Win Tickets: Our Love Affair with Happiness with Ruth Whippman

Happiness. Everyone wants it, but do we know how to get it? We’re told to be positive, to change our mindset, to focus on ourselves and our inner dialogue, our reactions, our breath – to help ourselves in the pursuit of happiness. But what if how we’re relating to happiness isn’t all hearts and rainbows and romance, but is really more like a bad marriage: are the individualistic ways that we are pursuing happiness actually making us miserable? Research shows that human happiness is actually most closely tied to the strength of our social connections and our relationships to other people. So what does this mean for how we think about what happiness is, how we can be happy, and what we really need as people to get to our happy place? Writer Ruth Whippman will lead discussion and exercises to help us tackle what it really means to pursue happiness.

Ruth Whippman is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Huffington Post, the Guardian and the UK Independent amongst other places. She has made several documentaries for BBC television and Channel 4 in the UK.

A British ex-pat living in California, Ruth stumbled into the shiny happy world of the American well-being industry at every turn and has been reeling ever since. Her book, The Pursuit of unHappiness, or How America’s Relentless Pursuit of Contentment is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks, will be published by St. Martin’s Press/Macmillan in the US and Random House in the UK in the Spring of 2016.

Saturday, December 12, 2015 @ 10AM | Makeshift Society | Tickets can be purchased here