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Work & Happiness

January 12, 2024

It’s a new year and time to reflect on whether your job is serving to increase or decrease your happiness. In an era where there seems to be little loyalty to employees or to employers, perhaps taking a more active role in your career can lead to greater satisfaction in what you do and greater happiness in your life.

In 2014 economists determined that a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment lowers national well-being by more than five times as much as a one-percent increase in the inflation rate. Is our well-being impacted more by our jobs than the overall value of our paychecks? Given how much time we spend at our jobs, what we do for a living greatly impacts our satisfaction and enjoyment.

“Hundreds of studies have shown that job satisfaction and life satisfaction are positively related, and causal: liking your job causes you to be happier all around,” writes Arthur C. Brooks in his book Build the Life You Want, which is co-authored by Oprah Winfrey. “Engaging in work with your whole heart is one of the best ways to enjoy your days, get satisfaction from your accomplishments, and see meaning in your efforts.”

The authors explain how four factors help determine whether you can live a happy life: family, friends, work, and faith. No one of these is more important than the others. And, assuming you’re earning enough money from your job to provide for your basic needs, you should seek to make your work “love made visible” in the words of Brooks and Winfrey. Among other things, this means choosing extrinsic rewards only to the point of providing for your economic requirements and intrinsic rewards for your overall happiness.

To do this with your career, the authors suggest putting some space between your job and your life by making friends outside of where you work. Take weekends off and partake in true vacations to ensure your life is more than what you do for a living. Your career or job should be an extension of who you are and not vice versa: work to live rather than live to work.

Specifically, with regard to enabling your work to be love made visible, Brooks and Winfrey suggest the challenges are:

  1. Figure out your career goals. To do this, seek intrinsic rewards from what you do to ensure that you are not simply motivated by financial motives or fancy titles. Intrinsic rewards will lead to inherent fulfillment and enjoyment when you do your work. You can often determine whether you have enough intrinsic rewards by reflecting on how you speak to other people about what you do for a living.
  2. Decide whether your career path is linear, steady state, transitory or spiral. Is your path a ladder, a lattice, or something else? Then actively pursue that path by paying attention to your internal signals as a guide for whether and when to move from one position or company to another.
  3. Determine whether you have a work addiction by honestly looking at your patterns and assess the health of your habits. Are they serving your mental and physical health, your relationships, your overall happiness? Depression and anxiety are strongly associated with work addiction—either the cause or the result. Making time for family and friends, hobbies, and exercise can reduce the likelihood of these and improve your happiness.
  4. Own up to whether your identity is defined by what you do. It’s all too easy to lose your true self to a representation of yourself that is based on your job title or duties. Avoid this self-objectification, which is allowing your job to determine who you are. Make sure you get space from your work and have people in your life who see you as a person and not just as a professional.

While your work is not the only factor that can determine your happiness, it can certainly play an important role. Therefore, reflect on whether you are taking an active role in your career. Ensure you don’t let your identity define who you are based on what you do. And, most importantly, don’t neglect your family, friends and faith as these are equally important for building the life you want and one that is happier.

Happiness Through Work

December 17, 2013

Social scientists have boiled down Americans’ level of happiness to three major sources: genetics, events and values. The first two are largely out of our control, but the last one is where we have a great deal of control with which can ultimately determine our happiness.

According to a University of Chicago’s General Social Survey of Americans conducted since 1972, it found that about a third of Americans reported they are “very happy,” about half say they are “pretty happy,” and 10% to 15% report being “not too happy.” And these ratios have stayed about the same over 40 years.

In a recent New York Times opinion piece titled “A Formula for Happiness” and in similar content on a YouTube video, Arthur C. Brooks explains how research has determined that 48% of our happiness is inherited and another 40% is based on events that have occurred in the recent past. Much of that may be beyond our control. This leaves just 12% that can help us alter our happiness quotient.

Many people may think there is direct relationship between money and happiness. And this is generally true for the poor.

But Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman found that once people reach a little beyond an average middle-class income level (about $75,000), even big financial gains don’t bring about much more, if any, happiness.

So that brings us to the 12% of which all of us have some control over our happiness. And this is in our values.

According to Brooks, these values come down to four things upon which we have a great deal of control. These are: faith, family, community and work.

Faith does not necessarily mean being religious, but is more about the interior or spiritual life. Family is obvious, but may require a new perspective with regard to how integral these people are to our overall happiness. Community means cultivating important people into our lives and being charitable. This includes the friends we choose to associate with and how generous we are to those outside of our immediate family.

And then there is work.

“Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others,” says Brooks. This secret to happiness through work is what Brooks calls earned success.

“This is not conjecture; it is driven by the data,” says Brooks. “Americans who feel they are successful at work are twice as likely to say they are very happy overall as people who don’t feel that way. And these differences persist after controlling for income and other demographics.”

I should point out that Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C. public policy think tank with an obvious free market perspective. Its mission is “to defend the principles and improve the institutions of American freedom and democratic capitalism.“

His perspective is that free enterprise is the right approach to reaching happiness through work. He says that if you want happiness not only for you but for others around the world, then you should work for free enterprise everywhere.

I won’t debate the potential political and economic argument here, but instead stay focused on the element of pursuing work that matters to you which can help determine your happiness.

What about you? Are you happy? Are you very happy? Is there something you can do to alter the values upon which determine your level of happiness?

Here at the end of another year, perhaps it’s time to take stock of where we are. Since our faith, family and community is ultimately under our control, it comes down to whether or not we choose to take responsibility for them or not. The same is true for work.

Do you believe you are creating value with your contribution at work? If so, the research says that you are more likely to be happy with your life.

As I’ve written about on a number of occasions, the work we do is a lot more than simply a paycheck and a way to provide for us monetarily. In our work, we have the opportunity to find fulfillment, a sense of purpose, and a reason for being that can ultimately help determine our overall happiness.

Don’t we owe it to ourselves to find and make ourselves happy by pursuing work that joins our passion and skills to provide value to us, and to the world?