Balancing intellectual and sensory pleasures may build happiness, resilience, and social connection.

Varied interests may counter the hedonic treadmill by keeping experiences from becoming routine.

A hobby can relieve stress, bring joy, and teach acceptance of personal limits, even if you're bad at it.

Review of The Well-Rounded Life. By Amy Berg. Princeton University Press. 237 pp. $27.95.

In his iconic treatise, Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill claimed that deploying “the higher faculties” was superior to pleasures involving “mere sensation,” which he attributed to an “infirmity of character.”

According to Amy Berg, a professor of philosophy at Rice University, Mill was “wrong, both descriptively and prescriptively.” In The Well-Rounded Life, Berg makes a thought-provoking and compelling case that people who tap both kinds of pleasure and balance them appropriately tend to be more socially connected, resilient, and happier.

Berg acknowledges, however, that well-roundedness is more difficult to achieve for some of us, including the working poor, mothers with small children, and........

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