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When Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos developed her course Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, she could not have predicted that her so-called “happiness” lectures would become one of Yale’s all-time most-popular courses.
The first year she ran the course, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled, according to a Santos interview with the New York Times.
In the same interview, Santos speculated that Yale students were flocking to her classes because, in high school, they had to “deprioritize their happiness” while chasing high grades to get into Yale, adopting harmful life habits that have led to what she called the “mental-health crises” we’re seeing at post-secondary schools such as Yale.
Under a new title, The Science of Well-being, the 10-week class was offered free on the Coursera platform and garnered over a million new subscribers in the first few weeks alone.
Nor could Santos have foreseen that her subsequent podcast The Happiness Lab would become one of the most heavily subscribed in the history of podcasts.
So what is this sudden search for “happiness” all about?
That apparently depends to some degree on your age and personal situation. An April 2019 survey of 2,500 Canadian adults conducted by the Gandalf Group found that 67 per cent of Canadians reported being “generally happy.”
The most powerful overall factors for adult happiness and satisfaction with life were mental health and “having a sense of purpose.”
So far so good, but the same report found that younger Canadians are substantially less likely than older Canadians to say they are satisfied with their lives.
This finding was also reflected in a 2016 UNICEF report in which only 55 per cent of children in Canada reported a high level of life satisfaction, with 27 per cent feeling sad or hopeless for long periods of time.
A third of respondents in the four-to-18 age range reported weekly indicators linked to mental distress, including headaches and stomach aches.
Fast forward to a 2020 news release from the B.C. Office of The Representative for Children and Youth that cites a research report [PDF] from Simon Fraser University’s Children’s Health Policy Centre.
That report concluded that whatever the situation before COVID, the impact of the pandemic on children and the daily news reports of illness and death resulting from the pandemic created a critical need for government to invest more in B.C.’s over-stretched and underfunded child and youth mental-health services system.
That need, says the SFU report, certainly increased with the restrictions necessitated by COVID, which created a breeding ground for anxiety, post-traumatic stress, depression and behavioural problems — all indicators of “unhappiness” in young children as well as children in their teenage years.
Beyond the impact of COVID on the mental health of adults and kids, Santos — who her students have named “the happiness professor” — has some other theories as to why contemporary notions of “happiness” or the perceived lack of it has created such a need for courses and podcasts like hers.
“We’re also fighting cultural forces that are telling us you’re not happy enough; happiness could just be around the corner,” she says, adding: “There’s an enormous culture that’s telling us to buy things which will make you ‘happy.’”
In other words, adults and kids alike are assailed every day with what the ad industry calls “joy marketing,” meaning “our product can make you much happier than you are now,” using images that relate the product or service to love, joy and adventure, where everyone looks like they’re having the best day ever, all the time.
But, says Santos: “Our minds lie to us. We have strong intuitions about the things that will make us happy, and we use those intuitions to go after that stuff, whether it’s more money or changing circumstances or buying the new iPhone. But a lot of those intuitions, the science shows, are not exactly right — or are deeply misguided.”
Studies throughout the U.S. and Europe that have looked at measures of children’s social and emotional well-being corroborate that opinion and have concluded that the things that really make children happy are not, as some kids might think, “things” at all.
Child psychologists also agree that social relationships and the amount of confidence and optimism about the future kids experience, along with a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself, are major “happiness” factors.
Or maybe we should simply pass on to kids Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to us all: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
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Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
Glacier Media Digital
© 2022 Victoria Times Colonist
