The Good Life

In his best-selling book, “Emotional Intelligence,” author Daniel Goleman asserts that “since the beginning of the last century, each generation has lived with an increasing risk of suffering a major depression — not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, dejection, self pity, and an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness.” Just reading that is very depressing, but it’s also very important. It’s important because it affects so many of us. The “overwhelming hopelessness” that Goleman describes results from the feeling that one is unable to overcome this impoverished emotional state — on either the individual or the global level.

According to Goleman, the “age of anxiety” that characterized the last century is now evolving into an “age of melancholy.” In “Man’s Search For Meaning,” the psychiatrist and educator Viktor Frankl claimed that this kind of bankrupt emotional state is widespread, and lamented the fact that 60% of his American students felt that they lived in a state of “inner emptiness — a void within themselves.” Yet the…