Transcript for Episode 85

njGrant: My guest on the podcast today is Tal Ben-Shahar. Tal is a teacher and writer in the disciplines of positive psychology and leadership.

He came on my radar recently when I read about a master's degree in Happiness Studies that he developed at Centenary University in New Jersey. I co-teach an interdisciplinary course at the University of Pittsburgh called “Happiness and Human Flourishing,” which is part of a broader movement to develop happiness courses at major universities across the country. So I was very interested in the work that he's doing.

We're talking today about this movement, happiness studies more generally, as well as Tal's MA program.

So, Tal. Welcome to the podcast.

Tal: Thank you for having me here.

Grant: When I read your work, one question I had is: Why do you use the term “happiness” rather than something like “flourishing”? The reason I ask is because it seems like the concept you're getting at is an Aristotelian eudaimonia, which is more consistent with what I would consider to be “flourishing.”

So why do you use “happiness” instead of “flourishing”?

Tal: Yeah, that's a great question. And in fact, when I created the class on happiness, the certificate program or the Master's Degree on Happiness, many of my colleagues and dear friends said to me, “Use another term. The term “happiness” is tainted. People think about “happiness” and they think about doing nothing on the beach or an ice cream or something superficial.” And obviously that's not what I mean by “happiness.”

But the reason why I insisted on the term is precisely because I wanted to have the conversation that we're having right now. I wanted people to challenge that term and to talk about it, because the term “happiness” once meant something very different. It's only today in our modern world that we think of happiness in the superficial manner.

So, when Bentham or Mill or Aristotle or Helen Keller wrote about – and they wrote a lot about happiness – they meant happiness as a sense of meaning and purpose. Happiness as the cultivation of healthy relationships, happiness as pursuing kindness and generosity. They included all these ideas within happiness, and I want to go back to that.

So I want to redefine or actually go back to the original definition of happiness, and we can't do that if we don't talk about it.

Grant: Yeah. So if you're made Happiness Czar of the United States and you had to invest major funds in one thing, you’ve got one shot, to improve happiness, what would you invest in?

Tal: So, first of all, in education, hands down. You can't buy people happiness. You can't make people happy. But you can certainly educate them towards doing things that would contribute to their happiness, such as being more cognizant of the things that are meaningful to them. Such as encouraging them to exercise more. Such as teaching them about the importance of kindness, generosity and appreciation. So these are all things that can contribute to happiness, and the way to bring more of them into our lives is through education.

Now, I find it unfortunate that schools focus, seems like, on everything but happiness. They focus on history and biology and math and the sciences in general. And that's great. I think that's important. But why are schools almost entirely ignoring the science of wellbeing? With an emphasis on science, because today we know what we can do to increase levels of happiness. Why aren't schools – and when I say schools, I mean yes, universities, and that's what we're doing, but no less important, perhaps even more important, elementary schools and even kindergartens – why aren't they focusing more on how can we attain happiness?

Grant: So when you think about education, what's the role of information transfer versus habit formation? When you think about education, is that sort of a classroom setting where we're giving students information about how to be happier or are you thinking a more embodied habit formation as well?

Tal: Yeah. So the answer is yes, meaning we need both. Information is important, but of course if we want to live happier lives, information is not enough. We need transformation, which means changing the way we act, which means changing the way we think. And that comes mostly through doing, through implementing the ideas.

People often come say to me, “Tal, we have your book next to our bed.” And I say, “Wow, that's, that's wonderful. Very flattering.” And I say, “And have you read it?” And some of them say yes, not all, but some say yes. And I say, “And have you implemented the ideas there?” Because that's the most important thing. Reading something: that doesn't contribute to happiness, just as reading about tennis doesn't make you a better tennis player. Reading about playing the piano doesn't make you a good pianist. You need to practice, you need to exercise. This applies to any skill, whether it's music, whether it's sports, whether it's happiness.

Grant: I want to talk a little bit about this phenomena that we're seeing in the United States: these happiness courses at major universities. There's a very high-profile course at Yale. I'm sure you're familiar with this course; it was a highlight in the New York Times in the last few years.

A team here at Pitt, we've been trying to document these courses and we find dozens and dozens, and I'm sure we're not even scratching the surface in terms of the number of happiness classes across the United States. They're often very popular and they often fill quite quickly. In fact, our class fills very quickly. This is only the second session we've done it, and we have two, but it has filled quite quickly.

So why do you think these happiness courses have proven to be so popular with students in universities?

Tal: They're popular because of human nature. And human nature is that we all want to be happier. And again, whether we define happiness as less pain or whether we define happiness as more pleasure or whether we define happiness as more meaning and purpose or health in our lives, we all want more of it. And today – and again, this is obviously a generalization – but we as a society, we're unhappy. There's more and more depression and anxiety, and levels of wellbeing have declined and unfortunately continue to decline.

People experience a real need for answers to the question: how can I become happier, or how can I deal with my sadness, or how can I improve in general the quality of my life? And then when they're offered this course – and of course these courses offer evidence-based, scientific approach to happiness – then yeah, of course they'll take it. If they were offered when I was an undergraduate, I'd be the first to sign up as well.

Grant: All right. So to what extent do you think this need for happiness classes, or interest in happiness classes, is the result of the abandonment of the liberal arts education in American universities?

Tal: Yeah. That's a complicated question because there's a chicken and egg issue here.

I think the liberal arts have neglected happiness over the years. So, if you studied in Aristotle's Lyceum or Plato's Academy, or if you were a student of Confucius or Lao Tzu or even if you had studied in most of the universities, in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, you would've studied a lot of happiness. Today, the liberal arts and…

So I studied philosophy as an undergrad. The two best courses that I took were with… One was with Stanley Cavell. He passed away recently. He taught a course called “The Pursuits of Happiness.” Which was an incredible course where every week we would watch a movie, read a philosophical excerpt by Austin or Emerson or Nietzsche and then we would discuss it. It was on happiness. And then I took an amazing course with – a one-on-one course – with Robert Nozik, who talked a great deal about happiness. But other than that, many of my courses were detached from my day-to-day life. There were on logic, which I think is very important, of course, and analytical philosophy, which has merit and it helps our thinking. But the questions that we addressed were not questions of how can I live better?

And towards that end, I really refer our listeners to the work of Alain de Botton. Alain de Botton has done magnificent work on reestablishing philosophy as well as, more specifically, art to its right position, which is all about improving the quality of our lives. So if a philosophy class on ancient Greek philosophy or a modern philosophers could start with the question, how can these philosophers improve the quality of our lives, I think we'll have many more students and then there'll be less need for people to take classes specifically on happiness because they'd be addressing this in their Intro to Philosophy class anyway.

Or for that matter, by the way, history. You look at the important work of Will Durant. Will Durant looked at history and valued history because he said it can teach us how to live better. It can teach our governments how to govern better. In other words, it was practical. And there is too much detachment in modern academic world, which I see as really unfortunate.

Grant: Right. And so the reason I ask that question is I read a number of academics who are very interested in reenlivening the liberal arts in the United States. And their arguments are very similar to the ones that you make and the ones we make in our class about why we do this happiness class. It's to help people live better and to live well. And they would argue that – and I've had these conversations – that maybe we don't need happiness classes. What we need is to return to the good books and the big books, whose central object really was a life well-lived.

Tal: I couldn't agree more. In fact, at Centenary University – and this is the initiative of Dale Caldwell, who's the new president – we want to create a “happiness continuum,” as he puts it. And the happiness continuum means that we want to have a… Right now we have a master's degree. We want to have a PhD offered, which hopefully we'll launch in a year. And two years from now, we're hoping to launch a BA degree in happiness studies. Now, for all three: BA, MA, and PhD, our focus is the great ideas, the Great Books. So we are going to read, well, we are reading Aristotle, we are reading Helen Keller, we are reading Lao Tzu and many other great works.

Grant: So we'll return to your MA program in a little bit, but a few more questions just about this general phenomenon that we're seeing in higher ed. So do you think the goal in these happiness studies classes, courses, degrees, is to make students happy or to give them knowledge and skills to help others be happy? What do you think the object is?

Tal: Again, the answer is yes. It's both explicitly. So we explicitly talk about how this degree course or a certificate program, if they're taking this certificate, is about helping you become happier and about helping you help others do the same.

Now, they are inevitably interconnected. Why? Because if we are to impact others, we have to start with ourselves. Confucius talked about this almost 3,000 years ago. He said if you want to bring more harmony to your nation, you first have to bring more harmony to your city. If you want to bring more harmony to the city, you first have to bring more harmony to your neighborhood. You want to do it to your neighborhood? Start with your family. You want to start with your family? Begin with the self. In other words, he created these concentric circles where the self is at the center and then expanding outwards, like a stone in water, the ripple effect: you have to start with the self.

At the same time, when you are contributing to others, when you are helping others become happier, you're also helping yourself become happier because we know that one of the best ways of increasing levels of wellbeing in yourself is through kindness and generosity, through helping others.

Grant: Yeah. So what do you think is one of the biggest barriers in the contemporary academy, in the university, that keeps students from flourishing, or being happy, in your parlance? What do you think the biggest barrier is?

Tal: Yeah, I think that the detachment from their life is something that is actually making them unhappy because they see, “Okay, so we have our real life and then we have to get this paper in.” Now, if they were writing this paper about something that is personally meaningful to them, and for most of us, our lives are personally meaningful to us, almost by definition, then they would feel much more engaged. If they were getting tools and techniques to experiment with from their classes, I think their lives would be a great deal happier. That's one thing.

Students actually believe that what will make them happy is if they get into their top choice university. And what is their top choice university? For 95 plus – I think I'm being generous here – 95% or more of the students, they are the universities that are ranked the highest. So it's not the place where they will find the most interesting conversations, whether it's with professors or students. It's not where they can personally flourish. It's where they can be perceived as most successful. In other words, the wrong standards, the wrong evaluation.

Grant: Right. And then on top of that, the central focus is then getting them a job so that they can…

Tal: And exactly the same thing applies, of course.

The same thing, by the way, applies before college to a high school. And one of the reasons why we… We used to live in New York City. And I took our eldest son at the time to look at different high schools. And the first thing that these high schools – first of all, in their elementary school, they emphasized what high school you should go to and where you can get into and the best you can do – and in high school, when he was looking at high schools, they emphasized what college you can get into and what colleges their graduates get into. That is what they emphasize first. They didn't emphasize “Here we're building a community here, creating healthy relationships, we'll engage you intellectually, you will be able to pursue your passions.” No. What college can you get into. Wrong values.

And again, this is culture-wide, society-wide. Not just in the West, by the way, and in most of the world.

Grant: So what are some of the challenges in happiness studies within a secular, pluralistic university environment? So I'm thinking, aren't many of the determinants of happiness tradition-specific, especially as it relates to maybe spiritual wellbeing; that seems to be an important part of your model. So what are the challenges to happiness studies within a secular pluralistic university space?

Tal: Yeah. I mentioned Alain de Botton earlier as a role model when it comes to studying philosophy. One of his most important books is called Religion for Atheists. Religion for Atheists, which I strongly recommend for religious people and non-religious people. What he talks about there is how we have – and he himself, by the way, is an atheist – but how we as a society have neglected and discarded the lessons from religion. And there are many important lessons there. So there is a great deal that we can learn from our religious texts or from our religious practices, whether or not we are religious, whether or not we believe in God.

And one of the important lessons is the role of spirituality. Now spirituality, yes, you can find it as you go to your house of worship, on whatever day of the week you choose to go. However, we can also find it in in our workplace if we are doing something that is meaningful, something that is important to us, that matters. And in fact, workplaces that provide their employees with a sense of meaning and purpose, in other words, where their employees experience spiritual wellbeing, they're more successful, more effective workplaces. Their employees are less likely to leave. They're more likely to bring their full self to the work. They'll be more creative. They'll have better relationships. Just about every variable that you look at, every KPI. You benefit from spiritual wellbeing in the workplace.

You look at it in the classroom. I certainly don't advocate and don't promote religion in my classroom. It's each to his or her own. At the same time, I certainly hope that my students will experience spiritual wellbeing, a sense of meaning and purpose when they take that class.

Grant: One interesting thing that we found is sometimes students, even when we present religious texts in a very pluralistic way, it's still seen as proselytizing, and I'm wondering if you've run into that at all.

Tal: I run into that constantly. The problem with much of what we're educating towards in the Western world is that we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. If you don't want to believe in God, if you choose to be an atheist, that's fine. Again, each to his or her own. Freedom of choice, freedom of religion, freedom of belief: they are critical moral precepts. They're also important for happiness. We know that.

At the same time, religion has been around for thousands of years. Religion has made very important progress when it comes to leading a full and fulfilling life. Why discard these ideas? There is so much wisdom in biblical texts. There is so much wisdom in Buddhist texts. There's so much wisdom in the Bhagavad Gita. and we can learn and derive a great deal of benefit from reading and engaging with these texts, whether or not we believe that it was God or a Supreme Being that shared these texts with us.

Grant: Right. So do you think happiness studies can effectively be done online?

Tal: Yeah. So is that a trick question? Yeah.

Grant: No, that's a very honest question. Actually, I did not look specifically if your MA program is an online program, because I wanted to ask this question.

Tal: Good. So, I'm glad you asked this question. So we really grappled with that when we launched the Happiness Studies Academy. Because we initially launched just the certificate program and only later the MA. And we had essentially three options, broadly defined.

One option was we're all doing it offline, the traditional way. We'll all get together, because we know how important being in the same room playing in the same sandbox is. Second option was we'll go online a hundred percent. We have the technology today. It's a privilege. We can reach many more students through online. And of course the third option was the hybrid model. Which, by the way, we experimented with initially.

We decided to go 100% online because of the benefit of reaching students from all over the world. Also because it's a lot less expensive and we can be more accessible to more people. So our programs attract as of today more than eighty-five different nationalities. We have students from all these countries. And this is expanding literally by the day. And we like that. We want to be accessible.

At the same time, we didn't want to lose the benefits – and there are real benefits – of being in the same classroom, of being in the same sandbox together. So what did we do? We created retreats. And we have retreats all over the world. So our last one was in Vancouver. Before that, it was in Lake Como, Italy. We have one coming up in Shanghai next month. The month after that we're meeting in in Cartagena, in Colombia, literally all over the world we have retreats. We have one in Kenya and Brazil soon after. So we have retreats all over the world.

And what these retreats allow us to do – first of all, they're completely optional. You don't have to attend them to get the MA or to graduate from the certificate program. However, they're there for you. And we have hundreds and thousands of people attending those retreats where we do meet and we do interact, and we have classes there and we have seminars there. And we even dance there and we do yoga there, the kind of things that we can't do when we're online, but things that certainly contribute to happiness. So this is was our way of making the master’s or the certificate programs accessible while at the same time also gaining the many benefits of a face-to-face, in-person interaction.

Grant: So is the online asynchronous?

Tal: Both. So some of it, prerecorded lectures you can watch anytime, anywhere because, again, we have people from around the globe, meaning all time zones. At the same time, we also meet in person. So the MA meets for an hour and a half as a group. Actually, I just literally got off a call a few minutes before we started chatting. And at the same time we also have one-on-one interactions with faculty members for those who would like it. And no less important, we have what we call our H.A.T. group meetings. H.A.T. stands for Happiness Accountability Team. And they meet regularly where they are accountability buddies to one another. And that is of course live.

Grant: Right. So what is the profile of the best faculty to teach a happiness course?

Tal: Hmm. Yeah. So this is something that I think about a lot, of course, because I hire the faculty who are going to be teaching. And, of course, they need to have the fundamentals, the basics. They need to know the material.

But there are many people who know the material. What I'm looking for are people who are grappling with the material. Who are, yes, struggling with it, who are applying it, who are trying it out. Gandhi, arguably, or certainly, one of the most important leaders of the 20th century, titled his autobiography “My Experiments with Truth.” Not “My Finding Truth.” Not “My Ultimate Truth.” It's “My Experiments with Truth.” And I think this applies to all great leaders. And great teachers are great leaders. I want them to be experimenting with truths. I want them to be grappling with it. I want them to be trying it out. I want them to be struggling with it because then they're in the best place position to help others along the same path.

Grant: What kind of disciplines do you find people coming from?

Tal: You mean as our students?

Grant: I was thinking the faculty.

Tal: The faculty. Good. Yes.

Grant: What kind of disciplines. Do they tend to be sociologists or psychologists? Where do they come from?

Tal: Yes, yes and yes. So we have… Our faculty members are clinical psychologists. Therapists gravitate towards teaching it. No big surprise here. We have positive psychologists, graduates from master’s in applied positive psychology programs. One of our faculty members right now is studying in the Master's of Applied Positive Psychologist Program, but she's a lawyer by training.

So, because happiness studies is an interdisciplinary field of study, I do not only look for psychologists. I would like political philosophy thinkers – I'm thinking of one of our faculty for our upcoming cohort – and lawyers and psychologists. And I really want this to be an interdisciplinary degree.

Grant: Yeah, so I always think of folks that are, the term I use is “intellectually promiscuous,” actually. I think that's the best profile: folks that may come out of a discipline or not, but read novels, watch movies, like poetry. And particularly within the academy, particularly in the applied sciences, that's increasingly difficult to find, someone who is just, has a very wide interest. I find that's the best sort of faculty member to teach the happiness course.

Tal: So is that your term, “intellectually promiscuous”?

Grant: I don’t know if I made that up or not. I might have heard it somewhere. But that's a term that I used when I'm thinking about who I want to bring in to help teach the course. Because we have, currently we have sections in nursing, engineering, there'll be one in public health. You got to have to find the right… And we're very interested in the applied sciences because we're very interested in thinking through how do we organize the applied sciences towards human flourishing. And again, we use the term “human flourishing.” But it's real hard within those applied sciences because the training is so pragmatic, right? It's hard to find someone who's really a broad thinker and really can bring in knowledge from different disciplines and different traditions.

Tal: Yeah, I think you're spot on. Intellectually promiscuous. It captures exactly what we're looking for. So, I'm thinking, you said you're looking for the hard sciences. We have a biologist coming in as a faculty member, and she has been studying the science of wellbeing for a few years now. And she's interested in the hard sciences and in the field of happiness studies.

And if you think about it, the father of happiness studies, to my mind, is Aristotle. Now, Aristotle was intellectually promiscuous. He was a biologist. He was a philosopher in the old sense of the word. Yes, he studied metaphysics and epistemology and he studied animals and human flourishing and love. So this is exactly – we're looking for modern day Aristotles.

Grant: Yeah. So I do want to talk even more specifically about your MA program. It's really fascinating. So did Centenary approach you or did you approach them?

Tal: I approached them. And for a long time I was I was looking for a partner university. And it was very challenging, I must say. Because there were many universities who said, “Yeah, we'll have a positive psychology master's degree because, they're already out there and they're very successful, so we want the same.” And I said, “No, I'm looking for happiness studies. It's not just psychology, it's also philosophy and it's movies and it's poetry, and it's…” And that's where very often the relationship ended. They said, “No, we want positive psychology.” Or some of them said, “That's okay, but, so we'll teach ‘The Philosophy of Happiness’ in our philosophy department.” And I said, “No, no, no. I want this to be an interdisciplinary degree.” And it was very challenging for me to find. And when it came to Centenary University, for me and for them it was just love at first sight. They loved the approach and I loved everything that was happening there. And it happened very quickly, but it took me years to find Centenary, years.

Grant: Yeah. So what's the profile of the student that registers for the MA in Happiness? What do you think they're getting out – or, what do you think they think they're getting out of it?

Tal: Yeah. So, we've really tried to define the profile because the marketing department said we have to find a profile and then we know who we are appealing to, and we really struggled and are struggling with that because there isn't a profile. We have students who are therapists and coaches, and we have students who are lawyers and managers, and we have homemakers, full-time parents.

So they come from different places. What's common to them is that often they want to increase their levels of happiness and always they want to do the same for others. Why? Because they realize that it's a good, it's an end in and of itself, as Aristotle describes it, and because it's also a means towards an end.

So, for example, take our managers – and we have quite a few managers in our cohorts – they understand that if they increase levels of wellbeing in their employees, their employees will become more creative, more productive. Teamwork will improve. Their organization, or their team will become more effective, successful. In other words, happiness pays; it's a good investment.

We have lawyers who often talk about how – and again, this is unfortunately a fact – lawyers are generally unhappy. It's one of the least happy professions. And they realize how important it is, not just in order to attract people into their law firm but also to help them perform at their best. Because we are more creative and more productive when we increase levels of wellbeing. So we have people coming for similar reasons and yet very different reasons. Similar reasons: the principle of increasing their own and others' happiness; that's similar to all. But where they apply it, that's very different among our students.

Grant: So I did notice that some of the promotion materials were couched within the terms “employee retention, shareholder value.” Do you see this the marketing department really trying to pitch to business leaders or why? Because it's like very specifically, in the promotional materials, pitched in that sort of language.

Tal: Also. They're not the only ones we target, but also.

Let me give you an example of why we're doing it and why I support doing it. So we did research, a lot of research, this was maybe twelve years ago, on schools and wellbeing. And so we created this, at that time it was a two year program, introducing more happiness in schools. I couldn't get it into schools. So what I did was I pleaded and begged with three close friends who are also school principals. And I said, “Please do me a favor. Can we introduce this into your schools?” And because they're my friends, they said yes.

And we introduced it into their schools. And we ran the program for two years. And we did a lot of research during those two years. And at the end we published in a couple of, eight journals, we published our findings. And our findings were that, yes, the program indeed increased levels of happiness and the program increased resilience levels and the program improved teamwork in the classroom.

And we also showed that grades improved. And as soon as we showed that and we published this finding, I had schools lining up wanting to introduce this program. And many of these principals, they've experienced pressure from parents and the pressure that they feel is for higher grades, better performance. And then they see this program and they introduce the happiness.

And to be honest, I don't care why they invite me. Let them invite this program because it improves grades. And I feel the same way about organizations. Why they invite or why they send their employees to a program in happiness studies: it could be because they really care about their employees becoming happier. That's great. Do they care about retention or being more profitable? And that's why they send their employees. So be it. I know how important this material is, plus I don't belittle the importance of retention and productivity and creativity and profitability, because a company won't survive without that.

Grant: Yeah. So I noticed we're coming up on time, but I have one more question.

So we think about perhaps the medieval university. It was easier to call it a “uni”-versity because there is a single unifying construct of inquiry, namely God, the contemplation of truth which is God, right? So God is no longer the unifying construct of inquiry at the university, which we know. And it hasn't really been replaced by anything else. So in many ways the university's very fractured.

I mean, you've been in universities. You know what I'm talking about. So, maybe one unifying object of the university is, like we said before, is to help students make money. But the university feels very fractured. It doesn't feel like a “uni”-versity. So to what extent might the concept of happiness in human flourishing serve as a unifier across various disciplines in the university?

Tal: So I do think that, generally speaking, “the good life” can be this unifying theme of a university. Or Aristotle would argue that it's happiness or eudaimonia, that is, the end towards which all other ends lead. So if I was creating university, yes, absolutely, I would call it “the Happiness University.” Or I would even say that the word “happiness” is redundant because what I mean by “uni,” a unifying theory, would be flourishing, happiness, again, take your pick.

Having said that, there's also something misleading about “university.” And now with all the sci-fi and superhero movies we're talking about “the multiverse,” and maybe talk about a “multiversity” instead of a “university.” And I know that some people have already picked up on that and that name.

In general, what I would like to see here is both. So, divergence as well as convergence.

Grant: Interesting. So, Tal, thank you so much. This was a really, really great conversation. I'm really excited about the work that you're doing. I'm really glad we had this opportunity to talk and maybe there's an opportunity to get even more people together that are thinking this way for an even broader conversation about what we can do to help these institutions that we work for. So thank you so much for the time and hopefully, our paths will cross again someday.

Tal: I very much hope so. Thank you for the work that you are doing.

Grant: Alright. Thank you.