‘Happiness is love.’ Decades of research yield a timeless truth.

Arthur C. Brooks has spent decades studying happiness. But in recent years the social scientist’s research turned into what he calls “me search.”

He found that those who are unhappiest later in life are often the strivers on a continual quest for money, power, pleasure, and prestige. Mr. Brooks turned his introspection into a bestseller, “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”

Formerly the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Brooks is now a columnist for The Atlantic. He also teaches a class on happiness and leadership at Harvard Business School. The Monitor recently spoke with him about his book. The discussion has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you embark on your quest to understand happiness – and what most surprised you about what you discovered?

My wife read it – these are just my notebooks – and she said, “You’ve got to publish this as a book.” I said, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to read it.” And it opened [shortly after its debut in February] at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list.

The most important skill that I talk about in this book is to really think about the happiness that’s occurring in your life. Why do I have these feelings that I have? What are the feelings that I wished I [had instead]? And when you do that, you can actually make some very affirmative and positive decisions in your life.

Like many people, you struggle with spending a lot of time thinking about the future. Why is that problematic?

My mentor Martin Seligman, at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. He believes we should be called Homo prospectus. And the reason is because we’re the only species that can spend any significant cognitive energy on the future. 

The average person spends, according to Seligman, between 30% and 50% of his or her time thinking about the future. To be thinking about the future, ironically, is basically to take the current present and waste it because you’re treating the current moment like drudgery so you can live in a better future. In a very real way, you’re missing your own life.

You went for a long walk in Spain to learn not to constantly chase that state of happiness on the horizon. Tell me about it.

One of the ways that you can fix that is by getting into a rhythmic activity in which your only goal is to be present. I did it on the Camino de Santiago, which is this ancient Roman Catholic walking meditation. One hundred miles. You walk all day and your job is to be fully present and pray a lot. When I notice my mind focusing on scenarios of the future, I’ll take it back to the dust on my boots. Flowers on the side of the road. The feel of the rain on my bald head. At first there’s screaming inside your head. Then after about 24 hours the screaming starts to get softer and then pretty soon you’re just in rhythm. I wouldn’t say it’s a permanent game changer because you have to keep doing it. 

You write about the importance of cultivating a spiritual practice. Why?

The four habits that are most associated with the happiest people are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. That’s the happiness portfolio. The first of those is faith. By that I don’t mean a particular faith. One of the greatest sources of misery in our lives is that we’re obsessed with the most boring thing in the world, repetitively thinking about my job, my car, my clothes, my house, my relationships. It’s like the same TV show over and over and over again. 

I’ve worked very closely with the Dalai Lama for the last 10 years. He says, “Always remember you are one in 7 billion.” Which does not mean I’m an ant or insignificant. It means I need to zoom out to find the majesty of life, to find the adventure in life. 

Every year, on your birthday, you compile what you term “a reverse bucket list.” Explain that concept.

Satisfaction is not a function of what you have. It’s a function of what you have divided by what you want. Most people try to have this kind of fruitless “haves” management strategy. Which puts them on what we call the hedonic treadmill. ... You go from have, to have, to have, to have. You can defeat that by modeling it in a different way by having a “wants” management strategy. The wants are the denominator of the satisfaction equation. And when you decrease the denominator, the whole number increases. So your satisfaction can go up, paradoxically, by wanting less. Now how do you want less? You have to make a positive affirmative decision to do that, and you absolutely can.

You write that love is the epicenter of happiness. Tell me more.

The world gives you a bogus formula for happiness. No. 1: Use people. No. 2: Love things. No. 3: Worship yourself. And it actually seems right because it’s so close to the truth. It just mixes up the nouns and the verbs. The right formula, based on all of the best neuroscience, clinical, [and] social scientific research, is simply: Use things, love people, and worship the divine. You can boil down all of the studies of happiness to five words. Those words are: Happiness is love. Full stop.