Person
Jordan Etkin
Marketing researcher; Cassie Holmes's co-author
Cassie Holmes's research collaborator, referenced (not interviewed) in Episode 131. Their joint work found that a greater variety of activities across a week raises satisfaction — and that even simply focusing on the differences between activities, rather than genuinely varying them, produces some of the benefit (see Holmes Etkin Activity-Variety Happiness Study). Holmes notes a caveat from the same work: cramming too many different activities into a short window backfires, because it feels like frantically shifting between things without ever engaging properly with any of them. See Hedonic Adaptation.
Discussed in
- Episode 131 — 131-tips-for-living-a-happier-life-according-to-science