Imitate the happiest people you can find

Some people seem to have figured out how to live the good life. Mimic them.

A picture I took of myself while covering the Paris Climate Talks.

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Back in 2015 when I was working at BuzzFeed News, I was surprised one day when my editor revealed that the company wanted to send me to France. The assignment was to cover the United Nations’ Paris Climate Talks, a major gathering of diplomats and wonks that eventually led to the well-known Paris Climate Accord.

I considered it a huge honor to be selected for this assignment, and to this day it remains a highlight of my career. After arriving, I met people from all over the world. I ate good food, saw an amazing city, and even interviewed a few celebrities. It was a blast and the whole time I felt a sense of bewildered euphoria that somehow I, of all people, had been chosen to cover the event.

But there was also something else.

Despite that sense of perpetual wonder, I couldn’t shake a deeper feeling of discontent. It wasn’t a new feeling, and in fact it was one of the things that kept me grasping at new professional victories like covering news in Paris. But I was surprised at the time that even after achieving one of those victories, the feeling lingered. There I was on my greatest assignment to date, and deep down I didn’t actually feel any different.

I wasn’t miserable. And I know a feeling of discontent while on a plum assignment is nothing to complain about. To say I’m lucky would be an understatement. But still, it was a surprising realization.

When I got back from Paris I wasn’t exactly ready to make any big life changes, but I did start paying more attention to the people around me, and to the types of lives that seemed to lead to greater satisfaction. And I was alarmed by what I saw.

At the time, I was a breaking news journalist, which meant that I traveled a lot to cover different news stories. I covered riots, protests, natural disasters and political rallies, among other things. It was a cool job¹.

But I also started to realize that it wasn’t necessarily a happy job. I met a lot of reporters out in the field who felt a similar sense of discontent. I met a few who seemed miserable. And I was particularly worried because people years or decades further along in the profession didn’t seem much happier than me. I remember talking to one guy in his 60s who lamented that all his friends who had gone into other fields were retiring and spending time with their families. Meanwhile, he had no idea when he’d be able to retire himself, and he had no close family anyway.

These characterizations are not universal, and I don’t mean this as a criticism. For some people, an adventurous life in breaking news is worth the sacrifices, which I respect. And I don’t claim to have done any sort of scientifically rigorous study of reporters’ mental states, or to have any special insight into how people felt beyond what they mentioned in casual conversations.

All I can say is that after gazing down the path I was on, I didn’t love where it headed. I could get the cool assignments. I could win an award here and there. I could impress people at parties. But deep down, I’d feel the same. And while I didn’t feel bad, I could also imagine feeling better.

Finally I realized something: Maybe I should stop copying the life choices of people who were discontent, and in some cases miserable, and start copying people who seemed happy. Maybe I would be happier if I simply did the things happy people do.

Over time, this led to a lot of changes. I stopped covering breaking news, which was often brutal and depressing. I loved traveling for work, but it also made it harder to build and maintain relationships or any sense of community, so I found another beat that required less on-the-road time. My wife and I moved to a new city. And of course the biggest change that happened around this time was that I finally stopped putting off having kids.

If you ask me, I will recommend these choices. My share of the good life is without a doubt larger for having made them.

But more than the specific choices I made, I’d recommend simply imitating happy people. It sounds so obvious. Of course that’s what we’re all trying to do. And yet, I struggle to think of times I’ve actually heard this articulated. My guidance counselors in high school talked to me about college majors and careers, but never suggested simply choosing a path based on its likelihood to produce happiness. Ditto for all the advice I got in college, and later from professional mentors.

And so I do not think I’m the only person who has found themselves wandering down a path that might have been professionally rewarding, or cool-sounding, but which didn’t exactly increase the odds of living a happy life.

Take for example the recent Pew research on parenting that I wrote about earlier this month. I found it interesting that white parents — my demographic — were the most likely to say that parenting is tiring most or all of the time, and to say they feel judged by other parents. These findings were anecdotally supported by the recent viral Cut article that chronicled the misery of status-chasing upper class white moms in the New York City area.

On the other hand Black and Hispanic parents seem to enjoy parenting more than white and Asian parents.

The reasons for different sentiments across demographic groups was not a focus of Pew’s research, so I’ll save that discussion for a future post. Suffice it to say here that the research shows that some people are achieving greater satisfaction than others. And personally, I’d like to learn — with humility — more from the happier groups.

Put another way, don’t chase the life of the wealthy-but-anxious Cut moms. The evidence suggests their choices don’t lead to happiness. It sounds so simple — and yet so many of us seem to be chasing exactly that kind of life.

The Pew research is also just the tip of the iceberg. The Centers for Disease Control, for instance, recently found that 57 percent of teenage girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. A CDC official told the New York Times the finding indicates “young people are telling us that they are in crisis”².

This is a complicated issue, but one doctor quoted in the Times story said there’s “no question” about a connection between the rise in teenage hopelessness and the rise of social media. The comment adds to a growing chorus arguing that social media is having a detrimental impact on kids’ mental health.

So here, again, there are different groups of people achieving varying levels of happiness. Except unlike with the Pew research, which identified variations among cohorts existing alongside each other, the research on teen mental health is temporal; it indicates that a group in the pre-social media past was happier than a group in the present. In this light, when I think about what I want for my own kids, it looks a lot more like teenage life a decade or two ago than what it commonly looks like today. I want my kids to imitate the happier group.

Obviously that’s not entirely realistic. Pandora’s box is open at this point. But I can at least attempt to model my life and the lives of my family after the happiest groups we can find, past or present. In fact, I think the idea that the happiest people may not be our contemporaries is an important one to consider. To paraphrase a popular internet meme, occasionally maybe you do have to reject modernity and embrace tradition.

In any case, the data on happiness is endless. Multiple studies have found, for example, that marriage tends to make people happier. During the pandemic, parents were happier than non-parents. Researchers have identified correlations between happiness and political orientation, and happiness and religiosity. Just this week, The Atlantic’s Arthur Brooks recommended drinking coffee if you want to be happy.

There’s no way I can compile an exhaustive list of all the research. And that’s not the point anyway. Instead, the idea is simply that it’s possible to identify how different choices lead to different levels of happiness — and then to use that information as a guide when finding oneself at a crossroads.

In my own experience, the data has been helpful. But it also doesn’t have to be that complicated. I just looked around at the people I knew and asked myself which ones seemed like they were living their best lives.

Changing course and following in their footsteps involved some counterintuitive choices, like sacrificing a degree of professional adventure. And I can still imagine finding even greater degrees of contentment in the future. But so far, the incredible thing is that simply copying happy people has worked out pretty well.

Thanks for reading Nuclear Meltdown. If you really want to be happy, the best choice you can make is to share this blog post:

Headlines to read:

Intergenerational Wealth: A Vision of Property and Stewardship

“How is it possible to induce a sense of obligation to future generations? The great conservative Edmund Burke anticipated this casual disregard for the future, and offered a possible remedy: “people will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Burke seems to be suggesting that knowledge of one’s ancestors will, among other things, help one realize the deep and abiding gifts that one has inherited from persons long dead, many of whom have long since disappeared from memory. A sense of gratitude will give rise to responsible action.  This responsibility entails caring for one’s inheritance and, in due time, passing the gift on to the next generation. When one comes to see oneself not simply as an individual with individual concerns, desires, and resources, but rather as part of an ongoing line of reception, care, and transmission of goods—cultural goods, institutions, and property in the form of wealth—one will be disposed to think seriously and act wisely to preserve, generate, and transmit wealth to one’s children, to their children, and beyond.

The word that describes this complex dance of grateful reception, careful cultivation, and responsible transmission is stewardship.”

Life’s Losers

“Battling to get your kids into a school where they will be treated like nobodies because you aren’t a partner at a law firm, presumably so they spend the rest of their life doing exactly the same thing, if they’re lucky, sounds not a world apart from paying to be punched in the face. A life like this is what happens when you have no value system of your own: you become incapable of operating on any basis other than envy and status-seeking. Yes, these are privileged women. But these women are also life’s terminal losers. There was the constant sense, in both the documentary and the Cut’s piece, of a group of people performing frantically for an audience that doesn’t exist.”

Most young men are single. Most young women are not

“More than 60 percent of young men are single, nearly twice the rate of unattached young women, signaling a larger breakdown in the social, romantic and sexual life of the American male. Men in their 20s are more likely than women in their 20s to be romantically uninvolved, sexually dormant, friendless and lonely. They stand at the vanguard of an epidemic of declining marriage, sexuality and relationships that afflicts all of young America. “

1. It was fun, exciting and professionally rewarding to cover climate talks or political rallies. But some assignments were less fun. In the course of my reporting I watched several ISIS beheading videos. I once spent a day interviewing people in a hospital parking lot after their loved ones were gunned down. Part of my sense of discontent may well have been connected to these more unpleasant parts of the job.

2. I have two daughters, so I found these findings particularly alarming; if more than half of teenage girls feel this way, odds are at least one of my own daughters will be impacted. Obviously I want everyone to be happy and for issues like this to be addressed on a societal level. But it drives the point home when I apply the odds to my own family.