My (awesome, brilliant) colleague at Hunch, Hugo Liu, has a piece in a Shanghainese journal, Cultural Review, entitled "Small happiness: aesthetic strategies for witting consumers". He's not online right now, otherwise I'd ask him if there's a copy of the whole piece, but I'm intrigued by the excerpt on his site. He says "true happiness becomes substantial when it not only endures, but in fact, creates and flourishes" and "with the wisdom of a well-trained imagination, each passing day we will even recognize new beauties in that which is already before us". He calls this "small" happiness -- happinesses that once you know how to recognize, capture and experience them, accrete, thereby becoming "true" happiness that endures over time.

(For all you social software nerds out there, he's also got a lot of interesting work in social networks, taste, recommendations and computational aesthetics.)

LINK | 5:11 PM | TB

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