How can I be happy?
For this month’s magazine recommendation, I listened to a podcast in which Nicky Gumbel of Alpha renown interviews Arthur Brooks, an American academic from Harvard University—and Roman Catholic Christian—who is one of the world’s leading experts on the subject of happiness.
Brooks, who has done extensive research, says that the foundations of personal happiness have to do with the part faith, family, friends and work play in our lives.
Faith is the basis for everything—having faith “allows us to become small” and to find ourselves part of a bigger picture, which is healthy.
Family is so important as to not need justifying, but many of Brooks’ students and clients are ambitious and hard-working, and prone to neglect their family relationships. Taking time to interact with and be near other family members is also healthy.
When it comes to friendships, Brooks says there are “deal friends” and “real friends”, by which he means that the friends who will make our lives worth living will be not usually be those we do business with but will be those who value us for who we are, not what we can do (and vice versa). Business and professional colleagues will rarely know how many children (or grandchildren) we have and are usually not the people we turn to in a crisis. So, cultivating “useless” friends is something Brooks says we should all take care to spend time doing.
Finally, our work can be a source of happiness when we believe that what we do matters, where we are recognised for our contribution, and where we are able to serve others. And for those who do not feel their jobs tick any of those boxes, Brooks has some useful tips for how even the most mundane work can be made meaningful.
Later in the discussion Brooks and Gumbel talk about leadership and the challenge of the “second half of life”. As we age, and grow in wisdom and experience, the ways in which we serve others and contribute to causes can change. Happiness can increase in later life for those who invest themselves in helping to make the younger generation successful.
But none of this is meant to make happiness ultimate. At the end of their conversation, Brooks makes some very interesting comments about the role of suffering and unhappiness in our lives. To live a completely happy life, with no experience of negative emotion, means missing out on the full range of human experience. Furthermore, we would not grow into the people God wants us to be, because suffering and unhappiness provide motivation for a lot of the positive things we do. Ultimately, says Brooks, suffering and pain enable us to love, because Jesus’ suffered and loved. The key to happiness is to love.
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