The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt. You hear 'ancient wisdom' on how to lead the good life all the time. These ancient aphorisms came from a time before the scientific method and the idea of testing your hypotheses. Tradition has acted a sort of pre-conscious filter on the advice we get, so we can expect it to hold some value. But now, we can do better. Haidt is a psychologist who read a large collection of t…
This book is my favorite non-fiction book. It is hard to reduce it back to what it is about, but it is filled with very useful insight into how the mind works. The metaphor of the rider and the elephant finally let me explain differences between what I consciously decided and what I actually did.
It's a metaphor he also puts to good use in his later book, the Righteous Mind. It's useful to seeing through your own righteousness and recognizing patterns in others. I enjoyed that one too, but it didn't have the same life impact as the Happiness Hypothesis.