On Happiness
Presented by David Cain



The baffling thing about happiness is that everybody in the world wants it, yet human beings are generally not very good at making it. Learning to improve the quality of your own experience in real-time is the most important skill-set in the world, yet our schools don't even touch on it, and it's not a common topic of conversation.

Society generally views the source of happiness as a favorable set of circumstances, rather than a set of skills, and so we end up learning to pursue happiness by focusing on the externals: money, achievement, status, and luck. This presentation is about how your level of happiness is determined mostly by how well you understand yourself and your species, and how skillfully you interact with the world on your end. 

We'll look at how cultural norms, Mother Nature, and even our well-intentioned friends and family can point us in the wrong direction in our pursuit of happiness. We'll explore the crucial role of lifestyle decisions, as well a set of skills and "best practices" -- both specific and general -- for cultivating happiness in your everyday life.

Meet David Cain


David Cain is a 35 year-old blogger from Winnipeg, Canada. After experiencing an inexplicable collapse of happiness in his early twenties, David spent the next decade reading about and observing the differences between how happy and unhappy people interact with the world. 

He learned that while much has been written about the topic of fulfillment and happiness, most of it is either too theoretical or too denominational for most people to make practical use of it in their lives. David's focus became the real-time application of insights about human happiness: what to do differently in the ordinary moments of ordinary days, in order to create a better experience.

By applying these principles, he transformed his life, and in 2009 he started his blog, Raptitude, to share his most useful insights and practices. Raptitude found an audience quickly, and now receives millions of visits annually. David has since left his career as a land surveyor to write full-time. He is an avid traveler and an amateur photographer.