How to Know What You’re Supposed to Do With Your Life | Arthur Brooks

Arthur Brooks, a happiness researcher at Harvard and Vanderbilt, opens the conversation with a corrective: happiness is not a feeling. Feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness, like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner. The real thing is a combination of three macronutrients: enjoyment of your life, satisfaction with your accomplishments, and the meaning of your existence. Most people fail to get happier because they chase the feeling directly, or they wait for external circumstances to change before they allow themselves to be happy.

The Difference Between Pleasure and Enjoyment

A central mechanism in Brooks's framework is the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure is a raw, automatic signal from the limbic system—the ventral tegmental area and ventral striatum—that says "pursue this." It is the same circuit tapped by a drug or by hearing "I love you." Enjoyment is different: it is pleasure plus people plus memory. It becomes conscious, social, and memorable. That is why nobody eats Thanksgiving dinner alone. The practical rule Brooks offers is that if you are doing something potentially addictive alone, you are doing it wrong. Social context makes pleasure self-governing and turns it into a building block of a good life.

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