One City’s Secret to Happiness: The Annual Burning of a 50-Foot Effigy

Destruction is essential to construction. If we want to build the new, we must be willing to let the old burn.

“psychological moralism” places enormous pressure on us to always be improving, feeling good, and rising above our problems.2 Happiness has become the new mecca, and anything short of that often leaves us feeling that we have done something wrong or failed to live up to the acknowledged standard. This forces sorrow, pain, fear, weakness, and vulner

We live in an increasingly anxious and depressed society, subject to unprecedented psychic misery at a time of unprecedented prosperity. The psychologist Martin Seligman explains this paradox with two parallel forces, which he calls 'the waxing of the individual and the waning of the commons'. On

Affliction, like fire, can ultimately consume our physical selves, but unlike fire, it begins by destroying our social and psychological selves. At its extreme, it reduces us, if not to a dead husk of what we once were, to something equally gruesome: a being driven by nothing more than the instinct of survival, one that “blindly fastens itself to e