Read the full transcript of Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks ‘s talk on the Science of Happiness at The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) 2025 on Feb 17, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
HARVARD PROFESSOR ARTHUR BROOKS: Good morning to all of you. What an honor it is to be here at ARC. I’ve been looking forward to this. This is a movement that’s now worldwide that I’m so delighted to be part of. Thank you to Philippa Stroud and to Jordan Peterson, who has my unvarnished admiration and amazement, and to all of you for being part of this movement. They asked me to come here and talk about, well, to pick up where Jeff left off, on the science of happiness.
See, that’s what I teach at Harvard University. I’m a behavioral scientist dedicated to the neuroscience and social science around happiness. It seems like a weird subject to teach at a business school, perhaps, but it really isn’t. I teach the business of life. You are all entrepreneurs in the sacred enterprise of your own life.
You’re the founder. You’re the CEO. But you have to know the currency of the fortune that you’re trying to accumulate. It’s not money or power or pleasure or fame, admiration. No. It’s love and happiness.
Do you know how to accumulate that? Do you know how to bring that to others? Well, that’s what I teach. As a matter of fact, I’ll be teaching that tomorrow morning in the classroom at the Harvard Business School. And I want to tell you what I’m teaching them. In the next 13 minutes and 50 seconds, I’m going to give you the entire semester.
The Essence of Happiness
Now, not really, but I’m going to start with the biggest mistake that people make about happiness in this world today. They think it’s a feeling. It’s not. The feeling of happiness is like the smell of your dinner. It’s evidence of dinner.
No, no. Your happiness is something that you can actually understand, change your habits for, and get more of if you know what it is. Happiness is a combination of three macronutrients. Enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
And when you know how to get more of those, you can have a better life. And you can fight for those things in our society, our culture, and our public policy to bring it to a world that needs it so much.
So let me tell you how to do that in just a few brief words in the time that I have with you.
Now, there are a lot of misconceptions about these things. The mistake that people make of thinking that enjoyment is the same thing as pleasure. It’s not. Pleasure is an animal thing.
Enjoyment adds people and memory to make it uniquely human. Satisfaction is the joy that you get from accomplishing something hard with struggle. Only humans want that. And finally, there’s meaning.
Meaning the idea of the coherence of your life, the purpose with goals, the significance that your life matters. Our outlook or our good practices. No, on the contrary. Wonderful research that actually looks at identical twins that were separated at birth and adopted into separate families.
The Genetic Factor
This is not a diabolical Harvard study that did this. It just happened naturally. When we reunite these people at the age of 40 and give them personality tests and tests about all different parts of their lives, you find that about 50% of their difference in happiness is genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy.
This is important to understand because what this means is not that happiness is out of your control. No, on the contrary. The same studies show that 50% of your tendency to abuse alcohol, also genetic.
But if you came to me and said, my parents drank too much and my grandparents too, so I guess I’m going to be an alcoholic. I’d say, oh, you missed a step. Because you know this, you can turn that genetic proclivity to zero by not drinking. That means habits are important if you know yourself.
The Components of Happiness
So the first 50% of your tendency toward happiness is genetic. The next 25% is circumstantial. The good things and the bad things in your life. And my students, they think that’s everything.
If I can just get better circumstances, the job, the money, the position, the family, whatever it happens to be, great. But that’s transient. That’s evanescent. It turns out that it’s true that in any given moment, nice circumstances will drive your happiness up by 25% or down by 25% if you’re experiencing unfortunate circumstances.
But it doesn’t last. What you need are good habits that will give you systematically better circumstances. And that’s the last 25%, which is what I want to talk about with you today. For you and your kids and our society. The happiness habits.
Now, these are the things that if you pay attention to them and cultivate them and practice them every day, will give you 25% of your happiness under your direct control. It will allow you to improve your circumstances and manage your genetic proclivities.
But you’ve got to know what they are.
The Four Happiness Habits
Now, I could give you 10,000 little habits, but they’re trivial. There’s only four that really matter. All of the science, all the neuroscience and behavioral science on happiness, it comes down to these four. Here they are.
Here’s what you need to put in the accounts every day. This is your happiness pension plan. Make a deposit every day in these four accounts. You ready? Your faith, your family, your friendship, and your work. Those are the four.
Now, when I say faith, I don’t mean my faith. I’m a Roman Catholic. Faith is literally the most important thing in my life. Thank you. We’ve got some Catholics here.
But as a social scientist, I will tell you that my path toward happiness is not necessarily the only path. What you need is not a particular religious path.
Again, metaphysically is a different matter entirely.
But for happiness, what you need is a path that will help you to transcend yourself. See, we’re stuck in the psychodrama of life every day. My job, my commute, my money, my lunch, my television shows. It’s so boring.
What we need is relief and peace and perspective. And the only way to do that, the only way to do that is to get small and make the universe large, to cut our narcissism and pay attention in awe to what’s greater than us. Lots of ways to do that. Some people like to study the Stoic philosophers. Other people like to walk in nature without devices for an hour before dawn or study the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach or to practice Vipassana meditation or, like me, to practice with seriousness the faith of your youth.
But you need something to get small and to not let the narcissistic world take over your soul. That’s faith. What is family? Family life.
You know, family life is a mysterious one. I could explain the neuroscience, the hormones, the neuropeptides in the brain that tell us who are our people and our people belong to us, but it’s still like a miracle when you see those people. It’s like the Fourth of July in America inside your head. How important that really is.
There are so many things that are ripping us apart. One in six Americans today is not speaking to a family member because of politics. That’s falling prey to somebody else’s culture war. Don’t let it happen to you.
There’s one reason to have schism with your family, and that’s abuse. In Newsflash, differences of political opinion are not abuse. They’re an opportunity, is what they are, to understand each other and to live with each other in love. And then, of course, there’s the culture that says that marriage and kids are for suckers. No, that’s the fast route to happiness.
Third, of course, is friendship. Friendship, and there have been so many forces that have militated against effective friendships in our society. Zoom friendships don’t work. Social media friendships, that’s not real friends.
And then, of course, there’s the whole professionalization of friendship. I make a big distinction in my work between real friends and deal friends. You know the difference. If you’re wondering, deal friends are the useful people to you, real friends are the useless people to you.
Do you have enough useless people in your life? I don’t mean worthless, I have them too. So, this is important, and these are relationships. Well, there’s one more, which is work. Work is so critically important, but I have studied work in my profession. As a social scientist, I was trained as an economist, and I’ve looked at different kinds of jobs.
And different kinds of jobs don’t predict happiness. They don’t bring joy or different levels of income or education. That doesn’t do it either. No, no, no, no.
There’s only two things that predict joy from your work. Earning your success and serving others. I don’t care if you’re a bus driver or a politician or a CEO. You need to earn your success and serve other people. That is the essence of joy from work.
The Importance of Free Enterprise
Now, earning your success means that you’re creating value with your life and value in the lives of other people. That means you are being rewarded and acknowledged for merit and hard work and personal responsibility. That’s why there is one economic system that brings joy to work, and that’s the free enterprise system. That’s the only one that we’ve ever invented.
But more importantly, we need to be needed. The essence of dignity is to be needed. The essence of despair is to be managed like a liability, which is why our welfare systems do such a poor job. They treat people at the margins of society like liabilities to manage as opposed to assets to develop.
You need to be needed, and so do I. And that means in your work, you need to serve other people and see how you’re helping other people to live better lives. The free enterprise system does that too.
Now, I talk about capitalism and free enterprise a lot, not because I’m worried about GDP growth. I am, but that’s not why. Because I want more human dignity. Because I want more happiness.
This is the essence of the four values that I’m talking about here. It’s not a political agenda at all. It’s an agenda of human flourishing, and if you want to be a happier person, these are the accounts in which to put your attention and time and energy and affection every day, your faith, work on it seriously every single day, your family life, your friendships, and your work that serves in which you earn your success.
Now, there’s one big concern that animates ARC, which is not just you leaving this beautiful place and having this great experience and being happier yourself. No, no, no. You’re here because you want to change society, and so do I. Well, it turns out that when it comes to happiness, we’re almost literally in a world of hurt. The happiness indices are going in the wrong direction in almost every OECD country.
In my country, the United States, we’ve seen this secular decline in happiness going back to about 1990 with big dips that have happened especially since the turn of the century. Why? People pay attention to the weather, as it were, the weather of happiness, the storms of happiness, the coronavirus epidemic, the financial crisis, the onset of social media, and those things are all bad, don’t get me wrong, but we tend to neglect the climate of happiness, and that’s a bigger problem that little by little by little is driving down the well-being of people all over the world today.
And you know what it comes from? The same thing that will ruin your happiness, a lack of the big four. Look around. What will you see for people under 35 today? A decline in faith. The year I was born in the United States, 1% had no religious affiliation. Today it’s 34%.
Look around. People are saying they’re lonelier than they’ve ever been. They’re walking away from marriage. They’re not having children. They don’t have a vocational sense of their work, and they’re turning against the free enterprise system. Those are the stakes. Look, if we want to be happier people, and we want to live in a happier society, those are the things to fight for. Those are the things to stand up for.
Conclusion
Don’t let anybody say that you’re fighting for faith and family and community and friendship and the free enterprise system because it’s all about your politics or it’s all about the tax rate. No, no, no, no, no. This is what the world needs. Pay attention to these things in your life. If you pay attention to these things in your life, here’s what I promise you.
The same thing I promised my students. The same things I practiced myself. You will get happier for the rest of your life. Furthermore, if you leave here and you work for these institutions, more faith in our society, a greater sense of family, a greater sense of community, more faith in our society, a greater sense of family values with more marriage and more babies because babies are awesome, with closer friends, with more coherent communities, with a capitalist system that brings everybody in from the margins for more opportunity and where we’re dedicated to loving each other.
That’s how the world gets better. That is not a political agenda. That’s an agenda for greater world happiness and we need to be part of it. Join me.
