What is the key to happiness? It’s a question to which Harvard professor and bestselling author Arthur C. Brooks has dedicated his career. His course “Leadership and Happiness” is one of the most popular at Harvard Business School, and his latest book The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press) compiles some of his best advice from this course and his weekly “How to Build a Life” column in The Atlantic.
Brooks sat down with Outreach to discuss why church leaders often struggle with happiness and enjoyment, how pastors can navigate discouragement, and how they can reframe success and better align themselves with Christ.
Arthur C. Brooks on Real Happiness
A lot of pastors seem to struggle with happiness, uncertain how joy and happiness relate. So why do you think the message about happiness is important in general and maybe a help to pastors and church leaders today?
Well, to begin with, everybody wants it. I mean, that’s a truism. Everybody wants to be happier. But the more important point is that happiness is in decline, particularly among leaders. And we have no bulletproof defense just by being Christians. My Christian faith is absolutely central to my life, but when I look at the data I see that Christians are suffering like other people are suffering. That gives me an opportunity as a scientist, by the way, to also talk about the fact that understanding my Christian faith in a different way is what I need to do to become a happier person.
So I work with a lot of clergy. I work with a lot of pastors. I work with a lot of priests. And I work with them to talk about how they can actually start using the happiness science in the pulpit. In so doing, they become happiness teachers. That helps their flock, and it helps them as people.
How do you help people to think about joy in the context of happiness? How are they related?
So it’s very important to understand the difference between joy and happiness as a scientific matter versus as a theological matter. Christians talk about joy—you know how C.S. Lewis talked about it in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy—that’s these moments of the beatific vision. Joy is ultimately what we’re gonna get in perpetuity when we die and go to heaven. That’s the whole idea. And those moments that take your breath away in life, those are moments of joy, as C.S. Lewis talks about it.
Psychologists talk about it in a different way. They talk about it as a basic positive emotion, which is produced by activity in the limbic system of the brain. That’s a basic positive emotion that’s telling us—our limbic system is telling us—that we have sensed an opportunity and we should approach it. That biological sensation is not the same thing as the beatific vision, as the vision of God, obviously. And so confusing those things is actually quite dangerous.
Joy in the psychological sense, in the biological sense, is very different than happiness. Why? Because joy is basically the smell of the turkey, not the turkey. The turkey itself is happiness. That’s a combination of enjoyment of life, of satisfaction with accomplishments and experiences, and the sense of life’s meaning. And those three things together, really what they tell us is if you want to be a happy person, unmitigated joy on earth is not going to be your lot. It just isn’t. For you to get satisfaction, you actually need to defer your gratifications. Every good Christian knows that. That’s central to the way that we try to comport ourselves, a disciplined good Christian life.
And meaning, the meaning of life, that requires a lot of hard experiences. That actually requires a lot of suffering. Every Christian is comfortable with suffering—we should be. Christianity is worshiping a man who suffered and died for us. So this idea that somehow if I’m not happy all the time I’m not right with God … I’m sorry, we’re walking the earth. Our earthly experience also entails some suffering. Why? So that we can purify ourselves, so that we can understand what real happiness is and we can get ourselves ready for the unmitigated, unending joy that we hope will be our lot in heaven.
What do you see related to happiness when it comes to practicing one’s faith?
So faith is absolutely central to it. There are four pillars in the happiest life. They are faith, family, friendship and work that serves other people.
When you don’t know what to do and you are suffering—which you will on earth—then the thing to do is for you to love. Love of the divine, love of our Lord, love of your family, love of your friends and love toward everybody through the way that you sanctify your ordinary work. One of the ways that I bait the hook for talking about the fact that this is the secret of happiness is to say, “Are you loving now?” And inevitably that leads people to ask, What is the basis of love, cosmically? Metaphysically, what’s transcendentally just vacuuming me into this love? And that’s the Lord. And that’s what people inevitably find.
“A lot of Christians feel guilty about enjoying their life because they think that enjoyment and pleasure are the same thing, and they’re not.”
I’m just a missionary. My grandfather was a missionary to the Navajos. On my mother’s side, they were missionaries to the Zulus. And one of the things that missionaries have always told me is that your job is not to get everybody all the way to baptism. Your job is to keep the door open one inch, because then the Holy Spirit can kick it in. So my job is to get people just to question their disbelief, just to interrogate their disbelief a little bit and say, Maybe through that little crack, maybe, maybe, maybe there is that happiness that I seek. And then with my life to try to live in an impeccable way so that there’s admiration for me. And they’ll say, That weird guy, that weird scientist, is going to church every day. What’s the deal with that? And then do what I can to open the door to all four pillars of happiness.