Speaker

Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, PhD social scientist, and bestselling author

Context: For the Arena Hall community, Dr. Arthur Brooks delivered an inspiring discussion centered around his latest book, the 2023 bestseller "Building the Life You Want: Strategies for Happiness," co-authored with Oprah Winfrey. Drawing from his extensive experience and research, Brooks shared valuable insights into the essence of happiness, weaving together scientific and sociological perspectives gained throughout his journey.

‍Bio: As a Harvard professor, accomplished Ph.D. social scientist, #1 bestselling author, and columnist at The Atlantic, Arthur Brooks specializes in the intersection of science, philosophy, and human well-being, offering actionable strategies for individuals striving to optimize their lives. Brooks extends his expertise to provide happiness training and professional development services to diverse sectors such as businesses, academia, government, and faith-based communities, integrating cutting-edge research from social science, neuroscience, and ancient wisdom traditions.

Summary

We are living in an unprecedented age of unhappiness.

The question of why we are so unhappy and lonely as a society is a complex and multifaceted issue. Through a comprehensive analysis, Dr. Arthur Brooks sets out to answer this daunting question. By identifying enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning as the foundations of happiness, Brooks presents a roadmap through which individuals can transcend themselves and emerge truly happier through faith, family, friendship, and work. So, if you want to be happy, it would seem easier than one imagined. The answer is quite simple: eye contact, touch, and asking the right questions.

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‍Big Ideas:

• In all facets of society today in America, individuals are as unhappy as ever - elite American university students not excluded. So unhappy were Harvard MBA students that the university called in the clinical expertise of Dr. Brooks to teach a course on happiness. Within six months, Brooks’ elective course had become the most popular class within Harvard Business School. An explanation for a widespread problem is in high demand.
• It is false to quantify happiness as a feeling. To do so would necessitate an entire dependency on the fluctuations of the neurological transmission to the limbic system - the system for determining basic positive and negative emotions. Rather than feelings, happiness is determined by three phenomena that human beings can get better at: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

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• It is empirically verifiable that happiness has been in decline since the 1990s. A study in 1992 by the IRS in Chicago found that a third of all people surveyed reported feeling “very happy”. Only fifteen percent of applicants surveyed reported feeling unhappy. Each year since then, there has been a steady decreasing tick of about a half of a percentage point in unhappiness.
• Pleasure on its own is meaningless - even detrimental to the individual. The marketed difference is pairing pleasure with people and memory. When these factors are combined, the experience of pleasure is moved from the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex where it can be experienced at the most human level of remembrance. Then it becomes a part of happiness.
• Hippies in the 70s were wrong when they claimed that if it feels good, do it. Conversely, today’s youth are also wrong when they claim that if it feels bad, make it stop. Young people today are afraid of suffering. This is concerning when one accounts for satisfaction as a factor of happiness. In order to feel satisfaction, a certain degree of struggle, sacrifice, and unhappiness is required. By shying away from this initial pain, the very human experience of satisfaction is stifled.
• Meaning is the hardest of the three pillars of satisfaction in that it is the most difficult to be without. While discipline can allow for enjoyment and satisfaction to be withdrawn for prolonged periods of time, meaning is something that must be at the center of the individual. If you can’t answer the why questions, then you are in big trouble.
• You pass the why am I here test by having real answers, not vague ideas about one’s existence. If you don’t have a reason for your existence, then you have no direction to move forward with. Now is the time to dig deep and answer the important questions of life. History is the illuminating guide to finding the answers to the big questions of life. Research what others who have gone before thought about these questions, and maybe because of such investigation, you can come to a better understanding of what you actually believe.
• There are four components of life that happy people are practicing on a daily basis: faith, family, friendship, and work that serves other people. What these four aspects of daily life are doing is allowing the individual to become transcendent to the daily psychodrama of existence. One should focus on the daily sacred rather than tedious, stressful, and terrible monotony that is Mother Nature. 
• The United States has seen an incredibly swift breakdown of family life. Fewer and fewer people are in long-term romantic relationships, people are having less children, and greater amounts of schisms are occurring between the remaining existing families. The data on this issue is unbelievably alarming.
• Today, compared with 1990, we have tripled the amount of people who say that no one knows them well enough. People today are more friendless in a meaningful way than just 30 years ago. 
• The free enterprise system is such a deeply moral system. It’s important that you believe that your job serves other people in a beneficial way. Regardless of vocation, to serve other humans in a positive way is remarkably important to one’s own personal happiness.
• While the 2008 market crash was thought to have been the catalyst for the upsurge in unhappiness correlated with that year, with historical hindsight, we now know that that was completely wrong. That same year was the beginning of a new feature to social interactions - social media. The advent of social media was like cancer for happiness that spread around young adults. It would become completely catastrophic for happiness.
• Chemically speaking, we crave two things: oxytocin and neuropeptide. Therefore, if you want to be completely reductionist about happiness, you only have to have two things: eye contact and human touch. What social media does is that it mediates social relationships with technology that doesn’t produce oxytocin. It’s too many calories, not enough nutrients, and so you run the risk of becoming both obese and malnourished simultaneously.
• There is a lie that has been pushed hard for the past ten years - if you hate someone else enough, your life will get better. The great irony is that the only person who truly suffers is you. Every time you hate, you become someone else’s product. We know that ninety three percent of Americans hate how divided the Nation has become, but that then means seven percent do not hate the current divided state. These seven percenters are the ones driving the bus.
• The great question facing the American political system is how do we change the political sphere to not support individuals who exemplify the dark triad traits of narcissistic personality disorder, Machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy psychopathic traits? We must stand up to these individuals, otherwise our college campuses, media, and political systems will continue to be lorded over by such narcissistic ideologues.

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