Arthur Brooks has a confession to make: “I’m not a very naturally happy person.” He tells me this one May morning in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, Half Moon Bay, thirty miles south of San Francisco, where he’s come to emcee The Atlantic’s two-day “In Pursuit of Happiness” festival. Brooks has spent the past twenty years training himself to overcome his less-than-sunny disposition and become a genuinely happy person, and now some 200 people have paid $700 to attend this conference, many flying across the country, because they believe he can help them do the same.
Brooks’s credentials suggest that he can. He teaches a course at Harvard Business School called “Leadership and Happiness.” His book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Meaning in the Second Half of Life became a New York Times bestseller. His column in The Atlantic, “How to Build a Life,” reaches over a million people in a good week.
Brooks, 58, is bald and trim and looks a little like Stanley Tucci, for whom he is often mistaken in airports. But when he strode onto a conference room’s makeshift stage earlier this morning wearing a wireless mic, the vibe was unmistakably Steve Jobs. Only the technology Brooks was selling was more abstract—a new way of pursuing joy. Here was the guru of happiness, and we were his acolytes.
We’re badly in need of one, according to the data (and Brooks loves nothing more than data). Last year was the first time, according to a University of Chicago survey going back to 1972, that more Americans reported being “not too happy” than “very happy.” An annual poll by Marist reported that in 2021 just 49 percent of Americans were more optimistic than pessimistic about the state of the world, a low point since the survey began in 2009. There are many conceivable reasons for our national saddening—a pandemic, political division, mass shootings, our addiction to social media platforms that deliver us these and other daily terrors intravenously—but Brooks says that a lot of what our collective sorrow boils down to is fear. “When you have a chronic drip of stress hormones that come from an uncertainty that is bred by a culture of fear,” he says, “you can’t maintain a positive outlook in a society.”
Whatever the cause, the quest for happiness has become big business in the last decade or so. Social psychologists like Dan Gilbert (author of Stumbling on Happiness) and Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis) have built massive followings offering lessons for leading a happier life. There are college courses devoted to happiness (like Dr. Laurie Santos’s “Psychology and the Good Life” at Yale, which became so popular it led to a podcast, The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos), TED talks (“How to Be Happy When Life is Not,” “The Habits of Happiness”), and even entire media companies (Dan Harris’s Ten Percent Happier, based on his book of the same name, which includes a podcast and guided meditations).
But Brooks, who began his Atlantic column in 2020 after 10 years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative think tank known for its support of free-market economics, has quickly turned himself into a leading popularizer of happiness studies. In his eyes, he’s uniquely positioned as a messenger between academia and the self-help space. “The self-improvement people can’t read the literature, and the academics can’t talk to the humans,” says Brooks. “There’s a seam running through that.” Brooks lives on that seam. He may not have a degree in psychology, but his Ph.D. in quantitative public policy analysis—“basically, mathematical modeling and applied microeconomics,” he says—makes him particularly adept at synthesizing scientific research and common sense wisdom into erudite life advice. Typically he reads a dozen scholarly articles a week and metabolizes them for the general public, both in his Atlantic column and on his podcast, The Art of Happiness with Arthur Brooks. His goal, he says, is to build “a grassroots movement of happiness hobbyists.”
His goals are not modest. “That’s actually how you change the country,” he continues. “Everyone is talking about politics—nonsense. Politics changes because people have hope. People have hope because they’re seeking happiness. So you have to start where the story starts, which is trying to simulate a happiness movement. Then you save the country. The ambitions are big.” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic and a close friend of Brooks’s, underscores that point. “Arthur is on a mission,” he says. “And I think being on a mission makes him happy.”
That mission, it turns out, is an intense one, both personally and professionally. Brooks relentlessly tracks his happiness via spreadsheet. He’s on pace to hit 175 speaking engagements in 2022. He’ll be the first to tell you that his own “happiness portfolio” is out of whack, too heavily weighted toward work. It all points out an irony at the heart of his work. The rise in national unhappiness has been a boon for the happiness industry, and with each new solution and antidote—books, podcasts, conferences, classes—it can begin to feel more and more like happiness is a full-time job. For Brooks, it quite literally is. “You strike while the iron’s hot,” he tells me. “Everyone wants the content right now.”
“Fifty percent of your happiness is genetics,” Brooks tells me in a blue velvet booth in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, after offering the festival’s opening remarks. Behind us, windows look out on the Pacific. One on one, Brooks is attentive and inquisitive, with a lean, muscular build. He has salty stubble and olive eyes, and when he peers at you through a pair of thin glasses, he makes strong eye contact (which, he’ll tell you, releases the hormone oxytocin, which plays a role in empathy, trust, and romantic attraction). Sipping his black coffee, he orders a small plate of amaretto cookies and tells me how he inherited his disposition—and overcame it.
Brooks grew up in Seattle in a lower middle-class family, with a mom who was a professional painter and a college professor father with a Ph.D. in biostatistics who drove a bus during the summers. He describes his parents as “gloomy” and his family history as checkered with mental health issues, including clinical depression. His mom was on anti-psychotic medication from her twenties until she died in her seventies.
Brooks inherited not only his mother’s melancholic disposition but also her artistic inclinations, taking up the violin at four, the piano at five, and the French horn at eight. He was unusually good at the last instrument in particular. So, at 19, when he was put on academic probation, he dropped out of college to become a professional French hornist, playing in Spain, where he’d meet his future wife, Ester. He went back to school at 28, taking courses by correspondence—from BYU, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Washington—asked a public library to proctor his exams, and banked the credits at Thomas Edison State College, in Trenton, New Jersey. He graduated in 1994, picking up his diploma from his mailbox the month before he turned 30. In the years that followed, he got his Ph.D. from a graduate school affiliated with the Rand Corporation, the military think tank where he’d later work as an analyst, and from there took the job at the helm of the American Enterprise Institute.
Brooks was driven, but he had his vices. He smoked cigarettes for over a decade, beginning at age 13, when he spent a summer washing dishes at a pancake house on the Oregon coast. It would take a near-disaster in his mid-twenties to make him quit: He fell asleep during his nightly 4:00 a.m. cigarette and almost lit the bed (and himself, and Ester) on fire. A different wake-up call came in his early thirties, when Brooks’s father was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and given 15 years to live. He died in two, on Thanksgiving Day in 2002.
“He never worked out,” Brooks tells me. “He died poorly. He wasn’t happy. He was really, really unhappy.” By the time that holiday season was over, in January, Brooks had given up drinking, started exercising daily, and begun tracking his happiness on a spreadsheet. He learned that he could control his appetites. “I really don’t have many vices at this point,” he says, “but I’m one day away all the time.”
Brooks still thinks about chemical dependence. (When I tell him I’m over thirty and single, he replies that I have a one in three chance of having a substance addiction.) And he’s come to approach his mental health the way a recovered addict approaches sobriety, constantly reminding himself that what he craves isn’t what he actually wants.
As Brooks sees it, our brains mislead us into chasing things that feel good but don’t result in sustained happiness. Those things are often what he calls the four false idols: money, power, pleasure, and fame. Like drugs, they tickle our dopamine receptors, but unlike drugs they’re socially acceptable because they’re all markers of success. Yet a success addiction, like a drug addiction, will still leave you unhappy in the long run. “Nobody is ever like, ‘Dude, you did five grams of cocaine today, congratulations on that, that’s a preternaturally high dose!’” Brooks tells me, with gusto. “But ‘You made a billion dollars!’ is sort of the same thing.”
Instead of chasing those idols, Brooks advises that we focus on what he calls the four pillars of our “happiness portfolio”: faith, family, friends, and work. The happiest people, according to Brooks, adhere to a belief system that helps them transcend their narrow perspective and “understand life’s bigger than the boring sitcom that is me, me, me.” They have deep family ties and strong friendships. And they do work that serves others and allows them to earn their success. Brooks points out that if you go back to the beginning of our national decline in happiness, in the late 1980s, you see that those pillars have generally become less central to people’s lives. “It’s my field theory of generalized unhappiness,” he says. “If you want to fix it, you’ve to fix it along those four dimensions.”
It’s not that we don’t know the importance of those pillars, necessarily—it’s just that they’re hard to prioritize on a daily basis. “I’ve said to Arthur, family, faith, work, friends, this is not particle physics, it’s a kind of common sense, and he agrees,” says Goldberg. “But there’s a lot of static and friction in our lives that keep us separated from common sense.” Much of Brooks’s work is aimed at helping us tune out the static and friction Goldberg is referring to. Though fifty percent of your happiness is genetic, he estimates that your circumstances are responsible for another 25 percent, and the remaining quarter is determined by your habits—good news for him and the rest of us who might not come into the world chromosomally laced with high levels of serotonin. “You can raise your happiness,” Brooks says. “And I have raised mine by having good happiness hygiene.”
Brooks’s happiness hygiene is no joke, and much of it is intensely physical. On a typical day, he’s up at 4:45 a.m. Four days a week, he lifts weights, alternating between different types of full body workouts. He’s currently at 12 percent body fat—he measures it with calipers—but can get down to 7 percent when he’s really on point. On days he doesn’t do full body workouts, he’s doing cardio, yoga, or blood occlusion therapy, which involves exercising while using bands to restrict the flow of blood to your muscles. He says he misses one day a month.
Brooks’s approach to physical fitness also informs his approach to his emotional well-being. He believes happiness is made up of three main “macronutrients”—enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose—which are in turn broken down into 19 micronutrients. Each micronutrient, which he tracks via a spreadsheet, gets a number and a force multiplier based on how important it is to his well-being. His faith and his marriage are weighted a nine out of ten, his relationship with his kids gets an eight, money is a two. (As to the eternal question: Brooks tells me that money can buy you out of unhappiness, but it can’t bring you happiness.) The point of tracking his happiness this way isn’t to achieve a perfect score, but to give Brooks a numerical visualization of whether or not he’s moving in the direction of happier horizons. “I don’t care very much if it’s 500 or 256—I care that it’s 211 this year and it was 203 last year,” he says. Each year, on his birthday, he makes a reverse bucket list of attachments he needs to let go of. One year, he threw out half of his political opinions.
For Brooks, happiness is a matter of awareness. In fact, he’ll say that “the secret” to happiness is metacognition, or the ability to observe your own desires, cravings, emotions, and feelings, without automatically reacting to them. “You’ve got to ask yourself: Do I want to be managed by my appetites, do I want to be managed by my emotions—or do I want to manage them?” he later asks me. Brooks says that where we often seek relief—numbing bad feelings, or satisfying cravings—we should instead seek clarity. It’s the old maxim: Know thyself.
“Clay is your big enterprise,” he explains to me in the lobby’s velvet booth, having only touched two of the five miniature Amaretto cookies. “You must manage Clay. You’re the CEO of you, no matter what else is happening.” (Given his background, the corporate framing perhaps isn’t surprising, but Brooks likes this “You are your most important start-up” metaphor so much that when his three kids were in high school, he had each of them draw up business plans for their life.) Happiness, Brooks says, is a practice, a discipline. You have to work on it every day, because life pulls you away from it. And so your pursuit of it must be rigorous, almost technocratic—the way a think tank scholar might approach a matter of economic policy.
“I can’t leave stuff up to serendipity, because I know what happens to me as a person who is not naturally very happy,” he says. In a few minutes, he has to go onstage for a conversation about mental health and happiness with the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. “And I know what happens to people even if they are naturally happy. Bad stuff creeps in and they don’t know where it came from. I can see patterns immediately and tighten them up. I feel like I’m running an airline and I’ve got a 58-year-old plane. You better keep good metrics. You gotta know when to change the screws on that thing, because if you don’t, a screw is gonna come out and you’re going to crash.”
“So, right now, are you happy?” a woman asks Brooks several hours later, after the festival’s daytime programming has wrapped. We’re standing out back of the hotel, on a lawn overlooking the Pacific, indulging in a Tito’s-sponsored happy hour. A chill whips off the ocean, and Brooks has thrown on a gray track jacket. “Happier,” he says, looking at the setting sun through a pair of black Ray Bans. “You never arrive. But the key thing we can promise people is that you can be happier.”
Several times over the course of the weekend, people approach Brooks in an effort to drink from the fountain of happiness, but the constant consultations don’t go to his head. “What they like is the milk, not the milkman,” he says. According to Ester, “He’s helping other people, and other people are benefiting from this. He’s happier doing this than what he was doing before. His life is more meaningful.”
In his quest to become happier, one finding struck Brooks as particularly important—so important that it ultimately caused him to quit his job, and provided the backbone for his book Strength to Strength. The idea is based on the research of a British psychologist named Raymond Cattell, who put forth a theory that people possess two main types of intelligence. There’s fluid intelligence, the ability to think quickly and solve novel problems. And there’s crystallized intelligence, more akin to wisdom, which puts your reservoir of accumulated knowledge to use. Fluid intelligence tends to dominate your early years, and then decline by your thirties or forties; crystallized intelligence, though, continues to accrue throughout your forties, fifties, and sixties.
One of the keys to late-in-life happiness, Brooks says, is to figure out how to make the jump from using your fluid intelligence to using your crystallized intelligence. He calls this “getting on your second curve.” Brooks was still at the American Enterprise Institute when he was doing this research, and he realized that getting on his second curve would mean leaving his position as president of the think tank behind. “I was like, I’ve got the data. Either I believe it or I don’t,” he says. So he quit.
As the sun sets on the resort’s lawn, Brooks is approached by a man named Dan, who’s trying to figure out what to do next, having recently retired after 37 years of practicing law. Brooks’ offhand recommendation—a very long walk, specifically along the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage trail in Spain—is either slightly preposterous or tailored to an audience of wealthy middle-aged people. At any rate, that’s what Brooks did after he retired from the American Enterprise Institute, before he started teaching at Harvard.
“I said, I’m going to take a month and go on pilgrimage,” Brooks explains. “I strongly recommend that—a real long walk, with no devices.”
“No devices?” Dan asks, incredulously. “That had to be hard.”
“It wasn’t, actually,” says Brooks.
“What if your kids needed you?” Dan asks.
“My wife had her phone,” Brooks laughs. “But my wife is a more equilibrated person than I am, she’s a much happier person. So she was not in need. She was in need of me to rescue myself.”
Brooks takes the faith part of his happiness portfolio seriously. A devout Catholic, he purchased his current house in Needham, Massachusetts in part because it’s so close to the church where he attends daily mass on days when he can. On days when he can’t, he does about a half hour of morning prayer. For him, walking the Camino was a transcendental experience. “His faith in God is absolutely central to his happiness,” Bishop Robert Barron, the founder of a Catholic media company and a close friend of Brooks’s, tells me via email. “He lives by St. Augustine’s great adage: ‘Love God first and then love everything else for the sake of God.’”
Dan says he grew up Catholic too but now considers himself agnostic, and wonders aloud whether finding his way back to his religious roots might help him in his next chapter of life.
“Walk the Camino with pure openness, and ask for truth,” Brooks advises. “Say, ‘Lord, I don’t know if you’re there. If you’re there, write something on my heart.’ And He will.”
“Yeah, I would definitely be up for that,” Dan replies. “We’ll have to look at when on our calendar it will work.”
This exchange gets at one of the flaws in Brooks’s supposed path to happiness: His proposals often require time and money. And as Brooks acknowledges, the solutions might be easy to grasp, but they’re often hard to follow. So hard, in fact, that Brooks sometimes fails to implement them himself. He’s aware that his work as CEO of Happiness, Inc., is in danger of cutting into his own happiness. He tells me he walked the Camino to break his own addiction to success, gain new perspective, and create a “forced separation from ordinary ambitions.” But that was almost two years ago, and Brooks is now very much back in the world of ordinary ambition.
“It seems like you’re doing so much,” Dan says. “You’re accountable in so many ways, and do you ever think, I’d like to have a long period of time where I’m just not accountable?”
“Yeah, that’s something I actually do want,” Brooks replies. “You strike while the iron is hot. There’s an opportunity to create a social movement around happiness, that this”—he gestures at the festival surrounding us—“is part of. You take these opportunities. But you can’t sustain this and actually be happy, or even productive. You’ll burn out.”
“You’re pushing yourself hard,” says Dan.
“Way too hard,” says Brooks.
The next day, I find myself hopping aboard a seven-seat Cirrus jet with Brooks, who has invited me to join him on a short but action-packed trip to L.A., where he’s recording a couple of interviews for other peoples’ podcasts. He’ll get back to the Beverly Hilton after 10 p.m., and be up early in the morning to speak to a college class, before addressing a conference put on by the Milken Institute.
As we taxi out, I bring up Dan’s comment to Brooks from the previous evening. “Isn’t that sort of the whole problem,” I ask, “that no one really has the time to be happy?”
Brooks considers this. “You don’t not have the time,” he says.
“Either way,” I say, “people don’t think they have the time.”
And in this moment, something in Brooks shifts. He goes into life coach mode, asking what it is that scares me. What I’m really scared of is our lone pilot, Scott, having some sort of crisis, and then all three of us falling out of the sky, but I don’t want to tell Brooks this. So I just say that my main problem is constant anxiety (which happens to be true, and of which the Scott-breaking worry is probably a symptom).
Brooks takes a moment to reflect. “One of the interesting things that you might consider is if your goal might be not ‘How can I have less anxiety?’ but ‘How can I love my anxiety?’” he says. “You can actually have big breakthroughs on the basis of your discomfort. That’s one of the consolations of age, unless you fight against yourself.” If you do that, he says, “you’re running away from yourself your whole life.” He picks at a plate of salmon and greens. “By the way, if I keep up the pace I’m doing right now, it means I’m running away from something. I’ve been stuck running, running, running my whole life. The next thing, the next thing, the next thing.”
Ester says that the desire to constantly work is something Brooks has always had to repress. “He doesn’t really like going on vacation, because there’s nothing to do on vacation,” she says. She recalls a camping trip they took in the Pyrenees in the ’80s, just after they started dating. Brooks brought his French horn so he could practice daily. Ester opted to leave her trumpet behind. “Normal people, like me, it’s possible for me to stop thinking about work or about ideas and just be on the beach and look at the beach,” she says. “But for him, it’s hard.”
At the American Enterprise Institute, Brooks worked 85-hour weeks. Now, he’s still doing 75 or 80, spending five days a week on the road. When I ask what he does for fun, he says that his version of fun is exactly this—more work. “It’s like, ‘My name is Arthur and I’m a success addict,’” he tells me. “Everybody’s got their own particular issues. I don’t smoke. I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. I don’t run around on my wife. I don’t do anything—but this is what I’ve got.”
Brooks thinks this is a problem that most ambitious, conventionally successful people struggle with. They can’t ever be satisfied. And you can’t find truly successful people who are just “normal,” he says. “You’re not going to write an article on me that’s like, Brooks is the most normal guy I’ve ever met. You’ve got to do the work.”
But it takes so much work, I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “I work my ass off because I’m naturally miserable.”
It seems like the conditions that make you want to strive for happiness are the conditions that are making you unhappy.
“That’s the paradox,” he says. “That’s the riddle.”
And this, of course, is one of the things that’s so frustrating about happiness. It’s like chasing the horizon.
“The danger is believing that the mirage is actually an oasis,” says Brooks. “When your pursuit of happiness presupposes a destination of happiness, that’s a fake palm tree and a fake pool of water, and you’re in a desert. You’re not going to find it.”
As we continue flying south, I reflect that this might be where much of the discourse around happiness falls short. Maybe it’s the pursuit part that’s all wrong. Like chasing a butterfly, if you run after happiness, it’ll evade you. But pay it no mind, get on living your life, and you might look down and find that happiness has fluttered down and landed on you, even if just for a moment.
In this sense, I find Brooks’s advice compelling, if a bit idealistic. Speaking personally, it’s true that I’m happier when I can control my emotions, or at least stop myself from eating the entire can of Pringles. I don’t pray, but I’ve meditated regularly for seven years, and have found nothing else that’s so effectively decreased my anxiety and improved my well-being. I’ve been buoyed during mental health struggles by loved ones, and by having a job that’s meaningful to me. Faith, family, friends, work—these are all effective ways of fostering moments of happiness. But they’re only really available to those who have privileges like health, financial security, and highly autonomous work. A lot of our society’s unhappiness can be attributed to systemic and institutional disadvantages. And even for those with advantages, happiness remains elusive in the modern world. I’m reminded of a line by the naturalist writer Barry Lopez: “There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
Brooks, for his part, leans into the light by bringing other people happiness, and hopes that he might see some boomerang back around to himself. “I study happiness because it’s what I want,” he says. “I can help other people, in many ways, more than I can help myself.”
About an hour after taking off, we land in Los Angeles. As we get ready to deplane, Brooks notices some brown prayer beads on the pilot’s wrist. “Are you Buddhist?” he asks.
Kind of, Scott says, explaining that he’s done a bunch of meditation retreats up at Spirit Rock, an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. “It’s good,” he says, of the retreats, before reconsidering if that’s really the right way to put it. “It’s work.”
“For sure—absolutely,” replies Brooks. “It’s not recreation,” he adds as he jauntily steps off the plane, heading back to the never-ending job of making the world a happier place.