Why Life Worth Living Exists

The Life Worth Living Program exists to revive critical discussion about these questions of lasting human significance. Through our courses at Yale College, a growing network of professors and institutions across higher education, pedagogical strategy and design, and public outreach for life-long learners, we aim to facilitate conversation across important and enduring lines of difference on questions of meaning and purpose.

The Life Worth Living program equips students, educators, and the public for the lifelong process of discerning, articulating, and pursuing the good life through engaging the world’s great philosophical and religious traditions. These core activities are supported by various media offerings and select textbook and popular publications. The program envisions a world where deep reflection on the good life is central to pluralistic undergraduate education and public discourse.

For Life-Long Learners

Educational resources to help you envision and live a flourishing life

Podcast

Thanks A Lot

Recent psychological studies find that gratitude can help us create, cultivate, and maintain the kinds of relationships that make life worth living. Other studies are finding that gratitude is far more complicated, and plays a nuanced role in our complex emotional lives. Research psychologist Jo-Ann Tsang (Baylor University) joins Ryan McAnnally-Linz to talk about the complicated emotional world that gratitude inhabits, the scientific study of giving thanks and the contexts where it's prosocial or adaptive for us, the dark side of gratitude, and the role it plays in a life of flourishing. This episode was made possible in part by the support of the Gratitude to God Project.

A caricature of a Turkey with a disgruntled pilgrim head, against a textured orange background.
People talking in a lecture hall
"I saw in my classmates, from Christian to Atheist to Muslim to Jew, from the agnostic middle to the free-will-denying scientists, a capacity for wonder, love, curiosity, deep reflection, argument, and serendipity."

Yale Student / Life Worth Living 2018

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John Templeton Foundation
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