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Jonathan Haidt speaks about happiness and how nothing is good or bad.

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Jonathan Haidt:

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of The Righteous Mind and The Happiness Hypothesis.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Why did you write a book about happiness?

Jonathan Haidt: I didn’t set out to write a book on happiness. I guess, in my own life I set out to figure out the meaning of life, because I was a suburban kid at the age of 17 who read Waiting for Godot and was already pretty much an atheist, and began to think, oh, my God, there’s no meaning to life. I’d better major in philosophy. So that was my personal quest that led to the book.

Along the way, life had a lot of twists and turns for me. I didn’t get a job my first time out of grad school, ended up doing a post doc in health psychology, which taught me a lot about the conditions of human flourishing and human health.

I was assigned to teach Introductory Psychology at the University of Virginia, and that forced me to review the entire field of psychology. And in reviewing all of psychology, I found myself looking for or choosing quotations from the ancients, from poetry, to help my students understand how the mind works, how the heart works.

And it was only once I did that, that I thought, hey, there are a lot of these great quotes. I wonder how many great truths there are. I wonder how many insights the ancients had. So it was really just a set of coincidences and flukes that led me to write a book [The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom] about the great psychological truths, which my publisher then labeled a book about happiness.

Question: Which ancient thinker has taught you the most about happiness?

Jonathan Haidt: I think you’d have to start with the Stoics and Buddha, because they were saying basically the same thing.

I think the greatest truths, the ones that you find in every culture that has any sort of history of reflection of writing, the greatest truth is that there’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. That’s the way Shakespeare put it. But you get basically the same idea from Buddha, from the Bhagavad Gita in India, and from the Stoics in ancient Greece and Rome.

So an understanding that the world doesn’t usually affect us directly. It’s what we do with it. It’s the filters that we put on it. That’s the foundation of certainly most pop-psychology, and of a lot of psychotherapy, cognitive therapy. So that, I think, is the greatest truth.

But if you take that to its logical conclusion, you get a psychology or philosophy of life that says stop striving, look within, meditate, disengage. And the conclusion I came to in writing The Happiness Hypothesis, it wasn’t where I started, was that that contemplative life, that life of reflection, that Stoic life, might have worked for some people in some times, but it’s generally a bad idea for us Westerners. Many of us who are not anchored in a religion, we feel like we’re seeking. Many of us end up at Buddhism. Many of us think, oh, so wise. Oh, meditate, reflect, withdraw. Of course, you can still be engaged in the world in a way, but oh, you know, passionate engagement is bad for you.

I disagree.

I think that we are passionate creatures who really live our fullest life when we are deeply engaged, when we feel successes, and exult in them, when we feel losses and tragedies and are hurt by them.

So I came to the conclusion that Eastern ideas of withdrawal may not be right for modern Westerners. Now, a lot of modern Buddhists have given me flak for this because they say, oh, no, Buddhism is compatible with modern life. And, sure, modern American Buddhism is--because it’s modern American.

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