The research consistently shows that money, power, prestige, food, drink, stuff, status—what Aquinas would call “worldly” pleasures, and what you and I might call the American dream—don’t typically lead to lasting happiness. For example, Americans didn’t get any happier from 1975 to 1999, even though they became 43 percent wealthier based on per capita GDP. Some evidence suggests that as we’ve had more opportunities for more of those things, we’ve become less happy. The United States experienced a serious happiness downturn starting around 2015. And the number of Americans reporting that they
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