Five years ago, REI took a bold stand against the hyper-consumerism that reaches its zenith every year on the Friday following the US holiday of Thanksgiving aka Black Friday. As with previous years, REI will close its stores, cease processing online payments, and pay its 13,000 employees to ‘Opt Outside’ for for the day. Only this year, the brand now says it, and its members, need to do more.
Barbara Frederickson is a leading researcher in the field of social psychology and positive psychology. That is, she studies love and other positive emotions such as joy, inspiration, and pride, through the lens of social science, rooted in research studies, hypothesis, and data.
If happiness is a state of being which at times can be vague, joy is an intense, fleeting emotion that we experience physically, in small moments. While the pursuit of happiness is a long-term endeavor, little moments of joy are easier to find and more accessible.
As Nassim Nicholas Taleb told us in his book The Black Swan humans have a tendency to find simplistic explanations for highly improbable, rare and unpredictable events.
