• Skip to main content

COLIN BEAVAN, PhD

  • Who you are
  • Who I am
  • How I help
  • Coming Events
  • Get in touch

happiness

Forget the stuff. Let’s just get happy.

May 13, 2009 by Colin Beavan Leave a Comment

A quote from a TED talk given by Dan Gilbert, the Harvard professor and author of Stumbling on Happiness: Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted. Synthetic happiness is what we make when we don’t get what we wanted. In our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness […]

Filed Under: Consumerism and Materialism, Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man Tagged With: consumption, Dan Gilbert, environmentalism, happiness, Stumbling on Happiness

Open Discussion: “You are here to be happy.” True or false?

April 21, 2009 by Colin Beavan Leave a Comment

Obviously I’ve been in the mood for introspection these last couple of days. And I think that introspection is important in the environmental realm, because we must prioritize the use of resources. We must decide what our limited resources are best used for. That requires introspection. Because to know what our resources should be used […]

Filed Under: Consumerism and Materialism, Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man Tagged With: environment, happiness, life purpose, resource use

Treating anxiety and depression could save the planet

January 30, 2009 by Colin Beavan Leave a Comment

Something a regular reader of this blog may have been able to guess about me: I suffer, at times, from anxiety and depression. I’m not talking about the worst kind of anxiety and depression. I’m talking about the kind that takes the edge off the gratitude I should be feeling for a good life. Not, […]

Filed Under: Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man, Society Tagged With: Anxiety, depression, environment, happiness, lifestyle, work hours

How to cut out home heating oil–Japanese style

January 6, 2009 by Colin Beavan Leave a Comment

This is a guest post by my friend Sean Sakamoto, who blogs at www.idratherbe.tv/injapan. “It’s so weird that you heat your whole house,” my wife said one winter. She’s Japanese, and when we first got married, here in the United States, we got a lot of mileage out of the “I can’t believe you people […]

Filed Under: Consumerism and Materialism, Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man, Society Tagged With: carbon emissions, climate crisis, consumption, global warming, happiness, kotatsu

The problem with happiness

October 31, 2008 by Colin Beavan

Well, what I mean is that there is a problem with happiness as a measure of whether limited planetary resources should be used. I talk about this a lot, right? I talk a lot about how if we only choose to use the resources that actually make people happy and cut out the things that […]

Filed Under: Consumerism and Materialism, Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man, Society Tagged With: children, Enrique Penalosa, happiness, sustainability, urban planning

Does high resource use make a great life?

September 4, 2008 by Colin Beavan

This photo (sorry for the poor quality) shows one half of an empty basketball court that I’ve ridden past many times during my car-less vacation in Greenport. It’s in someone’s back yard. Never once have I ever seen anyone playing basketball on it. And I thought: some dad or mom might have worked so hard […]

Filed Under: Consumerism and Materialism, Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man, Society Tagged With: climate change, environment, global warming, happiness, quality of life, resource use

Business People: Forget the fallacy of the zero sum game

August 21, 2008 by Colin Beavan

Zero sum game: A situation or interaction in which one participant’s gains result only from another’s equivalent losses. Sometimes, we imagine business works that way. But what a sad, sorry way to look at the world. And if we do look at the world that way, does it make us happy? Let me explain: The […]

Filed Under: Best of No Impact Man, Consumerism and Materialism, Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man, Purpose and Meaning, Society Tagged With: business, green business, happiness, marketing, zero sum game

“Why your happiness matters to the planet”

August 12, 2008 by Colin Beavan

  The headline is the title of an article in the Christian Science Monitor about how consuming fewer planetary resources may, instead of making us deprived, make us happier. We’ve discussed this so often here on No Impact Man. The article, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, points to yet another study that shows that material consumption above […]

Filed Under: Environment, Happiness and Life Satisfaction, No Impact Man Tagged With: consumption, environment, happiness

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to Next Page »
  • Who You Are
  • Who I am
  • Email Sign Up
  • Blog
  • How I Help
  • Coming Events
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Books + Films
  • Media

Copyright © 2023 · Infinity Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Join the Good Life Conversation

I'm excited to let you know when I have news that will help you in your quest for a safe, healthy, happy, meaningful life that also helps the world.