholarship. Far from being trivial, considerations of happiness are one of 바카라사이트 most prominent and profound scholarly preoccupations since 바카라사이트 first book of Western literature, The History of Herodotus, detailed King Croesus�� quest for happiness. The importance of happiness has since been prominent in 바카라사이트 thinking of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, 바카라사이트 Epicureans, 바카라사이트 Stoics, 바카라사이트 Romantics��and of Bentham, Marx, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Klimt, Freud, Beckett and Atwood among many. If happiness is good enough for this cast, avowedly, it��s a legitimate concern for academic workers.

History teaches time and again that it is not 바카라사이트 absence of difficult events, circumstances or people that renders happiness legitimate or viable �C but 바카라사이트 very presence of such challenges that makes seeking happiness so vital. Academic work will never cease to be demanding and serious, but it is this that makes happiness key.

Bailey J. Sousa
Director, International Institute for Qualitative Methodology
@BaileySousa

Alexander M. Clark
Associate vice-president, research
University of Alberta
@DrAlexMClark

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