Quotes from Jonathan Rauch

Whether one likes this or that person is less important, finally, than whether one likes oneself with this or that person.

if money does not necessarily increase life satisfaction, what does?

Everywhere that I have studied happiness some very simple patterns hold: a stable marriage, good health, and enough (but not too much) income are good for happiness. Unemployment, divorce, and economic instability are terrible for happiness—everywhere that happiness is studied.

Your Gain Is My Pain: Negative Psychological Externalities of Cash Transfers.

An increase in the visibility of inequality would compound the effect, as the Norwegians discovered.

A basic principle of science—of liberal social life—is that we kill our hypotheses rather than each other .

a middle-class teacher or a working-class taxi driver in San Francisco, and if every morning you watch as millionaires who look like teenagers queue on Van Ness Avenue for the Google bus, the status gap probably feels even bigger than the income gap.

we care about money not so much because of what it buys as because of where it ranks us among our peers.

Money is applause.

Deeper satisfaction comes not from feeling good, he taught, but from doing good: from cultivating and maintaining virtuous habits that balance one's own life and create and deepen ties with others.

social connectedness can go a long way toward alleviating the misery caused by a financial crisis.

Amateurs and single-issue activists have their uses, but without hacks the machine fails, which is why it puts such a premium on people who pay their dues and work their way up the ranks.

According to one estimate, the amount of money needed to "compensate," statistically speaking, for a lost marriage is on the order of an extra $100,000 a year.

The truest form of wealth is social, not material.

we all benefit enormously from living in a society which is rich with prejudices, because strong opinions, however biased or wrongheaded, energize debate.

Having parented successfully in the past may rank as a satisfying accomplishment retrospectively; but the bulk of research finds that being a parent, while it is happening, does not increase life satisfaction and may reduce it.

stamping out prejudice inevitably means making everybody share the same prejudice

You don't know how much of both love and anger you are capable of feeling until you're a parent,

Those who look to parenthood as a solution to their discontent will typically find that the rewards, though real, are some years in the future.

The 2015 World Happiness Report finds that women's life evaluations are on average slightly higher than men's, but that the differences are very small.

insisted on comparing upward, which is the worst thing you can do. As Richard Layard writes, "One secret of happiness is to ignore comparisons with people who are more successful than you are: always compare downwards, not upwards.

I was not comparing my forty-year-old self to my twenty-year-old self, as the twenty-year-old version of me had assumed I would. I was comparing myself to other fortysomethings in my peer group, many of whom also had sustained relationships (often longer), accumulated wealth (often more), and achieved professional status (often higher). True, I was better off than most of humanity, but most of humanity was not my comparison group.

Unfortunately, that advice, while sound, is difficult to follow; how difficult depends on not just our attitude, but also our age.

Now I couldn't care less. I just feel like I can write what I want to write, but don't feel I have anything to prove anymore. I think it's very much internal. I don't care about how others judge me.