Slow Syllabus

Heartbreak & Happiness

Ten weeks on love, loss, and what makes a life good.

This is a free, self-paced course exploring heartbreak and happiness through literature, philosophy, psychology, and contemporary culture.

We read because life is short. To fight loneliness. To escape the tyranny of time. To see the world through other eyes and inhabit other bodies. To figure out who we are, who we were, and who we are meant to be.

Literature is a window and a mirror: it lets us look out at lives unlike our own and look back at ourselves with new clarity. It is an anvil on which we forge meaning and a thread that weaves us into the broader human story.

This course invites you to do that work.

The course circles three questions.

  1. How are heartbreak and happiness interwoven? We tend to treat these as opposites. They’re not. The capacity for one is the condition for the other.
  2. What can experiences of love, loss, and the death of love teach us? Not just survive, but teach. What do we learn from heartbreak that we couldn’t learn any other way?
  3. What makes a good life? Not a perfect life, not an easy life. A good one. The ancient Greeks called it eudaimonia: human flourishing.

How it works

  • Every week stands on its own page. Read the framing, follow the links, answer the question at the end.
  • One to three hours a week, depending on how deep you go.
  • Every core reading is free and linked. Public domain texts, open archives, recorded lectures. Nothing to buy.
  • No account, no enrollment, no certificate, no grade. Nobody is tracking whether you finished.

10 weeks

  1. 1 Connection Matters Introductions to Heartbreak & Happiness 3 sources
  2. 2 Ancient Wisdom Ethics and the Good Life 2 sources
  3. 3 Friendship, Virtue, and Flourishing Aristotle on the Good Life 1 source
  4. 4 Biblical Depths Suffering, Ecstasy, and Blessedness 3 sources
  5. 5 Making Masculinity Stoicism, Endurance, and Longing 1 source
  6. 6 Feminine Formation Contemporary Voices I 3 sources
  7. 7 Love, Loss, and Justice Contemporary Voices II 0 sources
  8. 8 Vulnerability, Attachment, and Open Hearts Psychology and Fiction 1 source
  9. 9 The Tyranny of Love and Despair When Desire Conflicts with Ethics 4 sources
  10. 10 Narrative, Film, and Synthesis Why Literature? 3 sources