Arthur Brooks: Cracking The Code To Happiness

Happiness has three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose—which you need in balance and abundance. And if you don't have all those three, you're not going to be a happy person.

Fear and love are opposites; they are cognitive and philosophical opposites. Love and hatred are not opposites; hatred is downstream from fear. When we are fearful of being unsuccessful, the remedy to that is more love—and love only comes from human beings.

Number one... learn your values, act according to your values, practice your values, write it down, journal it. Number two is get your contemplative practice in order, and make sure you start with at least 15 minutes a day. And number three is, actually, read the wisdom literature in whatever tradition you want, and do that daily for at least 15 minutes. Starting their, your life will change.

The secret to being more satisfied is not having more; it's wanting less. That's the secret.

Happiness is only associated with enjoying jokes; it's not associated with making jokes. It turns out that if you're a funny person, that does not improve your happiness—quite the contrary. But if you enjoy funny things and you have the humility to laugh at other people who are funny, you get the benefits.

What's the hole in our souls that we're trying to fill with the success that we're pursuing in our fluid intelligence curve? It virtually always has to do with love. And why? Because we can get more validation, we can get more satisfaction, early on by sacrificing the non-special love relationships and by being successful.

To find real satisfaction in the second half of life... This is one of the things that all happy older people have in common—they have stopped adding, and they start taking away. They start chipping away.

You notice that people who are really successful who are success addicts, they tend to abuse alcohol more than people who are not. High-socioeconomic status people who work really, really long hours... they tend toward alcoholism; they turn toward drug abuse.

Be careful with your ambition, because it's as addictive as any drug.

Traditionally, the loneliest people in America are 60-year-old men.

Every product, marketing, and team and C-suite of every company in America needs more people over 70.

Only 20% of Americans are morbidly afraid of death.

I love all religions, but I'm in love with the Catholic Church, and I learn as much about who I am as a Catholic by talking to people who are not.

Looking at the data as a social scientist, I know perfectly that the people who tend to be most unhappy at the end of their lives are the people who achieve the most earlier in their lives.