Are You Happy? What Science Says About Happiness and Well-Being

Do you think you're happy? What even is happiness? Recently I listened to an interview the journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro had on her podcast, The Interview, with Yale professor and cognitive scientist Laurie Santos ("Want to optimize your happiness? This happiness expert says: Don't").

Santos, a researcher on happiness, has expanded her findings well beyond the classroom, including as host of the podcast The Happiness Lab. This conversation between these two dynamic women was riveting to me and I highly recommend it. I was struck by how much their discussion resonated with me.

First off, what is happiness? Consider that there are two main kinds of happiness that we've understood as far back as the days of Aristotle, hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic happiness is feeling good in the moment, pursuing pleasure, avoiding pain. This is the typical kind of happiness we're sold in our culture and it's the sort of happiness we tend to chase after. Eudaimonic happiness is having meaning, purpose, connection in life. Our culture saturates us with the pursuit of hedonic happiness, yet eudaimonic happiness is the more enduring and deeper kind of happiness. It's not that there's a problem with hedonic happiness, but it's important to know and accept that it's fleeting and that the more we chase after it, the less happy we will actually be.

While writing this post, I took a break to enjoy some slices of a sweet and juicy watermelon. Talk about a little hedonic happiness on a hot summer day! But it's over now. It was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But it's over. And that's ok. I understand and allow that the pleasure was temporary. If I kept chasing after that feeling of pleasure and consumed the whole watermelon, I can assure you I'd no longer be happy! Or if I was so bothered by the fact that the pleasure happened but then it ended, that would definitely create a sense of suffering, not happiness. Easy to understand with a watermelon analogy, but maybe harder to grasp when it comes to things like binge-watching your favorite show, scrolling through your feed, buying something new, and on and on.

Santos discusses eudaimonic happiness as "being happy with your life." She points out it's not the absence of negative emotions, because that's part of life and those experiences are actually important signals for us. She discussed the toxic positivity we get inundated with suggesting that we should have "good vibes only." That's not how life works, but with that messaging people can really think there's something wrong with themselves if any negative emotion creeps in. And what happens when you think there's something wrong with you? You're not happy. Truly, toxic positivity is a trap that keeps us from being genuinely happy.

Beyond toxic positivity, Garcia-Navarro and Santos explore how so many challenges of life in these modern times impact our happiness. Our phones and digital devices keep us more disconnected from one another, as I've been exploring in the ongoing The Tangible Way series. One can get lost in an endless scroll of pursuing hedonic happiness. The algorithms hand feed us things we used to have to interact with others to learn about.

As a former employee of the iconic Bebop Record Shop that closed it's doors in 2011, I can really relate with Santos' example of how we used to go to record stores to learn about new music from others, but now it's often just an algorithmic suggestion. And, as an aside, these days we can't even always be sure it's a real artist an algorithm sends us because of the proliferation of AI generated music. But there have been musical artists I'm certain no algorithm would have ever suggested to me, who I fell absolutely in love with just because of the happenstance experience of connecting with another human about it.

As a music lover, the loss of that communal experience of music discovery, to connect with others also into music, to be able to actually flip through and hold a music product in your hand, to immerse in the liner notes, to just listen to music while listening to music, is profound. Thankfully there are still a few record stores hanging on. Please support them!

Beyond the growing extinction of record stores, our connection with others gets more eroded with our devices. The next time you're in a public space with others note how many are on their phones rather than making eye contact, smiling, and chatting with one another. And sometimes that's even happening amongst people who know one another. Perhaps it's a coping strategy for anxiety or a defensive action to keep others at a distance. But, we are actually social creatures who need genuine social connection. And social media doesn't count. Social media is antisocial, as an old bumper sticker I once owned said.

So what will bring us a more enduring happiness? Gravitating towards living with meaning and purpose, authentic connection with others (which can only happen from authentic connection with self), restorative solitude, understanding hedonic happiness is fleeting and allowing that without judgment. These are just a few of the ways to find more happiness with your life.

Mindfulness meditation won't make you happy, and that should never be the aim of meditation, but I think it supports becoming more authentically aligned with oneself, fostering the allowing of the rising and falling away of experiences, decreasing judgment, increasing the understanding of the interconnection of ourselves with all living beings, and navigating towards a life of deeper meaning and purpose. It won't make you happy, but I think it will cultivate the conditions to help eudaimonic happiness grow. At least, it's done that for me.

If you're curious about exploring eudaimonic happiness more intentionally, that's exactly what my Vision Voyage course is built around. The LOTUS Domains (Liveliness, Oneness, Togetherness, Upliftedness, and Soundness) offer a framework for looking at your life across the areas that matter most to genuine well-being.

So, once again, do you think you're happy? I hope you are. And if you're not quite there, it might be worth asking whether the happiness you've been chasing is the kind that actually lasts. Hedonic pleasures are real and worth enjoying, like that watermelon on a hot day. But a life that feels good to be living tends to come from something deeper. Meaning, purpose, real connection with yourself and others. Those things take more effort than scrolling to the next thing, but they're also a lot harder to lose.

Listen to the full conversation between Garcia-Navarro and Santos here (or find it wherever you enjoy podcasts): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/magazine/laurie-santos-interview.html