This is How to Build a Happy Life, the Atlantic's podcast on all things happiness.
I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard Professor, and a happiness correspondent at the Atlantic.
When you teach happiness like I do, one of the biggest questions that people have initially, what is it?
I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think about it.
A lot of people, they assume that happiness is a feeling.
A better definition of happiness is it's like a meal with three macronutrients.
Just as a meal has macronutrients or protein, carbohydrates and fat, happiness is a feast with three macronutrients, and they are enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose.
I want to focus right now on that third macronutrient, on purpose.
I probably don't have to convince you that finding purpose or meaning in your life is required for you to be a happy person.
You may have spent certain times in your life really having a great old time, lots of pleasure, lots of enjoyment, but kind of aimlessly.
And you most likely didn't find that you were really, really happy.
Purpose is the weirdest of all of happiness's macronutrients.
Because it contains a paradox.
And here's what it is.
If you feel like you know your life's purpose, and I asked you, when did you learn it?
Almost certainly, you would not tell me, it was that week in Ibiza with my friends.
It was those annual vacations to Disney World.
That's not when you, those were fun.
But that's not when you found your life's purpose.
Most likely, you'd talk about something that was pretty hard.
A period in your life where you experienced a lot of loneliness, for example.
Or who knows, maybe a really bad breakup, or a divorce, or a bankruptcy, or something that really threatened your family, or an illness, or maybe even a death.
And you went through terrible times, and you came out the other end.
Almost everybody, it turns out, when they're asked what actually helped them understand their life's purpose, which is part of happiness, paradoxically, they talk about periods of unhappiness.
Here's the conundrum within all of these ideas.
To be happy, you need purpose.
To have purpose, you need unhappiness.
You need some pain, you need some sacrifice, you need some difficulty.
And that's what we're going to talk about today.
Because we need it to get the purpose, and thus the happiness, that we seek.
You know, I'm all for happiness.
It's a beautiful thing.
But first of all, it's not always accessible.
Second of all, it is deeply related to pain and other trouble.
I don't think happiness is the absence of trouble, or absence of problems, or the absence of pain.
I think happiness and pain are really close bedfellows.
BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative care physician, and the co -founder of the online palliative care company, Metal Health.
M -E -T -T -L -E, health.
Dr. Miller's professional field of palliative care deals directly with the healing of suffering rather than of disease itself.
From physical pain to emotional struggles.
You might wonder why I'm so interested in his work.
I'm interested in anybody who's a total subversive in their own field, and that's BJ Miller.
Why is he interested in suffering and death himself?
He had a near death accident during his college years.
He dealt with incredible pain and was forced to confront mortality head on.
BJ's wisdom on pain and suffering through his professional work and his personal experience helps us come to grips with the inevitable struggles of being human, which means sometimes being in pain and in every life, sooner or later, coming to an end.
Why? So that we can be alive today in a more meaningful way.
We humans are sort of, we're relatively oriented, so we know joy because we've known pain.
And we need foils, we need points of contrast.
And so death can provide us this point of contrast so that things like beauty and joy pop.
They have something to push against and to relate to.
So that idea of having a foil in life to understand what joy feels like because we know what its absence feels like.
Happiness is not so much just the pursuit of pleasure.
It's somehow the pursuit of being okay with reality.
And reality happens to include things like pain and death.
Death gives us this context for our life, this reason that time becomes a precious thing and where we place ourselves becomes important because it's not unlimited.
And it also gives us this grand excuse that we know our full life, we're never gonna get to everything.
That's not a failure, that's just the truth of life being much larger than any one of us.
So death has a lot to teach us.
And I would just say, I'm neither for or against death.
It just happens to insist upon itself, it exists, so therefore I need to deal with it.
Happiness, I think, has somebody to do too without somebody not being at odds with one's self.
And one of the things we do, every, all selves do is die.
So that's just part of the package.
Why would you go through your life never actually being alive until you die because you've been denying the existence of death?
It's a weird psychological conundrum that you put yourself into under the circumstances, don't you think?
Why are you interested in this topic?
What got you interested in the topic of death?
Well, because I finally came to realize that it exists.
Like I said, it was just like part of reality and that it was part of life, not the antithesis or the poacher of life, but part of life, that it's in us.
And so my pursuit of knowing myself and knowing life led me to trying to at least accept death.
I don't know if we can know death.
