Teach these courses

The syllabi are public on purpose. Take them, adapt them, argue with them.

If a course can’t touch how a student lives, chooses, loves, or endures, I’m not interested in teaching it anymore.

What Happiness Courses Don’t Teach You

For the last decade, the humanities have been trying to save themselves with the wrong arguments. We keep saying literature “builds skills,” that it “teaches critical thinking,” that it “improves communication.” All true. All bloodless. Those claims sound like résumé filler because they are résumé filler. They describe education as output. They do not describe education as formation.

That’s the first problem. The crisis in the humanities is not primarily a skills crisis. It’s a meaning crisis. We stopped saying, out loud and without apology, what the humanities are actually for. And once you stop naming the purpose, the curriculum hollows out. Courses become clever, cautious, and forgettable. Students feel it immediately.

The second problem runs alongside it. There is a massive hole in the modern curriculum. We train people for jobs, for credentials, for technical competence… and then we act surprised when the most consequential parts of life arrive untrained. Grief. Desire. Friendship. Betrayal. Loneliness. Moral injury. The slow corrosion of purpose. The confusion of pleasure with flourishing. The daily work of staying human inside systems that don’t care whether you are becoming a person.

This is the gap. And it is not abstract. People are already living these questions. They are just doing it alone.

Heartbreak and Happiness emerged from that gap. It began as an undergraduate course. Over time, it became something else entirely. Not therapy. Not self-help. A serious encounter with the questions adults are already carrying… but rarely get to examine with disciplined attention and real company.

The students didn’t respond because the readings were trendy or “relatable.” They responded because the course gave them language, form, and friction. An honest framework for experiences they were already surviving in private.

That word matters. Friction.

Much of contemporary happiness education is engineered to remove friction. Smooth the edges. Optimize the mood. Affirm the self. It’s comforting. It’s consumable. It’s dessert. All sugar. No resistance.

But real life doesn’t cooperate. Love doesn’t arrive optimized. Loss doesn’t respect your morning routine. Growth happens under pressure. Formation requires friction. You don’t get a durable self without resistance.

If education is going to matter in a world where information is cheap and answers are fluent, it has to return to what cannot be outsourced. Judgment. Taste. Ethical reasoning. Attention under strain. The ability to stay present inside ambiguity. The capacity to repair after rupture. The courage to revise your story without lying about what happened.

These are not soft skills. They are survival skills. They are the infrastructure of adulthood.

That’s why I’m making the syllabus public.

I want other professors, graduate instructors, and independent teachers to be able to take it, adapt it, argue with it, improve it… and teach versions of it in their own idioms. I want people outside academia to see what a serious humanities course looks like when it treats love, loss, and the good life as intellectually legitimate subjects… not as private messes students are left to clean up alone.

The premise is simple. Literature is our most powerful technology for exploring consciousness and relationship. It models desire and self-deception. It stages betrayal and forgiveness. It lets us feel consequences from the inside. It trains attention. It forces judgment. It shows what different lives cost.

This course is intentionally lean. Each week turns on one hard question. Each week pairs major texts with poems, advice columns, and one anchor piece of media… not to dumb anything down, but to keep the encounter embodied and alive. Private experience and public reasoning belong in the same room. Carefully handled. Taken seriously.

And it’s designed to travel. If you teach in the humanities, you already have the tools. The only shift required is philosophical. Formation becomes an explicit aim. Not an accidental byproduct.

The classroom stops being content delivery and starts functioning like cultivation. You can’t optimize an orchard. You tend it. You build conditions. You return daily. You accept uncertainty. Growth happens slowly or not at all.

That’s the solution to all three problems at once.

It answers the humanities crisis by clarifying the value proposition. Not content, but meaning. Not outputs, but formation. Not critique as an endpoint, but judgment as a practice.

It fills the curricular hole by treating heartbreak, happiness, and the good life as rigorous subjects… worthy of sustained study rather than relegated to private coping.

It takes seriously the fact that some courses genuinely change lives… and asks what it would mean to treat that as a core deliverable, not a lucky accident.

And it offers something scalable. A structure other teachers can run, revise, and iterate without waiting for institutional permission.

If you want the syllabus, take it. Teach it. Remix it. Swap texts. Change traditions. Make it local. Make it strange. The point isn’t to canonize one reading list. The point is to say, publicly, that education worthy of the name must prepare people not just to work… but to live.

I’m sharing this because the need is obvious. People are hungry for seriousness about human questions. They’re tired of comfort without capacity. We don’t need less friction. We need better friction. Friction that makes us more capable of love. More capable of loss. More capable of one another.