Arthur C. Brooks is a bestselling author, Harvard University professor, and a widely read columnist for The Atlantic, whose writing draws from both science and philosophy and is aimed at providing insight and strategies on how we can live our best lives. He’s the co-author (with Oprah Winfrey) of the forthcoming book, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, and he joined HBR editor Adi Ignatius for this episode of New World of Work to share insights in how to be happier at work, and in life. Happiness, it turns out, is contagious. But so is misery.
In the US at least, the number of cases of depression are up, the number of people who self-report themselves to be happy is down. I know it’s impossible to say exactly why, but what’s your hunch? What’s going on here?We do have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. You find that happiness started to go into a little bit of a malaise, a bit of a decline, in the late ’80s, early ’90s, but then it took a real big dip when social media came along.
Those trends have not actually turned around. We know that it has everything to do with social life. It has everything to do with our love relationships. One more thing to keep in mind, those things are easiest to do when we’re in person. That’s just it. You said we spend half of our lives with our coworkers at work. Well, I don’t know, man, not anymore. A lot of people are spending half of their lives in front of a Zoom screen where it’s hard to earn your success, it’s hard to feel like you’re serving other people, and you don’t even get to see your work buddies. That’s tough stuff.If you’re right, then there must be some self-deception here.
Life and your emotions, the affairs of the heart and the feelings that you’re getting, positive and negative, they’re not complicated at all. They’re what mathematicians would call a complex problem. That’s a problem that’s very easy to understand and that no amount of computational horsepower can solve it for you. You can only get in it and experience it and work with it in real time.
The problem is, we don’t teach kids to do this. We don’t teach school kids to do this. We don’t teach business people to do this. If I had my way, every business school and every high school would have this class, and when you came to work for a big company, they would have a class in metacognition and emotional self-management that you have to go through for the first week in orientation.I assume these business students are, as you said, incredibly successful by any measure.
My happiness has risen by 60% in the last four years. In just four years. To be sure it started at kind of a low baseline, but 60% is a lot based on the best measurement techniques for happiness. So I know it works, and I see the results of this every day among my students as well.Let’s keep you on the couch a bit more. You come across as a positive, presumably happy person.
The problem is that some people, their happiness levels are too low. Other people, their unhappiness levels are too high. I have a test that I administer to my students. I didn’t develop it. It was developed by psychometricians about 20 years ago. But it’s called a, the positive affect negative affect series, and it separates out the intensity of your positive and negative emotions.
High negative, low positive, these are poets. They tend to be extremely creative, but they suffer a lot from sadness and these negative emotions. They have to manage that. And everybody out there watching, you know I’m talking about you too. So take care of these pathologies because these are addictions like anything else, and there’s a lot of brain chemistry in that.
Number one is faith and philosophy, whether it’s religious or not religious, it has to be something that zooms you out on the majesty of life and makes you small so that you have yourself in perspective. You’re going to have peace. Look, if everything you do for your happiness is work, that’s like putting your entire pension into Greek bonds. It might work out, but I’m an economist. I don’t recommend it. That’s not a diversified strategy. You’re most likely not going to retire the way you want to.Here’s a question from Saudi Arabia, it’s a simple, intriguing question. Is happiness contagious?Yeah, happiness is absolutely contagious because social contagion is a real thing.
But even better was when my wife started clamping down and saying, “You need to sleep more. You need to go to the gym more. You need to have more of a life.” So number one, if you’re a leader, you need to get a hold on this problem because you’re going to be hurting yourself, wrecking your relationships, and disheartening all the people around you. This is a big problem.
Adi, guys like you and me, our age, in our fifties, you notice that we don’t make those sacrifices anymore. And the reason is because our time parameters are shorter. But also we’ve had bitter experience with these types of things. It’s funny, it’s like I’m a grandfather now and my grandson was born and suddenly I was a lot less interested in working. But part of it was the bitter experience.
If I could have had a little bit more perspective, I would not have been less successful. The data don’t lie on this either. The 14th hour is not productive. It’s just compulsive. Just like any other addiction, the 14th drink doesn’t give you more joy. Stop at two, is the bottom line, because you need the balance in this part of your life as well.
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