Tough Year for Happiness

Are you happy?

Should you expect to be happy? Are you entitled to be happy? How the heck can anyone be happy in this plague year of 2020?

Here’s a great short read that brings some insight to these questions in the context of COVID. Laurie Santos is a psychology professor at Yale, the host of a popular podcast called The Happiness Lab and teaches a course at Yale called “The Science of Well-Being”. Almost a quarter of Yale undergraduates take it, and through Coursera, 3 million people worldwide are now enrolled.

The most popular course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for the last 45 years has been “Interpersonal Dynamics”, widely known as “Touchy Feely”. At these two elite institutions, full of high-achieving so-called “Type A’s”, the most popular courses are not Computer Science 101 or microeconomics or a survey of English literature, but classes on how to be happy and get along well with others.

My mother, a child of the Depression whose birth in 1920 “replaced” the siblings lost to the last great global pandemic, scoffed when I observed that a family member seemed happier after divorce: “Happy? What’s that got to do with it?” Obligations, duty, living a certain code of behavior, came first. I grew up feeling that happiness was a subversive concept. These days we are likely to hear more about how to "hack your life and boost your productivity" than about “duty”, but the message I think is much the same. I’m rooting for Dr. Santos’ students, storming the Territory of Happiness so long occupied by the Army of Achievement. 

Happiness might be the wrong term, or perhaps the wrong goal. We know that what builds motivation and engagement in work is not salary and perks or even free snacks and Foosball (is that still a thing?) in the break room. It’s a sense of connection to a larger mission and the greater good, along with recognition and respect for what we do, the psychological safety to make mistakes and the opportunity for personal and professional growth. Prof. Santos adds: connection to others, regardless of how trivial. We can’t get to the free snacks while working from home, but we can – with conscious effort – maintain and build social connection and the rest of what truly motivates.

I loved her reference to “attentional hygiene”. I’ve been flossing my attentional teeth more often these days, using the tools on my phone to measure how much screen time I’m logging and commanding it to mute itself when I really, truly don’t need to check Twitter or the stock market. Here’s another subversive idea: talk instead of type. The folks you are leading need to hear your voice, and you need theirs.