Can Happiness Be Taught?

Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).

At this point, your conscience rebels. By buying a book on Amazon, you tell yourself, you will be directly funding a new angora lining for Jeff Bezos’s monogrammed slippers in the master bedroom of his private yacht—not the main one but the backup vessel currently moored off Patmos. Quivering with righteousness, you close your laptop and stride to your nearest bookstore, only to bump into a dilemma: whereabouts in the store, exactly, can “Build the Life You Want” be found?

It is not an easy volume to place. You’d assume that it belongs on the self-help table. Yet the title suggests home improvement or even civil engineering, and so ardently does Brooks insist on the “four big happiness pillars”—family, friendship, work, and faith—that readers of a nervous disposition may choose to wear a hard hat. On the other hand, Brooks is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, so he would slot into the business section with ease. Given that, as he says, “the macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose,” there’s an equally strong case for the cookery shelf. Or how about philosophy? Anyone who cites Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Aquinas, Kant, Mick Jagger, Epicurus, and Epictetus, as Brooks does, would be totally stoked to hang out in such lofty company. No one, of course, is loftier than his co-author, and, if your bookstore is furnished with an Oprah wing, that is where the book must be displayed.

When two writers join forces, it can be tricky to sort out who did what. Not in this case. Brooks is the principal player, and Oprah is his guest star. Only four times does she enter the action to offer “A Note from Oprah,” and the four notes, added together, take up less than fourteen pages in a book that is more than two hundred and forty pages long. What does she bring, then, apart from the humongous commercial clout of her blessing? Well, she reveals that “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was “always at heart a classroom. I was curious about so many things, from the intricacies of the digestive system to the meaning of life.” (Had she been French, of course, those two items would have been the same.) Near the start of the book, ever alert to her audience, she scrunches what she considers Brooks’s most valuable lesson into “words you should tape to your refrigerator,” and, for extra clarity, accelerates into italics: “Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.” One more scrunch, and Oprah has the mantra she wants: “Feel the feel, then take the wheel.”

What’s interesting about this advice is that far behind it, dimly discernible, is another speeding vehicle, fuelled by allegorical intent: the chariot drawn by a pair of winged horses and deployed by Socrates, in Plato’s Phaedrus, to illustrate the motions of the soul. One horse, representing our nobler instincts, is “upright in frame and well jointed,” whereas the other is a hell of a nag, “a crooked great jumble of limbs,” forever dragging us down toward the lower desires. All in all, chariot-driving is what Socrates calls “a painfully difficult business,” as is being alive, and the task that Brooks and Oprah set for themselves, in their affable and optimistic fashion, is the age-old one of turning us into better charioteers. Our feelings urge us this way and that, and we should learn when to yank on the reins and when—steady now—to try a touch of the whip.

Whether Brooks has an actual chariot, Massachusetts traffic laws being what they are, I cannot say. Heaven knows what Oprah keeps in her stables. But it’s charming to note the confidence with which Brooks, for one, presents his credentials as a successful whipster. He experimented on his own routines and began teaching a class on happiness at Harvard, not to mention composing a regular column for The Atlantic on the same topic. By his account, “I saw more and more progress in my life.” Onward and upward he flew:

In the years since I made this life change, my own well-being has risen a lot. People notice and remark that I smile more, and I look like I’m having more fun in my work. My relationships are better than they were.

We’re so happy that you’re happy, Professor! Far be it from me to point out that such protestations of improvement, sincere as they are, have a whiff of the travelling salesman—you know, the guy who puts a foot in the door and says, “Believe me, Ma’am, I’ve been using this very same vacuum cleaner in my own home for three months now, and the effect of that heightened suck power is just tremendous. My dust has all but vanished. My carpets look brand new.” To anyone browsing “Build the Life You Want” and books of a similar ilk, it soon becomes clear that the care and maintenance of the self is no longer a branch of the social sciences, if it ever was, or an offshoot of popular psychology. Restructuring your inward being, and increasing its turnover, is now akin to running a company. Personhood, like religion and politics, is a business.

It doesn’t take long for Brooks to get the business going. He proudly inducts us into the thrill of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, or PANAS, which gauges “your natural happy-unhappy mix.” This gives us a list of twenty emotions, such as “6. Guilty 7. Scared 8. Hostile 9. Enthusiastic.” (A perfect guide, as it happens, to the average day of a movie critic.) You note down how keenly you feel the feel, as Oprah would say, grading each emotion for intensity, then calculate your final score. This, in turn, shows where you belong on a pretty diagram, reproduced on page 16 of “Build the Life You Want,” that divides Homo sapiens cleanly into four basic types: Cheerleader, Mad Scientist, Judge, and Poet. Really? Imagine asking J. Robert Oppenheimer to nominate which one of those he thought he was. He would have exploded.

You’ve got to love the PANAS test. It means almost nothing, yet it gives you the bracing impression that you’re down on the factory floor, tinkering away on the unique machine that is you. It is, to use Oprah’s splendidly honest term, “science-y,” right down to the vague, if benign, laboratory conditions that Brooks dictates. “To take the test, find a time when you feel relatively neutral about life—say, right after lunch,” he writes. But what sort of lunch? If it’s three o’clock in the afternoon and you’re lingering over coffee and gazing out across the Bay of Naples, you will give thanks for the wonders of creation. Conversely, if you just blew seven dollars and twenty-nine cents on a Subway footlong, you will hold your fellow-humans in contempt and assume, naturally, that the world is an overcooked meatball hung in a meaningless void.

Undaunted, Brooks forges onward, and makes further encouraging claims about his methods. Eager to prove that even negative feelings, if shrewdly handled, can have a positive outcome, he ventures into the realms of the book-y. He even gets arts-y on our ass. Quoting a line from Keats’s letters—“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?”—Brooks adds, “Scientists have found that Keats was right.” If only all literary criticism could be as brisk as that. Moreover, according to a study cited by Brooks, “The research found that among great composers like Beethoven, a 37 percent increase in sadness led to, on average, one extra major composition.” That sentence makes me twenty-four per cent less sad, and eighty-one per cent more inclined to giggle, than anything I have read this year.

Brooks is scarcely the first to propose that our happiness, and its opposite, can and should be quantified as precisely as barometric pressure. In “An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation” (published, by a murky coincidence, in the year of the French Revolution), the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, clinging fast to his utilitarian creed, devised what came to be known as the felicific calculus. In theory, this allowed you to evaluate any given act in terms of its ensuing pain or pleasure, which could be graded according to various criteria: intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, and extent. In practice, the last of these—which sounds tame, and which refers to the number of people who will be affected by the act—is probably the most morally ticklish, as any secondhand smoker can confirm.

With a couple of centuries’ worth of medical probing behind him, Brooks can boldly go where Bentham was unable to go before and lead us to the particular neighborhoods where pain and pleasure hang out. “Build the Life You Want” plays peekaboo with the reader, affording sneaky little glimpses of the hypothalamus, the insula, and the adrenal glands. Are we genuinely expected to master this material, though, or is it designed purely to reassure us that we are in safe hands? When Brooks, analyzing our reaction to fear, writes, “Your periaqueductal gray, which also receives a note from your amygdala, tells your body to move,” the prosaic image of the note—plucked from our everyday lives—is what sticks and stays. To be told that our internal mail system is like that of a well-run office comes as quite a relief. Then, there is metacognition, a buzzword that hums throughout the book and entails “experiencing your emotions consciously” and “refusing to be controlled by them.” Brooks expounds: