Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Serenity Prayer
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
I first heard these words in my twenties and thought they were the pinnacle of self-help wisdom. It’s known as the Serenity Prayer—famous in Alcoholics Anonymous. Here was a path to peace, proven in the crucible of real suffering.
I took it as a blueprint for a good life: figure out what’s broken, fix what you can, and accept the rest. A kind of personal maintenance philosophy. It’s the way many Americans think these days. In a recent article in The Atlantic, psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman argued that treatment shouldn’t last forever. Once you’ve patched up the problem, the work is done.
It’s a compelling idea—progress through repair. But it turns out, the wisdom behind the Serenity Prayer goes back much further than 20th-century psychology. This idea forms the core of Stoic philosophy, especially in the work of Epictetus, who put it simply: “Some things are up to us, and some things are not.”
This wasn’t about fixing things that were broken. It was a philosophy of living. Their aim wasn’t to soothe the mind, but to shape a life worth living. They weren’t asking, What’s wrong with me? They were asking, What does it mean to live well?
Before psychology became a science, it was a branch of philosophy. It didn’t focus on diagnosis or dysfunction. It focused on building a life of resilience, clarity, and purpose—therapy with fewer couches, more sandals.
So how did we get from there to here, where mental health often feels like a scavenger hunt for trauma?
The shift began in the late 1800s, when psychology became its own discipline. To gain legitimacy, it had to measure things—and it turns out suffering is much easier to quantify than flourishing.
Freud charted internal conflicts. Behaviorists reduced human behavior to inputs and outputs. And eventually, the DSM gave us a comprehensive catalog of what can go wrong. That was real progress. Therapy helped people name their pain, and begin to heal.
But along the way, the field developed a kind of tunnel vision. We got so good at diagnosing the broken parts that we stopped asking what a whole life looks like. Insight became synonymous with pathology. Growth, we assumed, would follow once the damage was addressed.
This was the state of affairs until the late 1990s, when Martin Seligman—then president of the American Psychological Association—called for a pivot. Psychology, he said, had spent decades studying illness. What it had neglected was everything else—meaning, gratitude, connection, joy.
He called the new approach positive psychology. It didn’t reject therapy or minimize suffering. It simply asked: what else matters?
When I first heard about it, I’ll admit—I rolled my eyes. It sounded like a self-help rebrand, a too-sunny attempt to cheer us out of our sadness. Gratitude journals and TED Talks about happiness. I thought psychology was supposed to be deeper than that.
But I had it backwards.
Positive psychology wasn’t running away from psychology. It was running back. It didn’t deny pain; it just refused to make pain the whole story. It asked enduring questions in a renewed voice: How do we live wisely? What helps us flourish, not just function?
In the end, it wasn’t a tangent away from psychology. It was philosophy, sneaking back in through the side door.
Because healing matters. But it’s not the final destination. As we say in business, “You can’t cut your way to growth.”
We’re not here just to get better.
We’re here to become better people.
Notes
I wrote about positive psychology in this post: How to be Happy — Yale’s Most Popular Class.
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