Others' Advice for How to Be Happy

2016.12.04 - YouTube - ASIAN BOSS - What North Korean Defectors Think Of North Korea (Part 1)
- This was a very interesting interview and the two former North Koreans came across as intelligent / insightful.
- 10:54:
  Q: Would you say North Koreans are pretty stressed out in general, or are they happy with what they have got? How happy are they?
  
  A: In my opinion, even if people are starving and having a tough time, they are always laughing.
  
  Oh, really?
  
  A: Yes, all the time.
  
  Q: They really laugh a lot?
  
  A: Yeah, a lot. I think, the more well off a country, the more stressed the people because they think too much. North Korea may be a poor country but North Koreans have more warmth and really care for one another. I think they are generally very happy.
Chade-Meng Tan
- 2016.10.26 - Quartz - Google’s former happiness guru developed a three-second brain exercise for finding joy
  - In his latest book, Joy on Demand, the Google veteran describes his path from someone who was “constantly miserable” to a much happier guy. How did he get there? Sometime in his mid-20s, he discovered that he wasn’t stuck with self-loathing; temperament, he found, is malleable.
    Successfully reshaping your mindset, he argues, has less to do with hours of therapy and more to do with mental exercises, including one that helps you recognize “thin slices of joy.”
    “Right now, I’m a little thirsty, so I will drink a bit of water. And when I do that, I experience a thin slice of joy both in space and time,” he told CBC News. “It’s not like ‘Yay!”” he notes in Joy on Demand. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of nice.’”
    Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation of stepping from a hot room to an air-conditioned room, the moment of connection in receiving a text from an old friend. Although they last two or three seconds, the moments add up, and the more you notice joy, the more you will experience joy, Tan argues.
Spencer Greenberg