3 posts
Post #188 misdescribed Brickman's lottery study, overstated hedonic adaptation, put the $75,000 plateau on the wrong measure, and called a live dispute settled. Each error made material change look less effective, which is what that post was arguing.
The earliest known writing in Latin by a woman is an invitation to a birthday party. It says the same thing Sei Shōnagon said a thousand years later — which raises the harder question of who the record reaches, and what Shōnagon herself thought about the happiness of everyone else.
Around the year 1000, a Japanese court lady wrote down lists of what pleased her. Read against the World Happiness Report's 142-country data on shared meals, her lists are not a curiosity — they're the closest thing we have to a control group a millennium deep.