Happiness and joy

      Happiness! Just look into the eyes of a four-year-old on her birthday, or at the moment she clicks on Christmas-tree lights for the first time.

      These days, you read about happiness and its spiritual counterpart, joy, in virtually every news publication you pick up.

      It’s a challenging topic for even experienced journalists (and bloggers) to tackle at a time when young adults in particular are facing rising rates of depression and other mental health issues, including suicide.

      Yet columnist David Brooks met the challenge convincingly in The New York Times of May 7 after he had given the commencement address to Arizona State University graduates in front of 35,000 people in the local football stadium.

      “Happiness usually involves a victory for the self,” he wrote. “Joy tends to involve the transcendence of self. Happiness comes from accomplishments. Joy comes when your heart is in another.

      “Joy comes after years of changing diapers,” he continued, “driving to practice, worrying at night, dancing in the kitchen, playing in the yard, and just sitting quietly together watching TV.”

      Warming to his task, Brooks suggested that joy is the present that life gives you as you give away your gifts. His core point was that happiness is good, but joy is better. It’s smart to enjoy happiness, but it’s smarter still to put yourself in situations where you might experience joy. *

      Keynote speaker, columnist, and author of 17 books (including The Carpenter), Jon Gordon, also tackled this theme recently, expanding on some of the situations mentioned by Brooks. He insisted that the biggest determinant of our happiness at work is ... us.

      Happiness is an “inside job,” Gordon said.  He’d met bus drivers, janitors, and fast-food employees who are more passionate about their jobs and happier than many professional athletes making millions of dollars.

      Our happiness comes not from the work we do, added Gordon, but from the passion and purpose we bring to it—along with related reading and study, I might add.

      The Brooks and Gordon columns tie in neatly with a report a year ago in New York Magazine pointing out that one of the most talked about courses in the history of Yale University had been on the subject of happiness (and unhappiness. It was being given by Professor Laurie Santos in—do note!—a church, converted to a lecture hall.

      Many of her observations were rooted in a 2018 survey by the American College Health Association, in which 52 percent of students reported feeling hopeless, while 39 percent had suffered from such severe depression that they found it difficult to function.

      As I see it, many people related their happiness to good health, wealth, a beautiful home, a secure job, and harmonious relationships. Although, let's face it, those benefits can be circumstantial and even fleeting. Our pursuit of happiness needs to be far broader and deeper.

      It really needs to be the “inside job” Gordon describes. Be the seed, he says. Plant yourself where you are and begin to serve and make a difference. Then passion flows through you, purpose begins to reveal itself, and people want to be around you, and you all feel happier.

      When you work this way, Gordon concludes, you don't have to seek happiness. It finds you.

And how right he is!

* Several of the ideas in Brooks’s May 7 column feature in his latest book, The Second Mountain (Random House,  2019).