Academics who hope to answer that have found reasons to smile.
I recommend this Globe and Mail article by Erin Anderson: Can Happiness be Taught? Academics who hope to answer that have found reasons to smile.
Some highlights from the introduction:
There are no exams in Bruce Hood’s Science of Happiness course. The main assignment of the first-year classes is to practise what they learn. At lectures, cell phones are banned, and Dr. Hood begins by asking everyone to chat with the person beside them.
There are so many freshmen wanting to take the course that Dr. Hood, a Canadian-born developmental psychologist, now lectures in the morning, and again in the afternoon. He sometimes sees the same students in both classes.
At universities across North America, happiness courses pack in the students. Outside the classroom, there are enough happiness podcasts for a dedicated radio station, hours of YouTube videos to occupy those very early mornings when you are lying awake with existential angst, life coaches to guide you to happier choices, all-being teaching apps and online certificates to affirm your happiness credentials. The truly diligent happiness seekers can now take an online Masters of Happiness at Centenary College in the United States.
For centuries people have been debating, preaching, rhyming, and philosophizing about the definition of happiness and how we can get more of it. Scientists have joined in the human experiments and brain scans. Economists are busy measuring it. Meanwhile, business schools are churning out well-being consultants to increase productivity: Happy workers are productive workers.
In North America happiness is a multibillion dollar business based on the ideas that people – even those predisposed to crankiness – can learn to be happy. But finding and keeping happiness is hard, otherwise we would surely have figured it out by now. That’s no reason to give it up, science suggests.
The secret to a happier life is outlined in the article. Dr. Hood, for his part, began as a sceptic. He describes what made it hard to teach about happiness.
Dr. Santos, one of his former graduate students, started her own now-famous course at Yale University. Psychology and the Good Life quickly became one of the most popular classes ever on campus. Dr. Hood reached out to Dr. Santos for advice and in 2018 he launched the Science of Happiness. The course and its impact is described.
In the World Happiness Report 2024, Canada ranks a respectable 15th, well behind Finland and Denmark, who take the gold and silver respectively, but significantly ahead of Britain (20) and the United States (23). There is a rise in mental health issues, even in the safest more prosperous countries.
Dr. Hood was helped by a class to realize he’d been looking for happiness in the wrong direction. To find it, he had to practice! That’s a lesson we can learn at any age.
Final insights are described in the article.
- Twin studies suggest that a certain set point of happiness is about 50 per cent inherited – roughly the same as intelligence, Dr. Hood notes.
- Happiness levels also change – for better and worse – as people marry and have kids and age, traditionally following a U-curve across lifetimes.
- “There’s just a bias to assume that the past can change but not the future,” says Dr. Hood.
Other parts of the article outline criticism of the studies, interventions, adding novelty, constant practice, the big picture question. The final paragraphs are a summary about why to turn the practice of happiness into action.
Discard what doesn’t work, repeat what does is suggested by Mr. Folk. “And, along the way, bask in the moments when you experience joy.”
Can Happiness be Taught? Academics who hope to answer that have found reasons to smile.