The Architecture of Happiness with Timothy Lomas

Tim Lomas is a Research Affiliate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and the author of Translating Happiness- A Cross-Cultural Lexicon of Well-Being. His work has been featured in Time, the New Yorker, Vox, Scientific American, and the Atlantic. Tim discusses his new paper The Architecture of Happiness. Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘created’ we do not mean its influencing factors, for which there is extensive research, but how it actually forms in the person. The work that has been done in this arena tends to focus on physiological dynamics, which are certainly part of the puzzle. But they are not the whole picture, with psychological, phenomenological, and socio cultural processes also playing their part. As a result, this paper offers a multidimensional overview of scholarship on the ‘architecture’ of happiness, providing a stimulus for further work into this important topic.