When Happiness Interrupts the Darkness

Much like most of you, I live a life of constant interruptions. As soon as I sink my teeth into writing a column or covering a news story or even just trying to read a book (remember those?), I will get a text from my lovely daughter in N.Y. or a notice from a WhatsApp group or the latest news missive from a social media feed.

This is the typical life of the digital era — we get interrupted, over and over again.

The good news, of course, is that not all interruptions are created equal. If my daughter texts me her beautiful poem overlaid on a shot from her window on a rainy day (as she did recently), I’m grateful for the interruption. In that case, the text is more of a delightful break.

So, as I was looking around at all the darkness around us, it struck me that maybe we can all use a delightful break, like, for example, a cover story on happiness.

On the surface, this theme seems jarring at a time when we’re commemorating the first anniversary of the war in Ukraine, which has taken 300,000 lives; when antisemitism keeps rising; when a mass shooting seemingly hits us every week in the U.S.; and when Israel is in continuous turmoil, among many other ills.

Isn’t this the worst possible time to feature happiness on our cover? Well, as it turns out, last week we entered the Hebrew month of Adar, which, according to tradition, is the “month of happiness!”

Delightful breaks aside, isn’t this the worst possible time to feature happiness on our cover?

Perhaps, but Judaism also has something to say about interruptions.

Arguably the happiest interruption in the Jewish calendar is the weekly Sabbath, which indeed offers us a delightful break from the digital assault on our senses and the never-ending string of dark news. For those who observe the Sabbath, that break can become the highlight of the week, the one day that reconnects us with our humanity and prepares us for the rest of the week.

But if Shabbat was the explanation for featuring happiness on our cover, then we’d have that same reason every week. No, there’s something more.

You see, Judaism brings holiness not just to days but also to months. Well, as it turns out, last week we entered the Hebrew month of Adar, which, according to tradition, is the “month of happiness!” I’ll let you Google the wonderful explanations for this connection (which have to do with the holiday of Purim), but that precious factoid was more than enough for us.

So, as we enter the joyful month of Adar, we happily offer one of the world experts on that mysterious subject of happiness: Harvard professor, author and social scientist Arthur C. Brooks, interviewed by our editor-at-large Monica Osborne. 

You won’t see “ten easy steps to happiness” in this cover essay. That’s because there might not be a more complex, elusive and desirable idea than happiness.

“Our obsession with success, material goods, and physical appearance is evidence of this pursuit,” Osborne writes, “yet none of these things seem to make us happier. It’s no wonder that happiness has become such big business. We all want to be happy, don’t we?”

Well, we assume we do. It’s complicated. To really understand happiness, we must dissect it, and turn it and turn it until we can make some sense of it.

The “hard truth,” says Brooks, is that “mother nature doesn’t care if you’re happy.”

Since happiness isn’t intuitive, we look for hacks. “But sorry, no hacks. It’s all dials,” Brooks says. “It all takes the complexity of the human heart and mind … It takes love, and love is not a switch. Love is the ultimate dial.”

In the essay, Brooks identifies four threads—faith, family, friendship and work that serves others—for how you “build a life, a happy life.” But, as Osborne adds, “everything worthwhile takes work.”

Of the many insights in the essay, my favorite is the counterintuitive idea that so many of the ingredients to happiness are external. 

“Faith, family, friendship and work that serves others are all external — they’re outside of us, and we have to focus away from ourselves in order to nourish them,” Osborne writes. “But when we talk about self-care, we’re usually focusing inward, on ourselves, another misunderstanding of what happiness is.”

No one is saying we shouldn’t do any self-care, Osborne adds, but “the truth is that there’s an inordinate amount of focus placed on activities that don’t truly bring us happiness, which is really what we’re looking for when we engage in acts of ‘self-care.’ We feel distressed and so we want to ‘induce these feelings of happiness in the short term.’”

“I realized something important when I was talking with Brooks,” Osborne writes. “Happiness is not a product. It’s a process and a commitment — an idea that resonates with the Jewish way of seeing the world.”

Osborne’s essay weaves her interview with Brooks with her own commentary and Jewish experience. “I realized something important when I was talking with Brooks,” she writes. “Happiness is not a product. It’s a process and a commitment — an idea that resonates with the Jewish way of seeing the world.”

Enjoy the interruption.