I can recommend _The Happiness Hypothesis - Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom_, by Jonathan Haidt, as relevant here.
The book was suggested to me by a CBT practitioner. It languished on my shelf for several years because it sat adjacent to a bit of new age fluff, and I thought the subtitle sounded like it was another bunch of lost-wisdom-of-the-ancients drivel. I thought wrong: one should not judge a book by its cover.
The book is serious -- Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern School -- yet eminently readable. It pulls in relevant aspects of the "ancient wisdom," evaluates them in the context of contemporary research, and shows where they can help us today and where they are outright plain wrong.
I can't say it has changed my life yet, but it has helped settle the inchoate bits that I have taken from the Enchiridon, Meditations, etc., into a useful way of thinking about the world and my place in it.
Ah, Jonathan Haidt haven't heard of him in a long while. I second this. If you like stuff like this, then you also might like:
- Search Inside Yourself by Chade Meng-Tan
- The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman
I read the Happiness Hypothesis quite late in my development regarding "how to be come happier?" I already knew a lot of the ideas in there, but it presented its ideas a bit more clearly than whatever I read from Martin Seligman (many books) and Suzanne Segerstrom (Optimism).
This is why I'd still recommend that book.
I also recommend to read the concept on self-learned helplessness (Seligman researched it) if you haven't already.
One book that I actively disrecommend nowadays is Man's Search for Meaning. I didn't look too deep into it, but there's a lot of controversy on the truth of his claims (e.g. some claim he was in the concentration camps for a few days, not months or years like he implicitly depicts).
Disclaimer: it's these types of books that motivated me to do an entire undergraduate degree in psychology back 6 years ago. Only to realize most of it is nonsense. Yet, at the same time, not all of it is nonsense. Plus it gave me the skills to see what was and what wasn't nonsense.
Since we're mentioning Jonathan Haidt I just wanna chime in with an additional recommendation: _The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion_. In this book Haidt digs into the roots of human morality; it changed my perception of the world. Haidt has a TED talk [0] which is basically a tl;dr of The Righteous Mind and it's only ~18.5 minutes long.
The book was suggested to me by a CBT practitioner. It languished on my shelf for several years because it sat adjacent to a bit of new age fluff, and I thought the subtitle sounded like it was another bunch of lost-wisdom-of-the-ancients drivel. I thought wrong: one should not judge a book by its cover.
The book is serious -- Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU Stern School -- yet eminently readable. It pulls in relevant aspects of the "ancient wisdom," evaluates them in the context of contemporary research, and shows where they can help us today and where they are outright plain wrong.
I can't say it has changed my life yet, but it has helped settle the inchoate bits that I have taken from the Enchiridon, Meditations, etc., into a useful way of thinking about the world and my place in it.
Now on to William Braxton Irvine...