Three motivations for believing

April 20, 2024

There are three different motivations for belief, and it's important to distinguish between them. 1) Belief because you think something's true. For instance, you may think that the evidence supports the idea that you will eventually find love, or you may feel convinced by logical arguments you've heard in favor of god's existence. 2) Belief because you think it's useful to believe. Regardless of whether you predict something's true, you can predict that believing it will...

Does money buy happiness, according to science?

February 28, 2024

By Spencer Greenberg and Amber Dawn Ace This piece first appeared on ClearerThinking.org on February 28, 2024, was edited on February 29, 2024, and appeared here with minor edits on March 27, 2024. Does money buy happiness? Intuitively, the answer is yes: common sense tells us that poverty and hardship make people unhappy. We can use money to buy a lot of things that might make us happier – things like a nicer home, fancier vacations, education for our children, or just the oppor...

Ten theories for how to achieve true happiness (and useful resources for you to try them out)

February 8, 2022

This essay is cross-posted from the Clearer Thinking blog. The question of how to achieve true happiness has been debated for thousands of years. In this article, we've summarized ten approaches to happiness, new and old, that are popular today. How do you think about being truly happy? You might find that your personal views on this topic are captured by one of these ten popular theories. We hope that understanding these different theories will help you to better refine you...