Arrive at Being happy and achieving that fulfillment is one of the most common goals and that they bring more headaches to many people who climb that mountain in which we overcome obstacles, day after day, to reach a summit and think that we have achieved it. Over the weeks, we have talked about keys, tips and routines that help us train a positive attitude and maintain a state of joy, understanding that it is an emotion and we have to accept that it coexists with sadness, anger or anxiety. , depending on the moment we are in.
Arthur Brooks, Harvard University’s top happiness expertspeaks of satisfaction and also endorses that many times we fall into the error of obsession, without allowing us to achieve that goal in a calm and calm way. In a talk in which he participated in 2024, entirely in Spanish, he explained the cultural movement ‘It’s time to think’ what is “the mystery of happiness.”
Arthur Brooks and the mystery of happiness
“When you fight, when you sacrifice, when you are in pain or when you work hard and “You get to the point of having something, you have satisfaction.”explains the greatest happiness expert at Harvard University, who considers it curious that we are the only species that “sacrifices to obtain that satisfaction,” joking with the tranquility of “his dog Chucho,” who “wants to be eating stretched out and doesn’t want to eat.” do nothing.”
Human beings, he says, “we want to fight and that is very mysteriousas if we were gods of wanting to create something with a lot of effort and the more, the more satisfaction.” The “mystery”, he continues, “is increased even more because we believe that if we reach the end and We have satisfaction that will last forever and it doesn’t last, but we don’t learn. He, at 60 years old, gives himself as an example that he has not acquired this learning and uses an example so that we understand it better.
“I have a car, I think it is fantastic and that I am going to enjoy it for the rest of my life. I buy the car and after a month it is a car and I never learn. I am a teacher of this and I don’t learn because nature lies and it tells you that you are going to enjoy forever, also with the house or the marriage,” he explained to the attendees of a “thinkglado”, as the cultural movement ‘It’s time to think’ calls the spaces it organizes in Spain and other countries of the world.
The formula for lasting satisfaction
According to Arthur Brooks, we must “have courage against nature”which puts the “animal path” before us, but “we must follow the divine or human path”: “Satisfaction appears in our brains to satisfy everything we want, having more is the formula of satisfaction that nature gives you , but to have the satisfaction that does last you have to have another formula which consists of what you have divided by what you want.
That fraction, explains Harvard’s leading happiness expert, is very important, since “we tend to maximize what we have” and it is necessary that we be able to “look at the denominator”, since “having a strategy to minimize the denominator is much more effective. We all have to look at desires and a way to minimize them, because “People who do it are simply happier.”
The meaning of life, essential to be happy
After talking about enjoyment and satisfaction, Arthur Brooks introduces the “most difficult macronutrient element of happiness,” because “I can go a long time without enjoyment and without satisfaction,” but If we talk about the “meaning of life”, only “one day without it we cannot be happy.”
It is something as simple as answering ourselves, details the Harvard professor, to the question of “why of our life.” Finding it is “almost a joke,” because “it turns out that there are three coherence questions: “why things happen, what is the direction of my life and also what does my life mean”.
To know if we have a “life crisis”, there are two other questions that we can write down and ask ourselves at that moment, the expert points out: “Why am I alive? and why would I sacrifice my life right now?”. If we can’t answer, it means we have a crisis, Brooks emphasizes.
