8 things I learned from Yale's free happiness class

Life? Check. Liberty? More or less. Pursuit of happiness? On it.

In 2020, as a global pandemic threatened lives, and lockdowns necessarily curtailed our liberty to roam, millions of people decided to tackle the Declaration of Independence's trickiest inalienable right. Specifically, they pursued happiness via a 10-week online course that explains in scientific detail why our brains keep getting the causes of happiness wrong, and how we can go about fixing that.

The course in question is "The Science of Well-Being," taught by Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos, available for free on Coursera. In March 2020, fewer than half a million people had enrolled. As of April 2021, the number was 3.43 million — making it Coursera's second most popular class of all time. Still ahead, with 4 million enrollments, is a free Stanford course on machine learning, which has the advantage of being run by Coursera cofounder Andrew Ng. Santos and Ng are equally well-loved, with 97 percent of reviews for both classes rating them five stars out of five. Read more...