Bestselling author and columnist Arthur Brooks inspires people to embrace happiness through his writing.
The behavioral scientist, who is also a professor at Harvard University, started researching happiness because he too wanted to be happy.
“I always thought of happiness as astronomy,” he said. “An astronomer doesn’t think he’s going to change the stars. He’s going to study the stars and that’s how I looked at happiness.”
He credits his wife for helping him change his views in his 50s, and says he is 60% happier than he was five years ago.
“My wife said, ‘It’s kind of ironic that you study happiness, but you’re not a happy person’… She said, ‘Why don’t you see if you can change yours’… I changed my habits and started then taught a class about it at Harvard and my life started to change. It really did,” Brooks said.
Brooks’ work has inspired the likes of Oprah, actor Matthew McConaughey, former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as people from across the country, including David Cornbrooks of Arlington, Virginia.
Cornbrooks said Brooks’ writing helped him find meaning in the face of a heartbreaking diagnosis. Just over two years ago, Cornbrooks discovered he had stage four lung cancer.
“Honestly, I didn’t know you could get lung cancer without having smoked before,” Cornbrooks said. “I don’t think I processed that initial shock right away. I kind of returned to my normal life, probably denial.”
Cornbrooks said he had the same reaction as a high school student when his father died. Years later, he struggled with those feelings as a father with two young children.
“I think I may have cried a few times in my entire life before the diagnosis. One of them was right after my dad passed away, like in the hospital,” Cornbrooks said. “I’ve probably cried a dozen times or more alone, with my wife, you know, around my kids, and I think I’m living a deeper, richer lifestyle now.”
He credits Brooks’ writing for helping him through this time in his life and said his piece “The Red Pill of Humility” in “The Atlantic” resonated with him.
“So humility, I think, is the one word and concept that he has written about that has resonated the most and that is kind of a complete acceptance of the truth about yourself,” Cornbrooks said.
Brooks said Cornbrooks turned his devastating diagnosis full of pain and sadness into inspiration and a lesson for others.
“’The Red Pill of Humility’ is that we don’t want to be humble… Mother Nature really doesn’t care if we are happy. Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes, so she imprints this behavior in us. that are not optimal, that are not the best,” said Brooks. “Like making yourself look better than other people, focusing only on yourself and when you fight that, you discover that the secret of living fully, the secret of living. becoming a happier person is sometimes the opposite.”
Brooks said he has done a lot of research on loneliness. When someone feels lonely, the immediate solution is often to find someone else who is lonely and break their isolation.
“It’s amazing,” he said. “It’s the same as anything else. If you want more of something, give it away. Mother Nature doesn’t tell you that, but it’s a cosmic truth.”
Although Brooks explains that feelings are related to happiness, happiness itself is not a feeling.
“Happiness is more tangible, which is great news,” he said. “You can do the work. Happiness is a combination of pleasure in your life, satisfaction with your achievements and a sense of the meaning of your existence.”
Pleasure, satisfaction and meaning in life will increase a person’s well-being, Brooks said. He explained that meaning is a macronutrient, an element of happiness.
“Meaning is really why things happen the way they do, the goals and direction in your life, and why your life matters.”
To think about the meaning, Brooks suggests asking yourself two questions.
“Number one, what’s your answer to ‘why am I alive?’ The way to pass that test is to have an answer. The way to fail is to say, “I don’t know.” Second question: ‘What would you like to give your life for on this day?’ If the answer is nothing, that is a problem. A sense of meaning is having an affirmative answer to these two questions written in your heart.”
If people don’t know, Brooks says, that’s good news because it tells you to start looking for the answers, “and a miracle will happen in life,” he said.
