This past week was Spring Break and toward the end, somehow my ex and my nanny fell out of the picture, and I was doing a lot of taking care of the kids, which, I have said before, is not what I’m great at. I wish I were. I tried for four years to be [...]

It’s a big day, and I’m excited to take a pause from work with the rest of the country to watch Barack Obama give his inagural speech.
In the meantime, I’m thinking about the day of service. How Obama wants the country to come together in the name of service. And I heard MTV declare, [...]

It is well known in the sex research arena that the more educated a woman is the more often she will receive oral sex.
I have always wondered if this is true for salary as well. For example, if your salary goes up by $50,000, how much more likely are you to receive oral sex?
I cannot [...]

In the middle of 2007, I was interviewed by Stephane Grenier for his book, Blog Blazers. The book came out this week, and it's a nice resource for understanding the approach top bloggers take to their trade. (Examples of interviews include Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, and JD Roth.)
I am publishing my own interview here, [...]

New evidence from famed happiness researcher Richard Easterlin shows that women are happier than men in early adulthood, but at age 41, this switches, and men are happier later in life. Easterlin says this gap comes from frustration over an inability to get married. Because most people want to be married, and if you want [...]

The idea that we somehow have a certain amount of potential that we must live up to is a complete crock. People who say they are not living up to their potential do not understand what living means.
Life is very hard. We each probably have some fundamental goals, even if we don't think of them [...]

Maybe the reason we're so bad at saving for retirement is that retirement seems so ridiculous today. The workplace no longer demands that we put off our hopes and dreams until we've worked 40 years. And Baby Boomers aren't exactly retiring in droves either, which makes younger people think that maybe they won't want to [...]

My husband and I are getting a divorce. It's really hard to write this for a lot of reasons, but the one that comes to mind this moment is that it's so crappy to be in the middle of a divorce when I make a living telling people how to run their lives.
Fortunately I also [...]

Happiness is not really different in each person. In fact, science shows us happiness is basically the same for all of us. And our roadblocks to happiness are all basically the same as well — that we each think we are special and the research doesn't apply to us, so we just keep trying to [...]

One of the worst pieces of career advice that I bet each of you has not only gotten but given is to "do what you love."
Forget that. It's absurd. I have been writing since before I even knew how to write – when I was a preschooler I dictated my writing to my dad. And [...]

The New Year is a traditional time for predictions. So here are mine, for the workplace. I predict an end of work as we know it, of course. But don't get jumpy – it's not going to be here in 2008. It's going to come sooner than later, as the next generation infiltrates the ranks [...]

For those of you who graduated from college before happiness courses were available, you've got some reading to do. But luckily, almost all of the books I have seen on this topic are very interesting.
One of these books is Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment by Gregory Burns, a professor of psychology at Emory. His [...]

During the middle of the 20th century, the social fabric of community unraveled. Families fled to the suburbs, where they lived isolated lives. Baby boomers became hyper competitive – almost a necessity of being part of such a huge generation – and then baby boomers raised latchkey kids, and Generation X felt so isolated from [...]

I was standing at the bottom of the Word Trade Center when it fell. I was standing so close that I didn't know it fell. I thought earthquake, until I couldn't breathe. Then I thought nuclear bomb.
Now, when I let my head go back to that day, there are two moments I most easily go [...]

Stephanie Roberts and I hung out at the BlogHer conference, and she recently posted a recording of our conversation on her blog. She asks things people are scared to ask me in person, like how can I keep blogging about my husband? She asks me things no one ever asks, like how do I write a blog post? She [...]

By Ryan Healy – Soaring education, housing and health care costs in recent years have made simply staying afloat in a large metropolis next to impossible without a huge salary and benefits package.
These rising costs are causing the well educated to "sell their souls" to law firms, investment banks, and management consulting firms to maintain [...]

It is clear from a wide range of polls that the majority of both men and women under 40 are willing to give up power and money to get flexible and interesting work. The problem is that this is not so simple. Taking a low-paying, unimpressive job is not going to give you flexibility. In [...]

It turns out that money actually can buy happiness, but not a lot of it. At some point, well under $100,000, the happiness value of a dollar starts to plummet, according to Richard Easterlin, economics professor at University of Southern California. This is because social interactions impact happiness more than money does.
But here's a new [...]

We have been together for fifteen years and we have two kids. We have been in couples therapy enough different times for me to know that I hate being in couples therapy with him because he never changes. It's always been more productive for me to go to therapy alone, where at least I can [...]

Are you switching jobs every two years? Are you draining your savings to start companies with no business plan? Are you hiring a headhunter to find you a spouse? These are things you should be doing to find the success you're looking for in the new workplace. Sure, they create instability, but what else are [...]