The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic

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It seems strange toย launch a column onย happinessย during a pandemic. The timing is, well, awkward, isnโ€™t it?

Maybe not. Weโ€™re stuck at home; our lives on COVID time have slowed to a near halt. This creates all sorts of obvious inconveniences, of course. But in the involuntary quiet, many of us also sense an opportunity to think a little more deeply about life. In our go-go-go world, we rarely get the chance to stop and consider the big drivers of our happiness and our sense of purpose.

On second thought, maybe this is the perfect time to launch a column on happiness.

I teach a class at the Harvard Business School on happiness. It surprises some people when I tell them thisโ€”that a subject like happiness is taught alongside accounting, finance, and other, more traditional MBA fare. Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously said, โ€œHappiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.โ€ This is not exactly the stuff of business administration.

But if you imagine my students sitting outside in a circle (or in a virtual circle on videochat, these days) hoping to have a butterfly land on us, youโ€™re wrong. Here are a few of our topics: โ€œAffect and the Limbic System,โ€ โ€œThe Neurobiology of Body Language,โ€ โ€œHomeostasis and the Persistence of Subjective Well-Being,โ€ โ€œOxytocin and Love,โ€ โ€œAcquisition Centrality and Negative Affect,โ€ and โ€œThe Hedonic Treadmill.โ€

The scientific study of happiness has exploded over the past three decades. The Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (both at Princeton University) publish extensively on the subject. The University of Pennsylvania hasย a whole graduate-degree programย in positive psychology, led by Martin Seligman, one of the most distinguished social psychologists in the world. A peer-reviewed academic journal called theย Journal of Happiness Studiesย has been in operation since the year 2000 and enjoys high prestige in scholarly circles.

Religion, philosophy, and the arts have long considered happiness a subject suitable for study. The sciences have only recently caught up. This column, which weโ€™re calling โ€œHow to Build a Life,โ€ will draw on all these sources of wisdom in the hope of helping you identify the building blocks of happinessโ€”family, career, friendships, faith, and so onโ€”and giving you the tools to use them to construct a life that is balanced and full of meaning, and that serves your values.

This column has been in the works for some time, but my hope is that launching it during the pandemic will help you leverage a contemplative mindset while you have the time to think about what matters most to you. I hope this column will enrich your life, and equip you to enrich the lives of the people you love and lead.

To start us off,ย I want to give you three equations for well-beingโ€”equations that, in my opinion, you need to know to start managing your own happiness more proactively.

By Arthur C. Brooks

Read Full Article on The Atlantic

The Thinking Conservative
The Thinking Conservativehttps://www.thethinkingconservative.com/
The goal of THE THINKING CONSERVATIVE is to help us educate ourselves on conservative topics of importance to our freedom and our pursuit of happiness. We do this by sharing conservative opinions on all kinds of subjects, from all types of people, and all kinds of media, in a way that will challenge our perceptions and help us to make educated choices.

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