I thought I’d give you a break from the news and focus on a topic I’ve been interested in (and have written about) for a long time: happiness. After my journal entry, which is in itself much about happiness, I’ve included an interview between Coleman Hughes and Arthur C. Brooks on the nature of happiness, a piece titled “21 Ways to Make Your Life Miserable,” some encouraging facts about happiness, and a review of Brooks’s most popular book on happiness. Also included: an image that could have been taken in the mid-70’s during my service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Chad, and a few interesting reader contributions.
Feeling Proud and Happy
I went to bed last night feeling happy. I was happy because I was remembering spending the evening on the veranda of my home in Rancho Santana, talking to three men and three women – Nicaraguans that I first met more than 20 years ago.
It was an impromptu get-together. They had plans to have dinner at a local restaurant, along with four of their teenage kids, but they stopped by my house to say hello, and I insisted they have a drink. One drink led to another and a conversation that continued until nearly midnight.
We spoke about the early days of Rancho Santana, when we were clearing fields and building roads and clearing the beaches of debris. At that time, the three women were in their late teens, and the three men were in their early 20s. I was in my early 50s. Now they were in their mid-30s to mid-40s, with children and houses and careers.
Back then, their prospects for financial success were limited. The country was just emerging from a decade of post-revolution poverty, and in the state of Rivas, where we were, jobs were few and far between and those that could be had were poorly paid. A laborer earned about $5 a day, and a doctor made about $400 a month.
At Rancho Santana, we were paying about $12 a day for laborers, which was a bit more than twice what farms and businesses were paying in the area. I remember thinking then that it amounted to about $1.25 an hour, which is what I was paid for my first “official” job in 1962, when I was 12.
Twelve dollars a day is where these men started from. One dug trenches for waterlines. Another worked as a property guard at night. And the third spent his days cutting field grass with a machete. The three women had similar stories. One had been a housekeeper. One worked in Rancho Santana’s laundry. And the third one worked in the kitchen of our small restaurant.
While their kids watched TV in the den, we talked about Rancho Santana, then and now, and about all the little adventures we had shared. We were feeling good, laughing, and I was thinking how much the trajectory of their lives had changed.
The women had recently retired, but all the men have respectable, relatively high-paid careers.
One has his own fish company. He has four boats that go out daily, fishing along the shore and selling the catch to Rancho Santana and a dozen other resorts and restaurants up and down the coast. The other two are still working for the resort – but now they are senior executives, with their own departments to run.
In terms of income, they are probably in the top 5% of the Nicaraguan working population, which means they drive nice cars and own their own homes – small and rustic by US standards, but ample and respectable here.
What they have accomplished in their lives is the result of their good characters, relentless work ethic, and the willingness to continually learn and acquire financially valuable skills.
I was super-proud of them for what they’ve been able to do. They rose from the dirt – literally digging dirt – to positions of respect in their community. So I was not surprised to hear that they are referred to as Don Nestor, Don Eduardo, and Don Enrique by the locals. (In this part of Nicaragua, “Don” always was and still is a title reserved for influential and successful men.)
So there we were, sipping rum and reminiscing. And in the den were four of their children, all of whom I’ve known since they were babies. All of whom are now smart, young people looking ahead to a future that their parents, at their age, didn’t have.
And the best part, the part that makes me extra happy, is that they think of me as a sort of gringo padrino, an American godfather who they know they can count on, as they have in the past, to help them move forward with their lives and careers. And though they are too young to have “real” conversations with me, they are at least relaxed enough to laugh at my jokes in Spanish. I mean, really. How many people in the good old USA get to have that sort of experience?
And speaking of Rancho Santana, since I’m writing to you today about my life there…
Travel & Leisure just rated Rancho Santana as one of the 100 best hotels in the world and the #4 resort in Central America. Read about it here and here.
Coleman Hughes and Arthur C. Brooks on Happiness
I was too tired to work, even too tired to read. But I wasn’t ready to take a nap, so I thought I’d watch this videoof Coleman Hughes (whom I’ve been following for a while) and Arthur C. Brooks (whom I wasn’t familiar with) talking about Happiness, Wealth, Poverty, Buddhism, Thomas Aquinas, and Foreign Aid.
It’s a one-hour, 10-minute conversation. But it is a good one. Good to the last drop. Hughes is relatively new to the podcast game (I think), but he already knows how to conduct an interview.
1. He prepared for the interview by either watching enough of Brooks or reading his books and essays (or both) to write a list of good questions.
2. In crafting the questions, he wasn’t trying to show how smart he is or surprise his guest with a catch-ya question. No, he was asking him questions about the ideas that he found himself asking himself after becoming familiar with Brooks’s ideas.
3. He allowed Brooks to lead the conversation because he understood that, as a good writer and a popular university teacher, Brooks knew how keep the conversation interesting.
4. Included in the conversation is a very interesting four-question personality test that Hughes took from Brooks. I played along and gave the same answers in the same sequence that Hughes gave, which Brooks said were the same answers he gave, and in the same sequence.
Since this is a topic, I’ve been studying for years, I was familiar with the subject matter and most of the studies and theories they mentioned. (One notable exception was the writings of Thomas Aquinas on happiness, which I’ve put on my to-read list.) Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching it because of how much ground they covered in so short a time., and because most of the observations Brooks made and his views on the topic were (a) consistent with what I’d concluded myself, and (b) backed up by a considerable amount of research.
I’ve posted a review of his book, The Happiness Files, below. Before you read that, however, I encourage you to read my take on Eat, Pray, Love, the 2010 film starring Julia Roberts as Elizabeth Gilbert, based on Gilbert’s 2006 memoir of the same name.
Work, Learn, Share – The 3 Sustainable Pleasures
How to Be Happy in the Real World
“Hollywood produces a lot of movies inspired by naïve world views and downright stupid ideas, but there may be none more foolish and destructive than the movies made about what makes for a happy life.”
-Michael Masterson
“Eat, Pray, Love” is a great title for a book/movie. It captures the Hollywood philosophy, which has been widely embraced by the Coastal elites, of how to live a happy and meaningful life.
But if, instead of a movie starring Julia Roberts, it was a book of classical philosophy – you know, the kind of thinking that was done by men who knew how to think rationally – the title would have been Live Like a Hedonist. Think Like a Fatalist. Act Like a Solipsist.
Eat: Hedonism, in the contemporary sense, is the idea that happiness comes from filling oneself with all the luxurious things life has to offer – gourmet food, fine wine, exotic experiences, etc.
Pray: Fatalism, to the modern mind, is represented in the adolescent notion that happiness can be achieved by finding one’s soulmate and discovering one’s passion.
Love: Solipsism has infested itself into virtually every corner of popular modern psychology – the belief that happiness starts from taking the time to pay attention to and love oneself.
Another way to put this us that Eat, Pray, Love is one of many popular movies made in the last 20 years that are premised on the idea that the world would be a happier place if adults could act more like adolescents.
Adolescence is a stage of life between childhood and adulthood, in which children must, as the poet said, “put away childish things” and take on adult responsibilities. For most children, this is a time of making foolish and selfish mistakes for which they must suffer the consequences. And that is why, for most of us, adolescence is a cocktail of equal parts of thoughtless happiness, excruciating embarrassment, and emotional pain.
But there are some for whom their teenage years are seldom hard and painful, but mostly joyful and easy. These are the “privileged” few whose parents, for whatever reason, have decided to continue to treat their babies as babies forever.
This results in 20- and 30-year-olds that act like adolescents – spoiled, self-centered, and incapable of fending for themselves. You know them by the behaviors they exhibit:
* An extraordinary lack of self-awareness, leading to…
* A sense of entitlement about almost everything, leading to…
* Putting themselves at the head of every line…
* Inserting themselves into every conversation…
* Assuming that their problems are uniquely challenging and should be a grave concern for others.
Properly raised adults know that life doesn’t work that way. Having suffered through adolescence, they are able to move into the workforce, get married, and have children, with the realistic expectation that all of these experiences will be difficult.
Life, they have learned, is not meant to be an uninterrupted pleasure cruise. For those that have thought seriously about the matter, the central question is not how to best enjoy life, but rather how to get through it with the least amount of suffering.
This is, of course, a central tenet of Buddhism and an issue that has been dealt with by every important moral philosopher, starting with Aristotle.
For Albert Camus, for example, “To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.” Every other question, he said in The Myth of Sisyphus, is “child’s play.”
For Rabindranath Tagore, life was a duty, an obligation – and happiness came as a result of meeting that obligation.
In Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything, Viktor Frankl, expanding on Tagore’s idea, put it neatly. Happiness in life, he said, “cannot be “willed into being.” Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome.”
I’ve been writing about happiness since I began writing Early to Rise. 25 years ago. During that time, I’ve done the required reading and have become at least superficially familiar with most of the major theses on happiness, which I have always measured against my own experience. What I’ve come up with is my own three-part formula. Interestingly, my three tenets are almost polar opposites to “Eat, Pray, Love.”
Let me explain.
Don’t Eat. Stay Hungry. For Knowledge
In Eat, Pray, Love, the protagonist comes to understand an enlightened way of eating – one that provides her with greater pleasure than, say, the way I eat: consuming food as fuel, and as quickly as possible, so I can get back to work.
What she learns is what every “foodie” desires to know: that to truly enjoy eating, one must eat “consciously” and with discrimination. That is, of course, true. It is also the lesson from the great philosopher Epicurus.
But if the question is “Can eating make for a happy life?” one has to consider the fact that eating as a path to happiness has an undeniable limitation. No matter how conscious and discriminating the eating may be, one cannot continue eating beyond satiety without getting (literally) fed up and either cease or get sick.
In my lexicon, therefore, eating is not sustainable.
Since my thesis is about sustainable pleasures, I have to rule out eating and see if I can find a replacement. I think I have one. It is learning – learning about something you value, something you believe worth learning.
Think about any sort of learning that you enjoy. Think about how it makes you feel. Now ask yourself: Does the pleasure you get from learning have a time limit? Do you get “fed up” with learning something you find interesting and worthwhile?
I don’t. In fact, the more I learn about a subject I value, the more pleasure I get from learning more. I’m sure I’m not the exception.
If that is so, doesn’t it make sense to recognize it? To be aware that, of all the many things you are called to do and choose to do on a daily basis – many of which may bore, frustrate, or even upset you – isn’t it sensible to put aside some of your time, if only 30 minutes a day, for something that will give you sustainable pleasure?
The point I’m making is that learning about something you value provides a sense of pleasure that is enduring and one that gets more pleasurable the more you do it.
A Takeaway…
Instead of trying to find happiness by buying and consuming things that you want (that you think will make you happy), recognize that you can get pleasure – sustained and unlimited pleasure – by doing something that needn’t cost a dime: learning something you think is worth learning.
Don’t Pray; Get to Work
The Pray mandate in Work, Pray, Love is just as incapable of bringing you sustainable pleasure as the Eat mandate is, only in a different way.
The idea of praying, as depicted in the movie, is also a Hollywood fantasy. It is the idea that the way to find satisfaction in one’s career is to discover the kind of work you were always meant to do – i.e., the work for which you have a passion.
This idea is wrong in several ways. First, as I mentioned at the top of this essay, it is based on a fatalistic view of the universe: that we are each put on Earth with something that is missing inside of us, which is making us feel unfulfilled – and the way to overcome that is to find the things we are missing.
Second, it is based on another fantasy – that we can achieve what we want from life by praying for it. It’s Think and Grow Rich by someone who has never read the book, and the Law of Attraction for someone who has. These ideas are themselves based on the idea that the universe exists to support our individual lives and that to get what we want (and deserve) we merely have to pray for it.
You don’t need decades of real life to know that the universe is not designed this way. Not only is it uninterested in giving us the happiness we want, it’s designed to make happiness eternally difficult. (I’ve written a small book on this called The Seven Natural Laws of Building Wealth, which itemizes those laws and explains how they work. It explains how, for example, friction and gravity are always there to make forward progress difficult. And that entropy, the natural law that says, in Chinua Achebe’s words, “everything put together eventually falls apart,” is the overall effect of it.
No, there is no amount of positive thinking and/or praying that will help you succeed in business. It is all about time and energy applied. And our willingness to supply that time and energy depends on whether we believe that the goal is worthwhile.
A Takeaway…
Instead of searching for the career that you are passionate about… or for some person or entity (such as the government) to end your suffering… get to work on doing something – anything – that is about someone or something other than you. Stop blaming fate for your troubles. Stop blaming others for your fate. Take responsibility for the person you are and the place you find yourself.
Forget all the things you hate about your job. Focus on doing a better job, on becoming a better worker, on working to make the lives of everyone you work with better.
Rather than spending your time complaining about all the ways you are victimized by society, work on improving the society you actually live in.
Don’t Look to Be Loved by Others You See as Valuable; Look to Give Love to Others by Sharing Something You Value
Again, because Eat, Pray, Love was a large-budget Hollywood movie, it was inevitable that the love that Julia Roberts’ character, Elizabeth, finds at the end is not in any way wisdom or serenity, but a hunky Brazilian named Felipe.
In The Road Less Traveled, which I read nearly 50 years ago, the author, Scott Peck, contends that genuine happiness comes through spiritual progress, and spiritual progress comes from hard work, self-discipline, and an active commitment to overcoming obstacles.
At 28, I was not religious and would have recoiled at the thought of being considered a “spiritual” person, so it was a bit challenging for me to read that book, written by a Christian psychologist and philosopher, with an open mind.
But the moment I began reading the chapter about love, I became an immediate fan. A third of the way into the book, Scott takes on the idea of love – what it is, what it can do, and what it can’t do.
And his argument, although expressed in religious terms, made perfect sense to me – and still does, after all these years. He begins by making a distinction between what he calls selfish love and selfless love. Selfish love, he says, is what most people call romantic love. It is based on this fatalistic idea that underpins Elizabeth’s experience of finding love, by finding Felipe, who is presumably going to fill the hole in her heart with his magnificent Brazilian wonderfulness.
Even at the age of 28, I had already come to the conclusion that this idea was not only wrong, but was destructive to all relationships based on it, because it was based on what the other can give to the one, rather than what the one can give to the other.
Selfless love, Peck asserts, is the kind of of love that healthy minded parents give to their children. It’s the act of giving what value one has for the benefit of the loved one, rather than taking for oneself whatever value one perceives the other can bring him.
In my three-part formula for happiness, I have substituted love – because it is so often equated with selfish love – with the concept of sharing.
For anyone who has given selflessly – i.e., with the sole intention of giving to the other person – it’s easy to understand why the moral cliché of “It’s better to give than to receive” is true.
However, it’s not just giving that makes for true happiness (sustained pleasure). It’s giving something of value. And specifically, it’s giving the products of the other two sustainable pleasures – the things you have purchased from your love of work and the things you have acquired from your love of learning.
At a certain point in life – and it doesn’t have to be when you are older – sharing what you have acquired from a lifetime of hard work and persistent learning, the products of your values, will provide you with a deeper sense of satisfaction than you can ever get from trying to acquire more of them or hold on to them.
A Takeaway…
You can’t get the kind of sustained pleasure I’m referring to here by giving away something you don’t care about or by giving away so little of something you do care about that it cannot have a significant and enduring effect on those with whom you share.
An Afterthought
Two thought experiments that I did in preparation for writing this essay:
1. Take 30 minutes or so to think about the things you’ve done in your life that you are proud of. And then remember how you felt when you did them. What you will find is that they made you feel good. They made you feel good for two reasons:
(a) Because they were activities that, somewhere in that heart of yours, corresponded to your highest values.
(b) They were activities that were outwardly focused. They were not about you, but about things – people, projects, aspirations – that were outside of you.
2. Spend some time thinking about things you’ve done – and are probably still doing – that made you unhappy. Then remember how unhappiness feels to you and where it lives. You will find that it feels very tight and painful and constricting. And that it lives in your core – in your chest and in your abdomen.
Contraction is, obviously, a moving-inwards, which is a concentration of energetic impulses. In its extreme, it cannot reverse itself. It is a continuous inward collapsing. In astrophysics, it is a black hole. In human consciousness, it is extreme depression and anxiety, the kind for which the only remedy for the sufferer seems to be death.
Expansion, on the other hand, is how the universe began and continues to exist. And that is also true of the human spirit. We are made to flourish by expanding our consciousness outside of our selves. And that comes from two things:
(1) Letting go of – as much as possible – our worries and concerns about ourselves.
(2) Using positive energy to fill the space left by the letting go.
Consider this: Both energetic impulses can create pleasure. But only contraction causes pain. In negotiating a life of happiness, be alert to what each activity feels like, keeping in mind that the sustainable pleasures, the ones that can give you enduring happiness, are always expansive.
21 Ways to Make Your Life Miserable
1. Believe that, just by virtue of your being a human being, you are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
2. Believe that, as a citizen of the wealthiest country in the world, you have the right to free healthcare, free education, and a comfortable standard of living.
3. Believe that your parents’ failures at parenting account for your shortcomings.
4. Believe that you have a right NOT to be offended.
5. Keep a mental record of the harm others have done to you.
6. Keep a mental record of anyone doing better than you that doesn’t deserve to be.
7. Postpone or avoid experiences that take you out of your comfort zone.
8. Be attentive to aging. Imagine that every ache and pain is another sign of your senescence.
9. When listening to others, think about how what they are saying applies to you.
10. Try to improve your financial situation by befriending wealthier people.
11. Try to improve your emotional situation by climbing the social ladder.
12. Allow bullies to bully you.
13. Spend time with people that you don’t like or admire.
14. Socialize with people that don’t like or admire you.
15. Depend on your spouse, your family, or your friends for your self-esteem.
16. Depend on anyone but yourself for your financial wellbeing.
17. Do work that you don’t value.
18. Forgo learning for amusement.
19. Think about yourself… incessantly.
20. When you have the choice, always take the easier path.
21. See yourself, unconsciously, at the center of the universe.
Five encouraging facts about happiness…
* Happiness helps your immune system fight back.
Positive emotions don’t just feel good – they do good. A study in Psychosomatic Medicine found that people with a happier outlook were less likely to catch a cold after virus exposure. Smiling may be your cheapest health insurance. (Cohen et al., 2003)
* Hourly workers may be happier than salaried ones.
A 2010 study found people paid by the hour tend to be more satisfied with their work. When time is money – literally – it may boost your sense of control and value. (DeVoe & Pfeffer, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
* Happiness reduces pain.
Positive emotions help people with chronic pain cope better. In one study, happier arthritis patients reported significantly less discomfort. (Zautra et al., 2005, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology)
* Happiness is catchy.
According to a longitudinal study published in the British Medical Journal, happiness is contagious. If your friend is happy, your odds of being happy rise by 15%. (Fowler & Christakis, 2008)
* Happy people live longer.
A long-running study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that happier people had lower mortality rates – even when controlling for health, income, and age. (Diener & Chan, 2011)
The Happiness Files
By Arthur C. Brooks
What I Liked About It: Arthur C. Brooks is a social scientist who supports his ideas with facts and data that come from experiments and studies, most of them scientifically controlled.
I also liked that he distinguishes between pleasure and enjoyment. (In my essay above, which I wrote before reading the book, I used the word “pleasure.” I decided not to change it because pleasure was the best word I had at the time.)
I liked that he has studied the role of family on friendship and I agree with most of the conclusions he came to.
I like very much that one of his four “values” is work. His definition of it is not exactly the same as mine. (Mine is better.) But it’s good.
What I Didn’t Like So Much: One of his four pillars is faith. I don’t feel comfortable with that term because it is too easily mistaken for religion. And in fact, in the references he makes to argue for the importance of faith, he equates it with religion. I think the truth is deeper than that. But heck, he’s been teaching the science of happiness at Harvard for something like 15 years, and he’s never read my work. So I can’t criticize him for missing some of the finer points.
Here is a short presentation by Brooks on the science of happiness.
About the Author
Arthur C. Brooks is an American author and academic. Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and at the Harvard Business School as a Professor of Management Practice and Faculty Fellow. (Source: Wikipedia)
Who Are These Women and Why Are They Smiling?
Chad has always been and is today one of the poorest countries in Africa, which means it is one of the poorest countries in the world. But look at these Chadian women. Do they look unhappy? No! I lived in Chad for 24 months and can’t remember seeing a Chadian that looked unhappy. I promised myself that I would never forget that. And I never have.
Comments, Questions & Recommendations
Re the July 4 issue: “I cannot tell you how much I loved this.”
“I waddled thru the opening paragraphs including the poem, which not surprisingly I wasn’t as impressed with as you were… but then came to this piece about your solar panel installer interaction:
“You are doing the right thing,” I said. “Following your passion is what lucky people that get rich say when they are accepting awards. For the rest of us, we must first follow our moral obligations – and the most important of those is to pay for our lives and the lives of those who depend on us.”
He liked that idea. We became friends.
“I cannot tell you how much I loved this. I envisioned this exchange, you telling him this with the same honesty and seriousness that I have seen you direct at others. Honestly, I was a bit choked up at the end.” – CF
A wannabe writer asks for advice
“I’ve followed your career for years and believe you are one of the best writers around. Do you have any advice for a young author who wants to write for a living?” – ME
My Response: Step One, figure out what you mean when you say “write for a living.”
If you are happy earning $72,270 a year (the median salary for writers and authors), you should choose a field to write about that you believe will maintain your interest for a long time. Why a long time? Because, as a rule, writing for a living is a low-paid gig, and getting your yearly comp up to “average” will take several years – at least three and maybe as much as five. Why is that? Because however much natural talent you think you have, the company that hires you knows that it is highly unlikely that you will be writing at the level they want as a beginner. So you have to think long-term. If, for example, you are keen on golf now, you have to think about whether you will be keen on golf 10 years from now and even 30 years from now. Because once you get into a niche, it’s not easy to get out of it. Everything conspires to keep you there, including your knowledge, your skills, and your professional contacts.
If you want to make serious money, you have to research the various subject fields in terms of how much writers typically make and select one with an average income that meets your minimum desire. For example, if you want to make at least $100,000 a year, you should look at the kinds of writing where writers can make that kind of money. Technical writing in the medical field is one. Writing for a public relations company is another.
If you want to make the really big money, you have a binary choice: Become a bestselling novelist or fiction writer or a high-level copywriter.
Once you have a goal in mind, the next step would be to get an entry level job in a competitive environment and spend two to three years writing 12 hours a day to become an expert in your field and a master of the craft of the sort of writing you are doing.
Then, once you have real confidence (i.e., you have proven you are good at your trade), start to step up your compensation by marketing yourself constantly to larger businesses in your field that are happy to pay their writers more than the industry average.
A recommendation from AS: “Hurt,” by Johnny Cash
I didn’t like this song when I first heard it, but when I saw this video of it that AS sent in, it got to me. It’s a heartbreaker.
Middle School Band Covers Guns N’ Roses
Drummer Jasper Hughes posted this footage of his middle school band doing a truly badass cover of the classic Guns N’ Roses ballad “Sweet Child O’ Mine.”
“For my school’s ‘holiday concert,” said Hughes, “our band director thought that it would be fun if we were to do a cover of the famous Guns N’ Roses song, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’.…The holiday concert is the biggest performance of the year, with about every family at the school attending. To fit all of these people, the concert takes place in a giant church near our school. Needless to say, playing this song for such a large crowd was immensely fun.”