How to Talk to People - How to Build a Happy Life: Identify What You Enjoy

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

In adulthood, many of us are forced to recalibrate our relationship with joy. As responsibilities multiply exponentially, time grows limited, and challenges mount, it becomes harder to make time for fun, let alone remember what it feels like. As we explore the key components of happiness—pleasure, joy, and satisfaction—we ask the foundational question: What really brings me joy? In this special-edition, bonus episode of How to Build a Happy Life, the psychotherapist and Atlantic contributing writer Lori Gottlieb demystifies one of the vital components of a happy life: enjoyment. Gottlieb believes that we not only find it challenging to make time for day-to-day enjoyment, but also struggle to identify what it should feel like. This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael. Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail] or leave us a voicemail at 925.967.2091. Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Daydream in Silver”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”). Click here to listen to every full-length episode in the series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is How to Build a Happy Life, the Atlantic's podcast on all things happiness. I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and happiness correspondent at the Atlantic. In this special bonus episode of the How to Build a Happy Life series, I sat down with the Atlantic's own Laurie Gottlieb. We reviewed a lot of what we've covered in this series, from enjoyment and emotional management to the practical ways to apply the science of happiness to our daily lives. Enjoy. Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Atlantic Festival.

I'm really delighted because this episode of the podcast, it features one of the top psychotherapists in America today, the Atlantic's Lori Gottlieb. We're going to talk through some of the how-toes of navigating the natural ups and downs in life. And later in the episode, we're going to feature some of my very favorite guest stars, which is you, our listeners. So let's start by saying hi to Lori. Welcome to How to Build a Happy Life, Lori. Well, thank you so much. It's great to be here. Yeah, it's wonderful to have you here.

I've been looking forward to working with you in some way for the longest time. And when I, on the first day of class, I teach a class at the Harvard Business School called leadership and happiness. In the first day of class, I define happiness. Now, most of my students, they think happiness is a feeling. That's wrong. I mean, happiness has a lot of feelings attached to it, and feelings are really important. but it's not a feeling per se. I describe happiness as more of a

way that you would take a part of meal. Happiness is like a banquet. And you can define it in a lot of different ways in terms of the ingredients, you can define it in terms of the dishes. But I like to start with the macro-nutrients of any meal. Now, if you're eating literally a meal, the three macronutrients are protein, carbohydrates, and fat.

And I say that similarly, there are three macronutrients to happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. people who are truly happy about their lives, they have all three. And they have them in abundance, and they have them in balance. And people who are out of balance in enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, they tend to define themselves as unhappy. They know that something is wrong with their happiness. And so when I'm talking to somebody who says, I'm really unhappy, I start digging in on one of those dimensions. So that's where I want to start. And I want to start with the first of those, which is

enjoyment. I define enjoyment as pleasure plus elevation. When you learn, something about the sources of your pleasures, it turns into authentic enjoyment, which is a part of a happy life. Do you agree with that? I do. I would say that enjoyment plus connection. I really feel like connection. Connection with people. Right, right. Well, there are solitary enjoyments. You know, let's say that you're an artist or let's say that you're a musician or let's say you're reading a book. You know, that's enjoyable to you depending on who you are. But I think that when you talk about the ingredients, I think connection really has to be in there. And what I see in the therapy room is that when you look at those ingredients of happiness, if you don't have

connection added to those ingredients, it's going to be hard. And I love the way that you are talking about happiness, not as a feeling, because I think that happiness as a byproduct of living our lives in a meaningful way is what we all aspire to. But happiness as a goal in and of itself, often is a recipe for disaster because they're not looking at the ingredients that you're talking about. Yeah, for sure. And this is completely consistent with the findings of Bob Waldinger and George Valiant and all those guys who have done all that longitudinal work that shows that the happiest people in their 70s and 80s are people who established most of the most human connections in their 20s and 30s. They got really, really good at love. They've got good love chops is the bottom line.

So this is the number one ingredient, probably in enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose, is human connection. Well, right. And I think that the question that people ask themselves, I think that we all ask ourselves when it comes to happiness is how can I love and be loved? I think that that is the essential question. And so, you know, that's where the enjoyment, I think, comes from, too, is what does it mean to not only love someone and be loved, but how do you love yourself, too? And so often we don't know how to do that. We can make ourselves incredibly unhappy by being unloving to ourselves. I want to talk about this specific macronutrient of enjoyment here for a second. It's one of the characteristics of people who present with clinical depression is a syndrome called anhedonia, which all that means is the inability to experience pleasure and enjoyment. Even if you're not clinically depressed, clearly if you're having a hard time enjoying things,

you're going to be unhappy as we just talked about a minute ago. And even better if you're enjoying things in connection and communion with other people, because that actually creates the multiple fulfillment. Do you see patients who, because of whatever is going on in their lives, because of an over-sense of discipline or because they're excessively stoic or for whatever reason, that they have insufficient enjoyment of their lives? And if so, what do you tell them? How can I enjoy my life more? Well, this is kind of like a chicken or the egg thing. So Anhedonia is when people are depressed, they literally cannot experience joy in the things that would normally bring them joy if they were not depressed. So it's not that they don't know

how to enjoy things, is that because of the depression, they aren't enjoying activities that would normally be pleasurable to them. But yes, I think that there are people who don't know, so separate from that, there are people who don't know how to have fun. And I think that we have, we think somehow in our culture today of, you know, ambition and moving, moving forward and all of the sort of pressures that people think that fun is frivolous. They don't realize that it's actually essential. So when you talk about enjoyment, people think, well, that's optional. You know, like if I have time and then, of course, they don't make the time because they think that it's something that is not necessary. And it absolutely is.

So what's an example of, you know, somebody who would come to you and they're not enjoying their lives? They're not taking time to have fun. What's the assignment that you give? them because in your show you give somebody an assignment and then you see how it's going so so what would you you know if i came to you and i just i just don't know how to have fun i work and i work and i work all the time and you know i'm not very happy and and you'd say arthur do these three things you know what's the kind of thing that you would tell me what's the assignment well actually on the dear therapist podcast so we we do a therapy session with people and then as you said we give them a homework assignment that they have a week to do and they report back to us we had this actually 16 year old on

who presented with this exact issue. She said, I am so, I am just like trying to get into college. I'm doing all of these things. I never have any fun. And so we gave her an assignment where we wanted her to have more balance in her life. And we gave her a specific assignment. This is the Libby episode in season one. And she was somebody who was very reluctant to do this because she thought that it would

somehow hold her back, that it would somehow make her less competitive for college, that it would, you know, affect her in a way. because nobody around her was having fun, by the way. And everybody was pretending to have fun. You know, on social media, it looks like everybody's having just a great time. But in reality, everybody was really stressed out. Nobody was making time for fun. And so she did that.

And she found that not only when she made time for fun, did she enjoy her life more, but she found that actually it made her more productive. It actually helped her to get ahead. And so it was interesting because I think that we have this idea that, you know, having fun is going to hold us back somehow. And in theory, we want to have fun, but we don't actually say, I'm going to put that on my calendar. I'm going to make that a priority. And I think we really need to. That's pretty interesting in our hyper-scheduled and highly schematized life that certain people have to actually put it in their outlook for 45 minutes. Have fun. You know, it seems like fun would be the most

natural and spontaneous thing that people could have or do. And yet for people who are so scheduled all the way up into the tree, they actually need to treat it like anything else and take time for it. Is that what you're saying? I think it needs to be specific to it's not just have fun, right? It's getting in touch with how you have fun. A lot of people don't even know how they have fun anymore as adults. They grow up, they forgot what fun looks like because they're so busy with all of their responsibilities and then all of the things they think they need to be doing. And they don't realize, first of all, how they're spending their time. So so many people say, I don't have time for this kind of thing. And yet if they actually do a 24-hour diary, which is what I will

prescribe in therapy a lot, where they have to write down everything that they're doing for 24 hours and sometimes 48 hours. And when they realize that, they're like, oh, my gosh, I spent like an hour and a half mindlessly scrolling through the internet. And it's, and it actually dampened their mood. And it didn't, you know, it wasn't a pleasurable activity for them. It was like, oh, I'm so behind. Look at what everybody else is doing. Or look at that person. They went to Hawaii and I don't get to go to Hawaii or whatever it is. So it wasn't even a pleasurable activity. And then that hour and a half could have been spent doing something that would have actually brought them joy. And I want to use the word joy here because when we talk about, you know, happiness, you're right. Happy, happy is not an emotion. Joy is an emotion. And so what brings you joy? And so specifically people don't know. they're like, if I had the time, what would fun even look like? I don't even know what that looks like. And so really being able to identify, how do you have fun? What does fun look like for you? So that when you schedule time to have fun or make time so that it becomes not a thing that you schedule after a while, but just something that's a natural part of your existence, what does that look

like? People don't even know sometimes. If you said to them, how do you have fun? They look at me like, fun? What's that? It's interesting that people don't know how to have fun. And maybe they used to and maybe they've forgotten. So if they present to Lori Gottlieb and say, I'm not having any fun or I don't have enough enjoyment in your life, the first assignment is not go have fun. The first assignment you're going to give them is think about the last time that you had fun.

What were you doing so that you can remember how to have fun in the first place? Is that right? Yeah. And a good way to figure out what is fun for you is to look at your envy. People don't like to feel envy. They feel like it's kind of like a, you know, a taboo. They don't want to feel that. They think that they're a bad person for feeling that.

But actually, envy is very instructive. Envy tells us something about desire. And so I always say to people, follow your envy. It tells you what you want. And so when you are envious of someone or something or some experience, that's a clue to what might be enjoyable for you. We are so hesitant to look at our desire. We don't want to give space for desire. We're so much about the shoulds as opposed to the what do I want. What does desire look like for me? We feel like it's almost like a selfish act. That's really interesting because one of the

things that I talk about an awful lot in the study of discernment, which is a part of every philosophical and major religious tradition from Buddhism to Judaism to Judaism through Christianity. And and even stoicism, that discernment is actually not about what should I do. Discernment is about what do I want. It's finding the nature of your own desire. And so that is as old as the hills, and yet it somehow escapes us again and again and again. And when I talk to young people, a lot of my students, they think they're trying to figure out what they're, what they want to do. And actually, they should be thinking about trying to figure out what they want. That's what they really don't know is what they want. And that's what you're trying to get at, right, Lori?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that there's so much noise out there where sometimes people can't hear themselves. So they conflate what society wants them to want, what their parents want them to want, what they have been what the culture tells them is something they should want, versus what they inherently want. And if it goes against some of those things, like some of those culturally accepted things of what we should want. It's very hard for them to even acknowledge that that's something that they want. Let's move on to the second pillar, the second macronutrient of a happy life which is satisfaction. Now, this is a killer. Satisfaction is really tough. I mean, Mick Jagger is saying, I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is you can get satisfaction.

The problem is you can't keep satisfaction. Satisfaction is the reward when you meet a goal. It's the reward for a job well done. It's the promotion. It's the raise that you get. It's the little burst of joy that you get from meeting one of your own personal goals. And the big problem that people have is that they get it, they get a little burst of this joy, perhaps, but then it goes away. And then they're running, running, running, running again. And there's a whole lot of neurobiology about homeostasis that helps us understand this. And there's the metaphor of the hedonic treadmill that shows us why we keep running and running and running and which is really good because it shows that after a little while you're mostly running out of fear because if you stop on a treadmill, you know what's going to happen.

But the real question then becomes, how do we deal with that? I mean, satisfaction, you do need satisfaction to be a happy person, but you can't keep it. So what do you tell people who are workaholics and they're addicted to success and they're just trying and trying and trying, as Mick Jagger saying, to get satisfaction and they're not getting it. And the result is that they're missing something from their lives. When somebody presents with the satisfaction dilemma, what do you tell them? Well, as you were talking, I was thinking about the people who they present almost like a colander instead of a bowl. So it's kind of like, you know, something goes in and it doesn't stay there. The satisfaction gets there. And then like it just goes through the holes. It doesn't stay like in a

whole, right? And so it just seeps through every time. It doesn't last very long. And I think that the people who are happiest when we talk about people, and I would say I would use maybe the word contentment, the people who are most content, who feel most full and fulfilled in their lives, are people who are what are called satisfacers. And this is Barry Schwartz from the paradox of choice. And he talks about the difference between satisfacers and maximizers. And satisfacers are the people who, let's say you're trying to buy a sweater and you go into a store and you find a sweater that fits you, it looks good, it's the right price, you buy it, you're happy, you're done, right? It's, it meets all of your criteria. The maximizer will see that sweater, kind of put it under the

other sweater so nobody will buy it just in case, go to the next store and keep looking because maybe they'll find something a little bit cheaper or a little bit more attractive or, you know, whatever it is, right? Just something that's like a little bit better on some dimension. And they keep looking and then maybe they find it, maybe they don't. But if they do find it, they tend not to be as happy with that purchase as if they had just bought the original sweater. And if they don't find it, then they regret that they didn't get the original one. And the problem is even if they buy that first one, the maximizers, even if they buy that first sweater that met all their criteria, they might be happy for about a week, like you were saying. And then like the next week, they're like

walking by a store and they see something else in the window. And they think, oh, that one would have been better. And so they're just never satisfied with what they have. And you see this in relationships. People do this in relationships all the time, too. It's not just with things like sweaters. It's with people. It's with jobs. It's with everything. So it's a kind of almost like a personality type. Like are you a satisfacer or are you a maximizer? Even when you're shopping on Amazon and you're trying to like, which set of cookware should I buy? You know, and it's like the people who will spend like, you know, an hour going through all the different options instead of like, you know, 10 minutes going, oh, this is good. Let me just get this. And it really takes up your emotional energy in a big way,

because you're always thinking, you know, it's almost like it's a perfectionism type of thing. And it really gets in the way because it takes up all of your energy, all of your time, and then you're never satisfied with what you have anyway. That's really interesting. And, you know, what you're saying is, it sounds like kind of a Western version of what is holiness to Dalai Lai Lai. Mama always says, which is the secret to enduring satisfaction is not to have what you want, but you want what you have. The satisfacer is one who wants what she has, and the maximizer is the one who's always, he's always chasing, trying to have what he wants. And another way of thinking

about this that that actually works in the literature on the science of satisfaction is that you shouldn't think of your satisfaction as a function of what you have, but rather what you have divided by what you want. And if you can actually devise a wants management stress, the denominator of that fraction is going to decrease and your satisfaction is actually going to rise. So how, when a patient presents with a satisfaction deficit, what specifically do you, what assignment you give them on your show, if this is somebody who's unsatisfied, or if you have a patient who says, I just, I just not, it's just nothing's good, Lori, nothing's good. What do you tell them to do specifically starting today?

I think this is the difference between what a friend would say to this person and what a therapist would say to this person because what the friend tends to do is to say, look at all the wonderful things you have in your life, which is not helpful at all because they can't see it anyway. You know, it's very funny when you look at the difference between, you know, how we talk to our friends and how a therapist might approach us, because I think that people would expect the therapist to do that, to say, well, look at all these things that you're not seeing. But no, indeed, in fact, what I would probably do is I would agree with them and say, yeah, it's really, you know, I can see that you're really not satisfied. And then what happens for them is the more that you kind of go into their mindset,

that they start to see something new, that they start to say, well, actually, I have this really great partner, and I have this really great job. But, you know, there are a lot of butts with that. And then, but they start to, they start to sort of change their mindset when you're not arguing with them about whether they should be satisfied or not. You can't convince someone to be satisfied with what they have. They have to come to it on their own. And I think that a lot of people have very low tolerance for people like this because they feel like, well, you have so much. How can you complain? But I think it speaks to something in our culture, which is we don't really value what's important. We don't really value what's going to bring us happiness. And so people tend to take for granted all of the things that they do have that would normally bring a person happiness. That's really interesting. And it actually leads, which we'll touch on briefly, before we go to our listeners, about the last macronutrient of happiness, which is maybe the hardest of all, which is purpose

or meaning. And the reason that this is really hard is because it's the most counterintuitive when it comes to the science of happiness. When I ask in surveys, you know, large-scale surveys or experiments using human subjects, what brings happiness and purpose to life? People always talk about the most painful parts of their lives. They never talk about, you know, that week in Evitha with my friends. They never say that's when I actually found out my life's meaning. They always talk about that divorce, that ugly breakup, when I got fired, that bankruptcy, when my kid had to go to rehab. That's when they talk about the stuff that they were made of and when they really understood

the nature of their own souls. And yet, back when before you and I, when you and I were little kids and the hippies were running around in the 60s and 70s, and the Woodstock generation said, if it feels good, do it. Right. But now, young people on either side of us have bookended people like you and me, their mantra seems to be, if it feels bad, make it stop. Paradoxically, if we don't suffer, if we don't have pain, if we don't come to terms with having a life that's fully alive with the good and the bad, we can't actually get enough meaning and purpose in our life, right?

Well, that's right. And I think that's why we assign negative and positive connotations to feelings, even though feelings are neutral, they don't have a positive or negative connotation. So people say, like, you know, joy is a positive feeling and anger or anxiety or sadness are negative feelings. And that's just not true. All of our feelings are positive in the sense that they tell us what we want. Our feelings are like a compass. They tell us what direction to go in. And if you don't access your feelings, you're kind of walking around with a faulty GPS. You don't know what direction to go in. And people think that if they kind of numb their feelings, Like, oh, it's not a big deal because I have a roof over my head and food on the table. So this sadness, this anxiety, this insomnia, whatever it is. It's okay because, you know, it seems very trivial to them. But it's not. It's actually a message. It's telling you something about your life.

It's telling you about something that needs to change. And so people feel like, you know, like numbness isn't nothingness. It's not the absence of feelings. Numbness is actually a sense of being overwhelmed by too many feelings. And then they come out in other ways, like too much. much food, too much wine, an inability to sleep, a short-temperedness, a lack of focus. You see how the feelings are there. They're just presenting differently. And so I think it's really important for people to notice their feelings and to really welcome their feelings and embrace their feelings

because the feelings give them information about if you're sad, what is not working? If you're anxious, what is causing the anxiety? If you're angry, are there some boundaries that maybe you need to set? right? You know, is there something you need to change in your life? What is going on? So I think that I think that that's really important. And when we talk about meaning and purpose, if you don't listen to your feelings, they're going to direct you in the direction of meaning and purpose. They're going to tell you what is important. At Medcan, we know that life's greatest moments are built on a foundation of good health, from the big milestones to the quiet winds. That's why our annual health assessment offers a physician-led, full-body check-up

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It's interesting. Most of the great sages and saints throughout history have talked about the sacredness of suffering and some pretty wise and interesting people today do too. I mean, there was a famous interview of Stephen Colbert by Anderson Cooper where Stephen Colbert talks about the most painful time in his life when his father and one of his siblings was killed in a plane crash. And he talks about how grateful he is even for that experience because of the sacredness of every moment of his life, including the pain. He says, look, if you're going to be

fully alive, if you're going to have a life, if you're going to enjoy life per se, you've got to take it all. If you're thankful for life, you've got to be thankful for all of life because that's the fabric of your set of experiences. And it seems to me that that is the essence of how you find your meaning and the essence of how you understand who you are as a person according to what you just told me, right? I don't think that you need to suffer tragedy to feel gratitude. I think that sometimes it awakens us to feeling gratitude when you have some kind of tragedy in your life. But I don't think that you need to have some kind of tragedy. But I do think that you don't get through life without suffering in some way. So it doesn't need to be that a relative dies in a plane crash.

You know, I think that just being human inherently means that there are going to be times that you struggle. And I think if you look at the world today, if you look at, you know, there's so much suffering that we hear about every day in the world, but then what are we told? If you look at social media, for example, or you're at a dinner party, you know, like you're, you know, nobody talks about that. Nobody wants to talk about that. It's all like, let's pretend everything's great. And I think it's both and. And if we don't make room for the both and, then you're right, that we don't see the beauty. We don't appreciate the beauty in life. It's almost like you can't, you can't, you know, people always say like, I want to mute the sadness or I want to mute the pain. And it's like you can't

mute the pain and then also feel joy. If you mute one aspect of your emotional experience, you're going to mute all of that. There's like one mute button. So if you mute the pain, you mute the joy. And so I think that speaks to what you're saying. And there's one clarification you made that's incredibly important that I want to underline so everybody listening remembers. Lori Gottlieb just said that you don't have to go out looking for suffering. Don't worry, suffering will find you. And that's adequate for us to find the meaning and purpose in our lives. There's a difference between pain and suffering too. So pain is, you know, we all experience pain. You know, you go through a breakup, you go through a divorce, you know, somebody gets ill, something happens with your job, whatever it is, right? You know, we all experience pain of some sort. But suffering is something that sometimes we do to ourselves. So it's like you go through a divorce and then you're like looking on social media at your ex and you see them with their new partner, right? You know, you don't need to do that. That's suffering. You're creating your own suffering. So people do that all the time.

And so, you know, we're all going to experience pain in some way or another. But sometimes we are creating our own suffering. And in therapy, that's a big topic of conversation is how are we creating our own suffering, even though, of course, pain is inevitable. I want to go now to some of our listeners. And, you know, I put out a call at the end of my column asking people to tell me the last time they were happy. And what we got back was just pure gold. They were so interesting and so moving.

And I wanted to play just three clips of people telling me about the last time that they were happy and get your reaction to what they're saying and what it says to you. I could analyze this from the social science guy, but I'm a lot more interested in what you'd tell these people if they were coming to see you for help. So let's bring up audio clip number one who's one of our listeners, Carl, from North Carolina. The last time I felt truly happy was yesterday. I am a high school English teacher and we're now back in person. We're lucky enough to be in a school where we wear masks.

I was able to actually see their, if not their faces, their eyes light up when they figured out something or they got the point of my lesson. And I don't know, just seeing their eyes light up and getting to exercise that teaching muscle that I haven't really gotten to exercise in over a year and a half. Getting to be in front of the students again makes me feel truly like myself again. Something that I really haven't felt in a long time. So, yeah, teaching makes me happy. Isn't that beautiful, Lori? And it seems to me that he made your point. It's connection.

It's connection. That's the secret. Love, Happiness is love, right? Right. Well, it's meaning and purpose and connection all rolled into one. That was so beautiful. We had someone on our Dear Therapist podcast during the pandemic, a teacher also. And she was talking about this, you know, like wanting to reach her students and how she was,

they said to her, like, the best part of my day is when I get to connect with you, right? And so I think that, you know, we learned a lot during COVID about meaning and purpose and connection. Meaning and purpose don't have people think it has to be this big epic thing. It doesn't. Meaning can be, you know, I had this moment with my child and we had this great, you know, we had this great five minutes together. Or just like with Carl, you know, I had this experience with my students and I saw their eyes light up when they got the lesson. That right there is meaning and purpose. And it doesn't need to be this great. grand thing. It's like it's the dayliness of it. It's having

lots of bursts of meaning and purpose throughout your day. And that actually speaks to what you talked about with satisfaction because, you know, satisfaction, if you're looking for it and in some one big thing, it's probably going to disappoint you. But if you're looking at the little things that happen over the course of a day

and over a course of a life regularly, you've got a shot. That's important too. Often I will give people this assignment in therapy and even on the podcast, which is I want you to write down the different moments in the day when you feel something positive, right, that feels something positive to you. And often there are these moments of meaning, these moments of connection. And there are so many during the day that they didn't even realize, even if it's like, I went to Starbucks and I saw this barista who has been there for five years and we used to talk every day. And I missed that during COVID. And now we was so great to see each other again. And I realized this is meaningful to me. You know, it's like those little moments throughout the day that you don't even pay attention to.

And all of a sudden, you say, wait, those are really important to me. Right. So Carl is doing great because he's back in the classroom. I'm going to now go to Kristen in New York, who's struggling more. Let's go to clip number two, Kristen in New York. My name is Kristen Wilson, and I'm in New York City. The last time I remember being truly happy was in the summer of 2019. I had just ended my first year of grad school. I was living in Japan in Tokyo.

I'd already been there for five years, so I'd become quite accustomed to living there and found myself in a great group of friends. We were really close-knit, the kind we were always hanging out or making dinner plans, and felt like I had kind of found a place where I really belonged,

which was something that had been a struggle for me before. And then the night that I had to leave to say goodbye, there was this gorgeous sunset. I just felt that I was really true, really happy with where I was in life, with who I was with, and with what I was doing. And looking back from there, it kind of feels like everything has just been this slow and then sudden descent because I got back to Japan. My friends began to graduate and move away. And then the pandemic came. And like many people, I spent months alone in my apartment.

So it was just really lonely. And then my visa was expiring. So I had to leave my community that I had spent six years building and into this period of great uncertainty. And then my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly. And since then, I've been living in the after. And I feel like I will never experience that kind of happiness again like I did that summer. Being so devastated by grief and loss,

it just feels like whatever way joy manages to find its way back into my life, it will always be different. What do you say, Lori? Wow, just so much loss and grief. and what she's experiencing is so common because I think that when we're in the throes of that, we feel like we will never experience joy again. We will never experience happiness again in the same way. And actually, in my book, and maybe you should talk to someone, there's one client that I write about. And he was talking about how his son was killed in a car accident.

and he just, you know, within a week of that where he was devastated and he thought my life is over, I will never, I will never be the same again. He was with his daughter and they were playing a game and he laughed. And he said, I couldn't believe that I laughed. I couldn't believe that I actually could laugh. That I, you know, like what was that part of me that could do that even though the rest of me felt dead and like I would never come alive again? And so I think what she's feeling is extremely common. and that's what grief looks like. And, you know, she's going to have a lot of grieving to do. And it's unfortunate that her mother died in the middle of COVID when she was so isolated and she had lost her community and all of these other things had happened. So she's experiencing multiple layers of loss. And I hope that she allows herself the space to really grieve all that she has lost so that she can then start to emerge again.

And I think a really important part of your message, Lori, and what you just said, and I think that I want people to remember from this, is that, and I want Kristen to remember, is that happiness is going to come again. That is in the end. It feels like the end because that's how it always feels when you're in a period of grief. And there's all kinds of reasons for that. There's all kinds of science behind that. But happiness is going to come again. It just is, right? Well, it reminds me of when people are depressed, they feel like they will never be happy. And so I always say to people who are in the middle of a clinical depression, you are not the best person to talk to you about you right now, right? Because their thinking is so distorted in that moment because they can't see it. They can't imagine a time when they would experience joy again. And the same thing, I think, when people, you know, have experienced a devastating loss. They cannot imagine experiencing joy. And yet what happens later, just like the John in the book, people go to weddings and they go grocery shopping and they go on Twitter and their lives move on and they don't move.

You know, there's this expression like people say, well, why haven't you moved on? Moved on is not quite right. It's you move forward. The law stays with you, but you move forward. And you're still grieving. You will always grieve that loss. And I think that the grief is a sign of how much love there was with the person who is no longer there, right? And then loss of the community.

She loved those people. So that's going to be there. But it feels different. It has a different flavor over time. It has a different resonance. And there will be times when you're standing in an elevator and some song comes on. And it's the song that, you know, meant something with that person and you just start bawling in the elevator or whatever it is. You know, that's what grief looks like.

even decades later. So I think that's part of the human experience and what you were talking about earlier, Arthur, about this idea of meaning and struggle and how they're somehow intertwined in some way. One of the things that's so interesting that you talk when you talk to older people who are happy and well,

and it's pretty easy to find these people. The dead giveaway, by the way, is crow's feet in the corners of the eyes because that's when people who have been, have been experiencing the so-called doucheon smile. There's these orbicularis acolyne muscles at the corners of the eyes, and they give you crow's feet. So if you want to find a happy old person,

look for somebody with very pronounced crow's feet. And when you talk to those people, what you find is that they suffered a lot. It's not, it's weird, you know, for young people, people in their 20s and they want to find out, you know, how to have a happy life and they want to avoid as much suffering as possible. So in their 80s, they'll be really happy. That's actually wrong in the same way that, you know,

something that's a really delicious dessert actually has salt in it. And the afternoon of your life requires that the morning have had a certain number of challenges. And so you find that the happiest people have been fully alive all throughout their lives. And they've grieved and they've recovered. And when bad things were happening, they never thought they'd feel better. And guess what? They did. They did. And they allowed themselves to be sad. And that's one of the secrets, right? Right. And I think that the reason that they've been through so much is because they engaged in life. So the people who want to protect themselves from pain or discomfort are the people who never really engage in life because they're so busy protecting themselves to make sure that

they're not going to experience anything that feels bad, right? And so then they never put themselves out there. They never take any risks. And when you take risks, sometimes, you know, there's going to be pain involved. And sometimes there's going to be great joy involved. But if you are protecting yourself the whole time, you didn't really live. You're not fully alive. And so maybe you think you protected yourself, but you end up feeling very unsatisfied, very kind of empty and lonely. If you're going to live your life like an adventure, you're going to have to take some chances. Let's go to the last audio clip to finish this out, Lori. Hi, my name is Joel Marsh, and I own Marsh Painting Incorporated in Park City, Utah. I've been painting homes in Park City for over 20

years and I'm a fourth generation painter. What I've learned is that Arthur Brooks is correct in this column when he states that what matters not is so much the what of a job, but more the who and the why. One day as we were standing in the home, we took a 10-minute break and hit golf balls onto the adjoining driving range with the homeowner's permission, of course. Our work painting houses hard and boring much of the time. I tell new recruits that more often than not, when you have good music going, some good Mexican food for lunch, and you get into a rhythm with the rest of the guys, our job can feel a little zen-like. We're pretty much near the end of the time, so let's have this be kind of the last word. What's your big takeaway and what's the big lesson that people should get

from this incredibly encouraging message from Joel in Park City? Yeah, that was really beautiful. I was thinking about how before COVID, people used to say, co-workers are overrated. You know, people are like, I really want to, you know, I really want to work from home or whatever it is. Co-workers are not overrated. I think that if we've learned anything, it's those small moments, like he was talking about, those spontaneous moments of like, hey, let's hit the golf balls, right? The things that you don't expect, those just moments of connection that happen when you're in the same space with other people and you're, and you have a shared experience.

And I think that that's what we need to look for in general in our days, no matter whether it's at work or in our families or in our social circles or whatever it is, you know, how can we show up? When you show up, those moments of connection happen. Well, the practice of enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose through pain and through love and all the experience that is the beautiful thing that we call life courtesy of Lori Gottlieb. Lori Gottlieb is the author of the best-selling book. Maybe you should talk to someone of the wonderful, wonderful column, dear therapist, my colleague at the Atlantic. What a privilege, what a joy it's been to be with you during this time. Thank you for joining all of us on

how to build a happy life. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much for the conversation. This episode was previously recorded at the Atlantic Festival on September 21st, 2021.