Mark Fabian from the University of Warwick, recipient of this year's ISQOLS young scholar award, will present ideas from his new book for a popular audience. Beyond Happy explores how evolution has wired us to keep happiness just out of reach, leaving us perpetually stuck on a happiness treadmill. Instead of striving to escape it, the book argues, we should focus on making the treadmill a place we want to be. Finding this wellbeing begins with listening to our emotions, discovering intrinsic motivation and pursuing our authentic values. The book showcases a detailed theory of this process of self-actualisation: the coalescence of being.
Wellbeing, however, is not solely an individual pursuit – it is something we cultivate together. And so Beyond Happy also dwells on how to enhance your emotional intelligence, how we can build relationships based on care, and what it takes to nurture karmic communities.
Most profoundly, Beyond Happy shows the way out of nihilism – the pervasive sense that life on the treadmill is purposeless and incoherent. To escape this despair, we must develop a moral compass. To heal the toxicity of our acrimonious politics, we need to rediscover the joy of sharing and celebrating what we love. This is the core of metamodernism, the cultural mode that is emerging after postmodernism.
Delivered with an entertaining mix of academic precision, a podcaster’s knack for storytelling, and the down-to-earth panache Australians are known for, Beyond Happy is a one-stop shop to everything you need to know about the good life.
