Absence of failure may be the key to real happiness

After this long blogging break, I realized that I forgot to post a link to my most recent column from the Technique. As is often the case, articles I stumbled across on the web made me begin thinking about a topic -- in this case, that of happiness and why people are or are not happy in certain situations.

My key point is that students at Tech are often unhappy because they have unreasonable expectations of success, which cannot hold up in the Institute's challenging environment. I'm not sure I made the argument as well as I wanted to, though, and I'm frustrated because I don't have any really practical ideas for making students happier. As is often the case with matters of the mind, it's up to the students themselves to adopt the right attitude.