Harvard’s Arthur C. Brooks on the secret to happiness
The Daily Article
The Denison Forum
4.9 • 576 Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks, who specializes in happiness studies, explained in a recent Harvard Business Review interview that our collective happiness “took a real big dip when social media came along” and was further exacerbated by the coronavirus. So how do we fix that? For Christians, the answer lies in knowing the difference between means as ends and means to an eternal end.
Author: Jim Denison, PhD
Narrator: Chris Elkins
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Wednesday, September 6th, |
| 0:04.0 | 2023 edition of the Daily Article Podcast. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm Chris Elkins, narrating today's article, written by Denison Forum co-founder and CEO, |
| 0:13.0 | Dr. Jim Denison. |
| 0:15.0 | Let's start with some good news. |
| 0:17.0 | My internet connection is working this morning. |
| 0:20.0 | A few hours without it yesterday |
| 0:22.3 | reminded me of how dependent we all are on something few of us understand. What exactly is the |
| 0:29.4 | internet anyway? Where is it? What does it look like? It's become one of those things that we |
| 0:34.9 | take for granted until it's not there, and one of those things we think we need to be happy. |
| 0:40.7 | However, there's more to the story. |
| 0:42.6 | As Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks, who specializes in happiness studies explained in a recent Harvard Business Review interview, quote, |
| 0:52.3 | happiness started to go into a little bit of malaise, a bit of decline |
| 0:56.5 | in the late 80s, early 90s, and then it took a big dip when social media came along. |
| 1:02.3 | Social media was catastrophic for happiness. There is a lot of neuroscience behind this, |
| 1:07.7 | but everybody knows that when you're bored or when you're lonely or you start |
| 1:12.3 | looking at your devices and at your phone, you actually get more bored, you get more lonely. |
| 1:18.6 | This is a huge problem, especially for young adults. Then the coronavirus came along, and this was |
| 1:24.9 | the most catastrophic event for public happiness that we've seen in a long time worldwide. |
| 1:30.3 | Ordinarily, about 30% of people would say they're very happy about their lives, and 15% would say they're not happy. |
| 1:38.3 | The rest is in the middle. These are flipped. Now it's about 30% who are not happy and 15% who are very happy. End quote. What is the |
| 1:48.7 | answer? According to Brooks, it has everything to do with social life. It has everything to do with |
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