PM Mitsotakis will fight to keep leading the country, which is reeling from a rail crash and worries about the economy.

Right before the legislative election in May, questions are being raised over the state of democracy in Greece as the country faces the potential resurgence of far-right extremism for the second time within two decades, Georgios Samaras writes.

Greece has signalled the start of a month-long general election campaign with the Prime Minister and President meeting to dissolve parliament. The election will take place on May 21.

“How to Build a Life” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.

One of my friends, more so than anyone else I know, has a remarkable power to make the people around him happy. He does this not through beer or flattery, but simply through the power of his personality. He is extroverted, conscientious, agreeable—all the traits that psychologists predict will attract a lot of friends.

But there’s one personality characteristic of his that I find especially winning: his enthusiasm. He is excited about his work and fascinated by mine. He speaks ebulliently about his family but also about the economy and politics. He has, as the 19th-century philosopher William James put it, “zest [for] the common objects of life.”

My friend is also an unusually happy person, which I had always thought explained his enthusiasm. But I had it backwards. In truth, enthusiasm is one of the personality traits that appear to drive happiness the most. In fact, to get happier, each of us can increase our own zest for the common objects of our lives. And it isn’t all that hard to do.

Research on personality goes back millennia, to ancient Greece at least. In the fourth century B.C., Hippocrates theorized that our characters are made up of four temperaments: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic. These, he posited, were due to a predominance of one of the four humors, or fluids, in one’s body: yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm.

Although medical knowledge has overtaken this approach—for example, black bile doesn’t even exist—Hippocrates foreshadowed a good deal of our modern thinking on personality. During the 20th century, scholars developed a personality typology that we still use today. In 1921, Carl Jung distinguished between introverts and extroverts; in 1949, the psychologist Donald Fiske expanded on that work when he identified five major personality factors. Later research further refined the features of these traits and named them openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

[Read: What your favorite personality test says about you]

Over the past 70 years, the Big Five have been used to investigate and explain many social phenomena. For example, as I have written, extroverts tend to make friends easily, but introverts tend to form deeper bonds. When people high in neuroticism who have money make more money, many of them enjoy it less than those lower in neuroticism. People who are more extroverted and conscientious tend toward conservatism, whereas those who are more open to new experiences typically espouse more liberal views.

Two traits out of the Big Five seem to be especially important for happiness: In 2018, psychologists confirmed that high extroversion and low neuroticism seemed to be the recipe for well-being. More specifically, the correlations hinged on one aspect of extroversion and one aspect of neuroticism—enthusiasm and withdrawal, respectively.

You might say that enthusiasm and withdrawal form the poles of a spectrum of behavior. Enthusiasm is defined as being friendly and sociable—“leaning into” life. Withdrawal denotes being easily discouraged and overwhelmed, leading one to “lean out” of social situations and into oneself. If we could become more enthusiastic and withdraw less, the data suggest, we would become happier. We might become more successful too. “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1841 essay “Circles.” “The way of life is wonderful: It is by abandonment.”

Perhaps we could conceive of the perfect personality for achieving the happiest life. Of course, this is only helpful if you can change yours to better fit that ideal. This is unlikely, given that huge personality changes are generally only associated with a traumatic brain injury. However, as my colleague Olga Khazan has written, smaller shifts are possible. In one 2020 study, scientists asked people to record their ordinary activities, reminding them by text message to act in certain ways, such as being a bit more conscientious or open than they ordinarily would. It worked: Their behavior changed, at least as long as they were studied.

[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

If you want to lean into life more enthusiastically, you might try something similar by setting up a system of reminders. For example, you might schedule an alarm on your phone or an email to yourself each day that says, “Open up to all the people and things you see today!” But there are other, deeper interventions worth trying as well.

1. Use the “as if principle.”

In his magisterial 1890 text, The Principles of Psychology, James (a Harvard professor and an Atlantic contributor) outlined a radical philosophy of behavior change: Fake it. “We cannot control our emotions,” he noted. “But gradually our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method: we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real.”

As the psychologist Richard Wiseman argues in his book The As If Principle, James’s approach is surprisingly effective. Academic research undertaken by the psychologists Seth Margolis and Sonja Lyubomirsky bears this out, showing that if people act more extroverted in general, they do in fact succeed and become happier.

Faking enthusiasm is fairly straightforward. When you want to withdraw from social activities (perhaps you are overwhelmed or bored), act as if you were enthusiastic instead. Tell yourself, “I am going to get into this right now.” This will, the research suggests, establish new cognitive habits that gradually become more automatic.

[Read: A counterintuitive way to cheer up when you’re down]

Obviously, you can push this too far. I am not suggesting that you muster enthusiasm for something dangerous or use it to escape your problems. (“Today, I will enthusiastically act as if I didn’t have to pay my taxes!”) Instead, use the principle to nudge yourself toward positive changes.

2. Reframe challenges as chances.

One of the most popular self-improvement writers of the 20th century was the Protestant pastor Norman Vincent Peale, who sold millions of books on positive thinking. One of his titles was Enthusiasm Makes the Difference, in which he shares advice from a sage friend: “Always be glad when there is trouble on the earth … for it means there is movement in heaven; and this indicates great things are about to happen.”

It’s easy to dismiss this thinking as Pollyannaish and unscientific, but it is a good example of reframing a problem as an opportunity. This is a common strategy in creativity and innovation, and a successful technique in business leadership. Entrepreneurs routinely use reframing after setbacks by asking questions such as “What did I learn from this?” You can increase your enthusiasm for things you would ordinarily withdraw from by affirming, “This is hard for me, which is why I am doing it,” or something similar.

3. Curate your friends.

One of the best ways to become more enthusiastic is to hang around enthusiastic people such as my friend. (I’m not giving out his number; you have to find your own.) By doing this, you’ll be taking advantage of what psychologists call “emotional contagion,” in which people adopt the emotions and attitudes of those around them. If you tend to withdraw, it may be easy to gravitate toward people who do the same. But consciously doing the opposite can help you borrow a better personality trait from those around you. Look for companions who lean into life with gusto. Although it might seem like a chore at first, you’ll be more likely to “catch” this spirit and become enthusiastic about the friendships.

Fighting your tendency for withdrawal doesn’t mean that you can never be alone. There is a difference between a neurotic withdrawal from life and deliberate solitude. And the inability to be without company and stimulation is not necessarily a mark of good health either. What matters is your motive: whether you are moving away from others or toward being alone (or, conversely, whether you are moving toward others or away from your own thoughts).

Henry David Thoreau didn’t write Walden as an exercise in withdrawal but rather as an enthusiastic endorsement of finding oneself in the company of one’s thoughts. His description of waking up alone in a cabin by Walden Pond is a portrait of enthusiasm. “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

[Read: The virtues of isolation]

Even if your surroundings aren’t as picturesque as Walden, you can choose to treat every morning, every interaction, and every setback as a cheerful invitation. You can make your head into your own cozy cabin, and make life inside it a little brighter.

But the prime minister may not get the credit for it in the coming election

In ancient Greece, the physician Hippocrates is said to have theorized that the ratio of four bodily fluids—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm—dictated a person’s distinct temperament. The psychologist Carl Jung, in his 1921 book, Psychological Types, proposed two major attitudinal types (introversion and extroversion) and four cognitive functions (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition) that combine to yield eight different psychological profiles. And in 2022, a BuzzFeed contributor suggested that everyone is either an apple or a banana. (I’m an apple.)

The point is, people have historically made great efforts to categorize their inner workings, and they haven’t stopped trying. Billy is an extrovert; Sarah wants you to know that her love language is gifts. Your best friend is a Miranda, and you enjoy her company even though she’s a Gemini. Today, attempting to measure personality is a fun conversation topic, a still-growing area of scientific study, and a multibillion-dollar industry.

This plethora of personality measurements presents a new quandary, though: Which one do you believe in? Research has pointed to three major motives for self-evaluation—self-assessment (procuring accurate self-knowledge), self-enhancement (hearing vague compliments and thinking, Huh, that does sound like me), and self-verification (checking to see if others see you the way you see yourself). Yet modern behavior measurements—whether Jungian or fruit-based—can attract different types of people, who are drawn to their test of choice for different reasons. In other words, the selection of the metric itself might say something about the person.

Can someone’s personality predict the type of personality test they might want to take? The Atlantic made a quiz to try to find out. Like so many tests that have come before, it is not scientific. It also takes a rather broad definition of the word test—you’ll find astrology as one of the results, which is not a test, but a way of categorizing people based on the position of the stars and planets during their time of birth. Take our quiz as an Aquarius would: with an open mind and a generous spirit.

Ultimately, people’s attraction to certain personality tests is not completely random. Consider the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, created by the mother-and-daughter team Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, which sorts people into one of 16 personality types. The system was influenced by Jung, and each type is represented by four letters, such as ISTJ (introversion, sensing, thinking, judging) and ENFP (extroversion, intuition, feeling, and perceiving). The test—which may appear empirical, although scientists have strong reservations about it—is popular in the corporate world.

This association took off in 1975 when, according to Merve Emre’s book The Personality Brokers, Myers sold the MBTI to Consulting Psychologists Press. The new version of the quiz was shorter and adjusted to be self-scoring, which made the test cheaper and faster to take, and, according to critics, less concerned with validity. It is still used by Fortune 100 companies, universities, and the military to assess workers’ strengths, determine which employees should work together, and—though it is not advised by the Myers & Briggs Foundation—sometimes assist in hiring. In corporations, Emre told NPR, the MBTI became “this incredibly useful tool for convincing people that they are doing exactly what it is that they are meant to do—and that they should bind themselves to their work freely and gladly.”

The Enneagram, meanwhile, might appeal to people who are seeking spiritual enlightenment rather than a happier workplace. This system—which is also not scientific—sorts its test-takers into personality types labeled one to nine. Each number represents a core “virtue,” which also corresponds to a “passion” (transgressions that are essentially the seven deadly sins plus two extra: deceit and fear). The Enneagram tries to help people learn what is motivating them to move away from their virtue, and then navigate them back. Its popularity with some Christians might reveal what people like about their favorite personality tests generally: The results readily assimilate into the test-taker’s worldview.

[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]

There are plenty of other personality measures with their own appeals. The Big Five grades people’s traits—openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—with percentile scores of one to 100, and is the personality framework most widely approved by psychologists. Although it is not perfect, the Big Five places its users on a spectrum rather than into a set of rigid “types,” a system much more in line with how personality actually works. That might appeal to the more empirically rigorous seeker of self-knowledge. For people who are more spiritual than religious (or for those who just like memes), astrology offers another path toward guidance and self-reflection. Although it’s been around for thousands of years, Millennials and the internet have driven a resurgence of the star-based personality-sorting system. Meanwhile, if you strongly identify with your favorite fictional characters, quizzes abound online. You can find out which Sex and the City character you are, or which Taylor Swift era you’re currently in. Tests that tell you which Hogwarts house you belong in have been perhaps among the most persuasive pop-culture quizzes, because personality testing is built right into the Harry Potter series’ lore via its sentient “Sorting Hat.”

The bottom line is that personality tests that you can do at home speak to a timeless human need—and most of them should not be taken too seriously. Jennifer Fayard, a psychology professor at Ouachita Baptist University, in Arkansas, told me not only that both the MBTI and Enneagram “aren’t real” and “aren’t good,” but that overrelying on their explanatory powers could have negative effects. “In my experience, when I talk to people about this, what I hear is, ‘Oh, I know it’s just a test … I don’t make it my whole identity. I just use it as a tool to understand myself,’” she said. “But yet, I know so many people who have made it their identity, who use it as the way to describe themselves to people or to explain their behavior.” This can lead to test results being used to ignore, or refuse to adjust, maladaptive behavior: for example, bailing on dinner plans at the last minute because, as your friends should understand, ENFPs struggle with time management.  

But looking for excuses isn’t what typically motivates people to take a personality test today. Instead, as Tessa West, a psychology professor at New York University, told me, they’re looking, in part, to have a sense of certainty about where they belong and what path they should follow. In some ways, this is not surprising. Self-knowledge can feel like a balm for unpredictability, whether in relationships or at the office. The contemporary test-taker’s hope might be that if you know your love language or what kind of worker you are, you’ll know what choices you need to make to have a successful life. Beyond that, you might even find a sense of identity or community. That rings true to me. But then again, I am a Type-Four-Aquarius-INFJ-Ravenclaw.

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What image does the word philosopher conjure? Maybe Socrates, bearded and barefoot, counseling Plato on the agora; Rousseau on one of his solitary walks around the outskirts of Paris; Sartre sucking pensively on his pipe at the Café de Flore. What it may not call to mind is a woman.

And perhaps for good reason: The field of philosophy has always had a stark gender imbalance. And it’s no different today. Though women tend to be overrepresented in the humanities in general, philosophy is an outlier. A 2018 survey of the American Philosophical Association’s membership reported that 25 percent of respondents were women, and one 2017 study similarly found that women made up 25 percent of faculty in U.S. philosophy departments.

There are likely multiple contributing factors, many of which aren’t unique to philosophy: exclusionary professional cultures, unconscious bias from peers and professors, sexual harassment within departments. And just as the myth of the mathematically superior male brain has discouraged women from pursuing careers in STEM, myths about men’s propensity for abstract thought still shape conversations about philosophy.

In How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind, the journalist Regan Penaluna, who earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston University, writes ambivalently of navigating male-dominated philosophy departments, where she wondered if her negative experiences were the result of sexism or her own inadequacy. (It didn’t help that women thinkers were rarely acknowledged in her coursework or included on syllabi.) She compares her pernicious self-doubt to Descartes’ pestering, deceptive demon—a concept that the Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila actually articulated nearly a century before Descartes did.

Through her studies, Penaluna confirms not only that women have always engaged in philosophy, but that they have made unique and substantial contributions to the field. If philosophy is concerned with the nature of human existence, then a canon dominated by men, to paraphrase Joanna Russ in her 1983 book How to Suppress Women’s Writing, is not just incomplete but distorted. Women see and understand the world differently from their male counterparts, not owing to any kind of gender essentialism but because they bring their own experiences to the table, as all philosophers do.

A life wholly devoted to philosophy was unavailable to most women for the majority of history. But in the past century, as greater numbers of women gained access to higher education and created lives outside the home, thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Simone Weil, and, more recently, Judith Butler and Angela Davis, have transformed philosophy with their ideas. (The recent book Metaphysical Animals and the forthcoming book The Visionaries mark two exciting efforts to establish some of these women as integral to the canon.)

[Read: Reviving the female canon]

Yet since ancient Greece, women have pursued a life of the mind amid every imaginable constraint. That we don’t know most of their names is the result of omission. In How to Think Like a Woman, Penaluna zeroes in on four women who deserve more recognition—the 17th- and 18th-century philosophers Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn, Damaris Masham, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

“Women philosophers were not late to the scene; it seems they were there from the start,” writes Penaluna, “and they had much to say about their oppressive condition.” Indeed, enabled by their unique vantage point, the four women whom Penaluna spotlights wrote explicitly about the limitations of a society shaped almost solely by the views of men. In 1792, Wollstonecraft published her groundbreaking treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which argued, against the backdrop of the French Revolution, that natural rights—access to an education, as well as to political and economic life—should extend to women. A full century before that, Astell wrote A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, which advocated for academies created by and for women. The proto-feminist nature of much of these women’s writing—as well as the mere fact that their work focused on women—likely contributed to their exclusion. Yet this approach is what made their work so valuable philosophically: By expanding the range of subjects and perspectives that the discipline could encompass, they laid the groundwork for a more capacious and inclusive field of study.

Overall, Astell, Cockburn, Masham, and Wollstonecraft’s writings endure less for the sophistication of their arguments than for the fact that they introduced such era-defying ideas in the first place—they were among the very first to critique men’s domination of the social and political realms, assembling the foundations of feminist theory centuries before such a thing existed. And they did so with exceptional boldness, sometimes writing in direct, defiant response to their male contemporaries. Masham’s 1696 treatise, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God, rebutted a book by the popular French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, and Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman was prompted by a report on public education by the politician Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord—her book begins with a note to Talleyrand-Périgord: “I dedicate this volume to you.”

Though Penaluna engages rigorously with her subjects’ work, she tends to focus more on biography than textual analysis. But, refreshingly, she doesn’t cast these four women as flat feminist heroes; instead, she paints Astell, Cockburn, Masham, and Wollstonecraft as complicated, conflicted figures who often found themselves lonely, disappointed, and alienated by their own intellects. Like many women today, they were caught between ambition and reality. Masham, a 17th-century English thinker and longtime friend of John Locke, predicted that if women took their minds seriously and made full use of their critical faculties, they would become attuned to the limitations and indignities that constrain their lives—“here,” writes Penaluna, “the pleasure of contemplation will be mixed with notes of sadness.” This sadness followed Masham to the grave: Her headstone, which praised her “Learning, Judgment, Sagacity, and Penetration,” conceded that in her life she “only wanted Opportunities to make those Talents shine in the World.”

[Read: Where our sense of self comes from]

Some male philosophers have argued that women thinkers are disqualifyingly circumscribed by their femaleness, that they are impeded from seeing objective truth because of their subjective (and often subjugated) experience. “Women regulate their actions not by the demands of universality,” wrote Hegel, “but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions.” This assumes, first, that men are the default human and, second, that philosophy has not always been shaped by subjective experience. (Just look at Nietzsche: After the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé rejected his marriage proposal, much of his writing about women turned vitriolic.) Hegel’s “universality” is a philosophical impossibility that excludes thinkers unlike himself: Philosophical thought will always be shaped by our inclinations and opinions.

Penaluna, herself galvanized by Astell’s work, knows how potent role models can be in encouraging women philosophers. At one point in the book, she writes about the 18th-century scholar and historian Elizabeth Elstob, who collected in a journal the short biographies of ambitious, accomplished women. In moments when she felt “deflated,” Elstob would read through the journal and “immediately feel better thinking about the stories of other smart women who somehow found a way to create.” Later in the book, Penaluna writes her own capsule biographies of various women thinkers throughout time: Hipparchia, of the third century B.C.; Rabia al-Adawiyya, of the eighth century; Murasaki Shikibu, of the 11th century; Hildegard of Bingen, of the 12th century; Christine de Pizan, of the 14th century; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, of the 17th century. By giving us their names, she not only counteracts their omission from the canon, but fashions the beginnings of a new one entirely.

The cost of living crisis is hitting the Easter holiday hard in Greece, as some Orthodox Christians struggle to afford holiday goodies.

Israel announces the deal days after newly-inducted NATO member Finland bought its missile defence system.

Protests erupt in Israel amid Netanyahu’s government push for broad judicial reform. Plus, Greece’s wiretapping scandal.