The Happiness Project: Finding Joy in Tough Times

Happiness 

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This is a very long article but has some valuable advice how different people deal with hard times! 

 

In a time like this, what does happiness look like? A dozen culture-shapers offer their very personal perspectives on searching for joy and finding meaning in life.

By Chris Heath

January 25, 2021

Illustration by Keir Novesky

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Happiness—and, at times, its absence—sits right in the center of so much that we do. We refer to it constantly in passing—as a goal, a state of mind, an outcome, an invocation, and so on—and we tend to do so as though we know exactly what we are talking about, and as though we know for certain that everyone else around us is talking about the same thing. But do we? And are they?

Although this article isn't about the strange and troubling year that we have just been through, it was, in part, inspired by it. At the height of the first lockdown—when people found themselves sundered, fending off unexpected anxieties and fears—I found myself thinking about happiness, and noticing from our collective distanced conversation just how individual, idiosyncratic, and mysterious our ideas of happiness seem to be.

I wanted to dig deeper into exactly that—into the very different and often contradictory ways we talk about, search for, and experience happiness. To that end, I spoke to 12 very different people. All of them are famous in some way, and each was chosen as a person with interesting life experiences who might articulate a distinct viewpoint. There is a youthful singer-songwriter (Phoebe Bridgers), an acclaimed new playwright (Jeremy O. Harris), a World Series-winning baseball player (Mookie Betts), a TV presenter and comedian (Samantha Bee), an actor recently turned TV show host (Drew Barrymore), two very different venerated actors in their later years (Anthony Hopkins, Goldie Hawn), a rapper (Roddy Ricch), a comedian who rebuilt his career after tragedy (Tracy Morgan), an activist who spent much of the previous decade in jail (Chelsea Manning), a film director and artist (David Lynch), and a writer (Roxane Gay). They were not, for the most part, selected as people who I expected to have any particular expertise on the subject of happiness, other than the expertise that we all have by virtue of having been either happy or not happy in our lives.