I think you’re most happy when you’re not focused on yourself, you’re just focused on trying to help other people, trying to make other people happy. Mookie Betts: I can’t even really explain it.… You’re just able to escape from kind of reality to whatever that can get you into smiles, get you into a good mood, get you into wanting to help others. Chelsea Manning was at the Brooklyn apartment she'd had to quickly find after being released from jail into a world of looming quarantine in March.Īside from asking each interviewee to tell me about a time when they were happiest, and to tell me when they had been happiest in the past year, and to tell me about some other things, large and small, that made them happy, and to ask them about songs and other works of art and also things that they wear that make them happy, I tried to incrementally probe different aspects of happiness by asking all of them the following questions: What do you think happiness is? How important is it? What does it feel like? What's the opposite of happiness? What used to make you happy when you were a child? Have you become happier or less happy as you've got older? What have you learned about happiness, and about what makes you happy and what doesn't, as you grow older? How much of the time are you happy? Are you happier than most people, or are most people happier than you? What do you do when you're not happy? Are you more creative when you're happy or when you're unhappy? Do you think about happiness much? Can someone be too happy? Harris was at a friend's home, waiting for their dinner sushi delivery in London, a city he'd been based in since the spring lockdown halted a production of his play Daddy there.
Mookie Betts was at home in his hometown of Nashville, where he and his family had returned from Los Angeles for the off-season after his World Series triumph.
Roxane Gay was at home in New York, and Drew Barrymore was also in New York after filming a live episode of her new morning TV show. Tracy Morgan was at home in New Jersey where in the background for most of the conversation was the beeping of what sounded like a truck being backed up.
Goldie Hawn and Phoebe Bridgers were at their homes in different parts of the same city.
Roddy Ricch was driving around Los Angeles, running errands. Samantha Bee had just returned to New York City from a long summer in rural Connecticut with her husband and three children, where her weekly show had been filmed by her husband against the backdrop of the surrounding woods. (Aside from Chelsea Manning she meant to audio-call me on FaceTime but mistakenly videoed instead.) David Lynch and Anthony Hopkins spoke from long-term isolation in Los Angeles homes. I talked with the people who appear in this article separately over the telephone. 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. 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). There is a youthful singer-songwriter (Phoebe Bridgers), an acclaimed new playwright (Jeremy O. 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. To that end, I spoke to 12 very different people. I wanted to dig deeper into exactly that-into the very different and often contradictory ways we talk about, search for, and experience happiness. 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. But do we? And are they?Īlthough this article isn't about the strange and troubling year that we have just been through, it was, in part, inspired by it. 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. Happiness-and, at times, its absence-sits right in the center of so much that we do.