Following up on my previous post, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness: The Free Press: Don’t Pursue Happiness. It Will Make You Terribly Unhappy., by Arthur Brooks (Vanderbilt) (Author, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness (2026)):
As someone who has dedicated my life to studying happiness, I am often asked two related questions: What is happiness? And how do we pursue it? During this semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, those questions have taken on new urgency. Two hundred and fifty years ago, after all, Thomas Jefferson famously declared that we have the God-given right to “the pursuit of happiness.”
What did he mean? And what does this mean for us in 2026?
This column is named for the Declaration’s founding promise, so you’d hope that I would know something about exactly how to pursue happiness. The problem is that when this tricky phrase is followed as we often understand happiness today—a physical sensation to be obtained—it leads in the wrong direction. The more you pursue feelings of happiness, the less of it you will get. …
[L]ive an honorable and upright life, do your duty, and happiness will pursue you. … For Jefferson, happiness was a way of living; feelings be damned. Today—for most people, at least—it is your feelings. …
People really are happier when they help others. … Researchers have even found physical evidence that other-serving behavior literally feels good. Specifically, altruistic activity engages the brain’s reward systems. …
Even more effective than giving money is acting generously. As Rabbi Yitzhak taught in the Babylonian Talmud some 1,500 years ago, “Anyone who gives a peruta [a small coin] to a poor person receives six blessings, and whoever consoles him with words of comfort and encouragement receives 11 blessings.” And the fact that this is a religious claim is no coincidence: Serving others as the secret to happiness has been taught by every serious religion throughout history. This is no doubt one reason that religious people who take their faith seriously are, on average, happier than others. They are following a moral aspiration that may seem harder than the animal impulse to selfishness, but that effort is rewarded with well-being.
The inverse of this virtuous cycle is the vicious one we find in the modern coincidence of self-focus, secularization, and unhappiness, by which our happiness declines as we focus ever more on ourselves and ever less on others and the divine. The 20th-century atheist and existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote:“Hell is other people.” In truth, hell is actually yourself, alone with your feelings at the center of a cold universe. …
What I’m telling you, in my column called The Pursuit of Happiness, is something very simple: Don’t pursue happiness in the way today’s culture advises. Pursue virtue, generosity, piety, integrity, and kindness. Your happiness will come from the love you give.
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