Stop Chasing Happiness. That's How You Find It.

I embedded in a monastery running a 1,500-year controlled experiment on the good life. Here's what I learned.

In Monday’s post, I mentioned how I lived with Benedictine monks at a monastery in New Mexico for my book Scarcity Brain. The chapter that came from that experience is probably the best thing I’ve ever written, and I’m sharing a truncated and actionable version of it here.

I was at the monastery to learn about happiness. Despite the world being safer and more comfortable than ever, each American generation is unhappier than the one before it. Global unhappiness hit a record high recently. Meanwhile, the happiness industrial complex—of books, apps, podcasts, courses, and “happiness labs”— keeps growing … right in step with misery.

First things first: We all want to be happy forever. But that’s a grand delusion.

We’re working against millions of years of evolution designed to make happiness fleeting. University of Michigan researchers found¹ that the brain evolved to treat happy feelings like bananas—they’re golden for a moment, but they rot away quickly, so we’ll move on to the next thing that we think will satisfy us.

This helped our ancestors survive. The scientists explained, “a state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.”

Yet these monks are happy, despite owning nothing, waking up at 3:45 a.m., living in silence, being celibate, and rarely leaving the monastery grounds.

Before I arrived at Our Lady of Guadalupe Monastery, I spoke to Alex Bishop, a professor at Oklahoma State University who has studied Benedictine monks and nuns extensively.

“The Benedictines have very high life satisfaction scores,” he said. “They have higher sense of purpose and meaning. They’re far higher than the general public. And you see this in other studies on them too. They’re pleasantly, well, happy.”

But how they lived and found “simple contentment,” as one of their holy books put it, was at odds with what most modern happiness research tells us to do.

“And I think that’s where these Benedictine communities become interesting,” Bishop told me. “It’s a rather austere lifestyle.”

I was about to find out just how austere it was, and what it could tell me—and now, so are you.

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From here you’ll learn:

• The biggest flaw in modern happiness research and what it can tell us.

• Five lessons from Benedictine monks, one of the happiest populations on earth, who got that way by accident.

• Exactly how to use these lessons to increase your happiness.

• Never-before-seen videos from my time at the monastery.

What the monks do differently

It was black on the edge of the Gila wilderness. I’d been driving a serpentine dirt mountain road edged by dark pines for nearly half an hour and was beginning to suspect I was lost.

Then my high beams caught two twenty-foot stucco pillars flanking the road. A cross topped each. The pillar to the right held decorative tiles showing an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe and square blue letters spelling out:

MONASTERIO

DE NUESTRA SENORA

SANTA MARIA DE GUADALUPE

The next morning, I asked a few of the monks about happiness.

They looked at me as if I’d asked them to solve for X. Happiness, it turns out, is not something they really think about. In all twenty thousand words of the Rule of Saint Benedict—the 6th-century document that governs their entire lives—the word “happy” doesn’t appear once.

And yet here they are, consistently scoring higher on life satisfaction than the general public—all by accident.