LISTEN: New York Times reporter offers insight on the pursuit of happiness

SALT LAKE CITY — Can you track happiness? 

New York Times reporter Jessica Grose asked herself this question after contemplating the ability to track feelings similar to tracking steps or heart rate. That prompted a written piece on whether or not happiness can be tracked in the modern age. 

Listen to Boyd Matheson’s full conversation with Jessica on Inside Sources here. 

 

Grose said she used websites like trackyourhappiness.org to prompt a daily intake of happiness. 

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Ultimately, none of it made her happier. In fact, she says, those kinds of sites instead annoyed her. 

Thus began an exploration as to what it means to quantify happiness. 

Happiness changes over time 

Grose found out along her journey that there are historians of emotion. 

“Basically people have been wrestling with this question as long as we’ve had writing… philosophy and thinkers,” she said. “Our idea of what constitutes happiness has really changed over time.” 

It’s only been very recently that people were supposed to outwardly show that they were happy, like smiling. 

“A lot of this outward expression of happiness or the idea that happiness is actually attainable in this life is very, very new.”

Historically, Grose found that people mainly believed that true happiness could only be obtained in an afterlife. 

The idea that happiness is something you an actively pursue and that doing so on a daily, weekly basis is a new idea. 

Connection with others

One of the few actual, quantifable things that show happiness is interconnectedness with other people.

“A lot of the very common happiness interventions, like meditation or exercise — they don’t work for everyone,” she said. “The one thing that seemed to have most evidence behind it was being with other people.”

Self-help culture often tells people that they need to work on themselves before they can go out in the word, Gross says. That couldn’t be further from the truth. 

“We grow by interacting with other people. It’s okay if we have conflict or imperfect interactions… it’s all building to something bigger or something outside ourselves.”