No cow cuddles, no brain worms: Do you want to be happy?

Dogs Are Smarter Than People: Writing Life, Marriage and Motivation

Do you want to be happy?

It’s a question philosopher Sebastian Purcell asks his students every year.

Do you want to be happy?

For Purcell being happy has a lot in common with living a good life,

“The Stoic answer to this question, that the good life consists in flourishing (eudaimonia), has seen a resurgent interest that is indicative of a cultural shift. Interestingly, it looks to be taking the place left open by the retreat of religious belief,” he writes.

And stoicism? It’s a way to look at life and how the world connects, how they work. It’s physical, Purcell says, and metaphysical.

Most people think of me as a pretty happy person, and I possibly am. To be fair, before I started to feel a bit overwhelmed by my life, I’d always thought positively about things, expected good outcomes.

When I lived in another town and would drive from place to place for my job as a reporter or to pick up my daughter, Em, from school, I’d hear from people later.

“You just drive around smiling. What are you even thinking about?”

I couldn’t ever tell them. They’d scoff. I’d laugh. I’m pretty sure one city councilor called me a weirdo about it. I know a baseball coach did. It didn’t matter. I was who I was.

When Em was little, she and I would talk about her worries, I’d run through logically how outcomes were probably not what she’d expect. I do that with Xane, our other kiddo, too.

“If you fail a test, will you end up in jail? Will anyone die?” I’d ask.

Em would roll her eyes at me and say things like, “You’re being ridiculous, Mommy.”

I’d bounce back with and say brilliantly, “You don’t have to expect the worst case scenarios all the time because a bad grade is not a worst case scenario.”

“I’m just being realistic,” she’d say.

“No. You’re being pessimistic,” I’d tell her, “because you aren’t going to fail anyway.”

The truth is that though I’ve told both of them these things and even though I motor through my day staying pretty chill and positive, often I would flop in bed at night and stare at the darkness for an hour, a weird shiver of anxiety creeping through me—anxiety stemming from things that I couldn’t quite place.

That doesn’t sound all that happy to me, but the truth was that even as I smiled in my car all by myself, even as I sold positive outcomes to my kids, I didn’t know how to even define happiness. I don’t think I’d ever really tried.

And I’m trying now.

Harvard professor, Arthur Brooks, says that “happiness equals enjoyment plus satisfaction plus meaning.”

Brooks tells his students to think of happiness as “a portfolio with four big categories of investments.”

He says, “We need all of them so our happiness can grow in a balanced way. The first investment is faith or life philosophy, it's how you make sense of the world.”

Family and relationships that will most likely stay with you throughout your life though you don’t choose them is the second category.

The third is the relationships we choose. What he calls our “most intimate relationships.”

“The fourth is meaningful work,” he says. "That doesn't mean work that pays a fortune or features a fancy title. Rather, it's work that allows you to earn your success and serve others.”

A HAPPINESS PORTFOLIO

Those four categories aren’t solo acts. They work together and they all have to be there, he believes and that means? Well, it means that we don’t get to be in charge of our happiness all the time. Sometimes horrible things happen. Circumstances exist. And heredity is a factor, too.

I think I’m pretty lucky because despite all the choices she made and things she went through, my mom was a pretty happy human. And my biological father was always happy too. That accounts, Brooks believes, for about 50 % of my happiness.

I once asked Shaun, “Babe, would you call your parents happy people?”

And he said, “Now or when I was a kid?”

“Kid?”

Then he made a long whistling exhale and said, “Not really. I mean they weren’t really unhappy. Probably happier apart.”

So maybe take a hot second and think of your parents, too, if you know them. Do you think they were happy?

Brooks said,

“Approximately 50% of your happiness is inherited and another big chunk is determined by your circumstances at any given moment. But the remaining part, about a quarter, comes from this portfolio, which is under your direct control.

“Another metaphor for happiness is a meal which has certain macronutrients but instead of food's macronutrients of protein, carbohydrates, and fat, the macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And just like you need a balanced macronutrient profile in a healthy diet, you need balance to be a happy person.”

Brooks suggests taking a second and think of those four pieces of your happiness PORTFOLIO.

Your Life Philosophy – Do you have one? Do you have core personal values?

Your Family – Are there people you could call in an emergency?

Friends – Do you have a community somewhere? Where? Is it a club? A house? A school?

Purpose-filled Work – Does your work (volunteer or paid) make you feel valued?

Are you happy in those places?

DOG TIP FOR LIFE

It's okay for your happiness portfolio to be:

Poop

Sleep

Eat

Cuddles.

God, knows it's Shaun's.

PLACE TO SUBMIT

APPLE IN THE DARK

Submit Here

Open through May: Our first-ever flash fiction contest! Our judge this year is Chelsea T. Hicks.

Submit your unpublished work (no more than three stories/essays at once) through our Duosuma page.

(We’d very much appreciate anything you can donate to the Tip Jar there!) Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but do please let us know if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

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SUPER QUICK WRITING EXERCISE

This one is pretty fun. And though it's meant for poems, it can definitely be for short stories. It's from ThinkWritten.

"7 Days, 7 Lines: Write a poem where each line/sentence is about each day of last week."

PLACES WE MENTION IN OUR RANDOM THOUGHT

Bird flu and cow cuddles

CDC

Pork and brain worms

SHOUT OUT!

The music we’ve clipped and shortened in this podcast is awesome and is made available through the Creative Commons License.

Here’s a link to that and the artist’s website. Who is this artist and what is this song? It’s “Summer Spliff” by Broke For Free.

WE HAVE EXTRA CONTENT ALL ABOUT LIVING HAPPY OVER HERE! It's pretty awesome.

We have a podcast, LOVING THE STRANGE, which we stream biweekly live on Carrie’s Facebook and Twitter and YouTube on Fridays. Her Facebook and Twitter handles are all carriejonesbooks or carriejonesbook. But she also has extra cool content focused on writing tips here.

Carrie is reading one of her raw poems every once in awhile on CARRIE DOES POEMS. And there you go! Whew! That's a lot!

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RESOURCES:

A cool book to check out is The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Subtitle: Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy.

Brooks, Arthur. Managing Happiness. HarvardX. July 2022.