“It’s a huge opportunity for introspection, spiritual renewal and creativity,” said Arthur Brooks, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School who taught Tabrizi in the happiness and leadership class and has also begun a column in The Atlantic on happiness. “These opportunities don’t come along that often.”
Brooks, a practicing Christian, said happiness shouldn’t necessarily be the highest goal of life.
“We need a full range of emotions and experiences,” he said.
But happiness studies can lead people to seek out meaning and purpose — a goal of working toward something bigger than the self, whether it’s religious — like faith — or secular, working toward the common good.
The irony of happiness studies, Brooks said, is that many people take the class for purely personal reasons but wind up learning that focusing on the self may not be the key to lasting happiness.
“If I live under the illusion I’m the only thing that matters, which is very easy to do,” Brooks said, “I become anxious and unhappy.”
Retraining the brain to think more broadly is the key to the class.
“This stuff is cool,” he said. “It’s serious and it matters.”
One fallout of being stuck at home is time to ponder serious questions about happiness. For more than 2.2 million, the question has brought them to Yale professor @lauriesantos: https://t.co/nWuQZSRY7Z
— Yonat Shimron (@YonatShimron) April 27, 2020