The more religious I am the happier I am. But I actually argue that there are very earthly reasons for why that link might exist. To the extent that religion provides me greater communality, greater cohesion within group members, it offers me some form of purpose and meaning, it allows me to have greater bonds of reciprocity within group members— those are all very earthly human needs.
Gad Saad, Ph.D., one of the best-known public intellectuals fighting the tyranny of political correctness, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, where he held the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption from 2008 to 2018. A pioneer in the application of evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, he is the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, The Consuming Instinct, the international bestseller The Parasitic Mind, and numerous scientific papers, and the editor of the book Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. A blogger for Psychology Today, he has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and interviewed by Dave Rubin, Glenn Beck, Megyn Kelly, and Joe Rogan, among many other high-profile platforms.
DRG: Dr. Saad, welcome. It’s pleasure to meet you. How are you doing?
GS: Doing well, sir, happy to be with you. It’s always exciting to venture into new ecosystems, so thank you for this opportunity.
DRG: Thank you as well. Your book is a captivating study about happiness and its place in our lives. And it’s a subject that I’m really interested in personally, as it intersects with a lot of my writing and work in religion and literature. There are a lot of places where we could begin our discussion, but I was interested in starting with a survey that came out recently that said that 69% of people in 42 countries stated that happiness is extremely important to them. And yet it seems like there’s been a lot of pushback in recent years against the idea that we should view happiness as important part of our lives, with some writers and influencers arguing that happiness is not really something that we should be pursuing and that we would be better off if we didn’t make it such a goal in our lives. My question is, do you view yourself and your book as part of a pushback against this pushback, if you will? And, if so, why do you think it’s important to oppose this anti-happiness narrative?
GS: Yes, thank you for that question. I wasn’t even aware of the original pushback in order to push back against that. I think the people who say, “oh, you know, you shouldn’t pursue happiness,” or “there’s a deleterious element to pursuing happiness” I think are missing a key element to happiness, which is that you shouldn’t be willfully pursuing happiness. So in the last chapter of my book I have a quote from Victor Frankl where he’s basically saying—I’m paraphrasing his words, I don’t have the exact word in front of me—but he’s basically saying, as relating to success, don’t pursue success willfully. Success is something that comes as a result of doing the right things. The exact same quote applies to happiness—simply replace the word “success” with the word “happiness.” So I don’t get up in the morning and say, “my objective today is to be happy”; but rather if I have adopted a certain set of mindsets—if I have implemented certain decisions that I know statistically speaking are correlated with downstream effects of happiness—then I will wake up inherently happy. So I agree that the willful pursuit of happiness is not going to make you happy. But let’s take an example. If you have made a good choice in terms of the spouse with whom you’re going to share your life and if you’ve also made the right decision in terms of which job provides you with the greatest amount of purpose and meaning, well, you’re well on your way to cracking the code to happiness. Because if I wake up in the morning next to the person in the bed with me that I really like, then I go off to a job that, you know, makes me rub my hands in existential glee, and then I return home to that bed next to that person that I liked in the morning when I left, well, I’m pretty much happy throughout the day. I didn’t willfully set out to say “I need to be happy and therefore let me do A B and C.” I live the life that is authentic to me, whereby the choices that I make are congruent with my values, and then the result of that is that I’m content and happy.
DRG: Jumping off that, there’s so much discussion in our culture on happiness and how we should be pursuing it and whether we should be pursuing it. I think you’ve given us here a great modus operandi of how to go about achieving it in our lives. With all the discussion about happiness, though, I wonder if you feel like we still don’t talk about it enough? Or that we don’t talk about it in the right ways?
GS: Right. So I think that speaks very much to the first answer that I gave, which is that it is wrong to talk about it as though you should “pursue” happiness. So, I don’t know if this is a perfect analogy, but if I were to say to you, “we’ve evolved a mechanism called ‘kin altruism,’ where we’re altruistic towards our kin. Why would we evolve that? Why would I jump into the river to save three of my children?” Well, if you understand that evolution only cares about the propagation of your genes, well then it makes perfect evolutionary sense from an evolutionary calculus perspective that even if I were to die when jumping in that river to save the three children, the three children on average share 50% of their genes with me, right? Therefore it makes it makes adaptive sense that I would engage in this behavior. Now why am I giving this analogy to you? Most people who instinctively jump into the river to save their three children are not willfully aware of the evolutionary calculus that I just told you. They didn’t say, “well, you know, if it was only one child I may not jump into the river because that’s only 50% of my genes,” right? It’s an instinct that’s built into us, and then the behavior manifests itself, and if the behavior is adaptive, then it makes sense that evolution would select it. So in that sense happiness is something similar. It’s not something that is necessarily within the purview of my conscious machination. I don’t get up and say, “there are five things that I can do today to maximize my happiness.” But, again, if I’ve lived an authentic life, if I’ve done enough introspection to say, “what do I want out of life? I would love to be a parent; I would love to raise children; I would love to be married to someone who respects me and who’s my best friend; I would love to have a job that, you know, every single day gives me great purpose and meaning; I try to do things in moderation (I have a chapter on ‘everything in moderation,’ which Aristotle had talked about, Maimonides had talked about, Buddha had talked about, and so I demonstrate that for most things in life the edict of ‘all things in moderation’ is exactly correct); I also live life as though it’s a playground—I immerse myself in play, even when pursuing very serious things like science.” So there’s a set of these edicts which if you apply, statistically speaking, they will increase your likelihood of being happy. “Statistically” is really the important word here, because unlike many books in the self-help market that guarantee that “if you do ABC you’ll be happy” and “if you do ABC you’ll be a better employee,” I’m saying that life is a game of statistical probabilities. If you want to reduce your chances of getting lung cancer, don’t smoke; but people who don’t smoke also get lung cancer. You certainly reduce your chances if you don’t smoke. So by the same token, all other things being equal, if you pursue intellectual variety-seeking, that’s going to increase your happiness. If you live life in such a way that you minimize the likelihood of future regrets, if you choose the right spouse, that’s going to make you happen. So, yes, we do speak about happiness the wrong way only in the sense that we think that we should have a general goal called “Happiness.” No. Happiness comes from living a good life.
DRG: I certainly agree with that. My approach is that if you pursue the good you can get happiness as an ancillary benefit. But you can’t grab it directly.
GS: Exactly right.
DRG: I’m really interested in some of the figures you mentioned whom you said you wrote about in relation to happiness—Aristotle, Maimonides, Victor Frankl. Do you view your approach to happiness as influenced by any of them in particular?
GS: I could point to a singular one, although I think it’s more of a school of philosophy. I do think there’s a lot of value in the Stoics. Not all of it, though. So, for example, the Stoics were very good at being the precursors to cognitive behavior therapy. Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is the idea that oftentimes we suffer from psychic maladies because our cognitions about something is wrong, and if I can now change the cognition towards that something, then better behaviors will ensue. So the way that you view something is often what causes the harm more than the thing itself. That’s exactly one of the fundamental tenets of stoicism from 2000 years ago, where—I’m paraphrasing the exact tenant, but it basically says it’s oftentimes not the event that is the most painful but the manner by which we react to the event. That is within my control; the event happening is not within my control. How I choose to respond to that event is within my control. And so I take great solace in that because we know from contemporary Clinical Psychology that CBT is one of the most powerful effective tools to combat all sorts of mental illness. And so I would say that the Stoic philosophy is certainly one that is worth exploring if you’re interested in happiness. If I talk about a singular person then probably Aristotle, because first of all he’s written some incredible stuff on that. A good friend of mine who’s a fellow Lebanese author—his name is Nassim Taleb—he used to kind of tease me many years ago. He said, “you know, Gad, I don’t know what you guys study in psychology, because everything that there is to understand about human nature the ancient Greeks have already told us.” I understood he was kind of ribbing me, but as I was doing a deep dive in terms of the research for this book I started thinking that maybe Nassim was on to something because every time I would get an insight that I thought was unique and brilliant on my part because I came up with it, well here comes Epictetus—he’s already said it two thousand years ago. And here comes Aristotle and he beat me to it by a couple millennia. So, that was quite a humbling experience, because you really do realize that while many philosophical traditions are very rich and varied, there really was something in that Greek water that made those ancient Greeks and in some cases Romans quite unbelievably adept at understanding of human nature.
DRG: Oh, for sure. Do you know the South Park episode “The Simpsons Already Did It”?
GS: I don’t.
DRG: You know South Park, right?
GS: I do know what it is, but I never watched it.
DRG: It’s such a great show! The humor is so sharp, and the satire—they did one episode where the boys are playing and they’re trying to come up with wild schemes and plots. In one of them one of them says “let’s go blot out the sun!” and the other says, “oh, they already did that in a Simpsons episode.”
GS: [Laughs.]
DRG: And so then the first one says “let’s go chop off the head of the statue of the town pioneer! We’ll create chaos that way!” And the other one responds again, “the Simpsons already did it!”
GS: [Laughs.]
DRG: Every time they try to come up with some wild and crazy scheme they discover that it was already done in a Simpsons episode.
GS: So I’m South Park and The Simpsons are the ancient Greeks? [Laughs again.]
DRG: So I’m working on this book about Dante’s Divine Comedy, and there’s this one section of the book I’ve titled “The Greeks Already Did It,” because every time Dante tries to create this fantastical situation he’s almost always drawing on something from Greek mythology.
GS: Yes [nodding and smiling].
DRG: It’s so hard for him to create something original. So I titled the chapter “The Greeks Already Did It,” like “The Simpsons Already Did It.”
GS: Right [smiling].
DRG: It’s amazing in all the different fields, whether it’s philosophy or literature or even apparently psychology how many different disciplines still draw on them. So getting back to those Greeks, it’s fascinating to me that you mentioned the Stoics as the school of thought that is an influence to your approach to happiness, because I think that many of us today who are familiar with Greek schools of thought who are thinking about happiness might think more about the Epicureans than the Stoics. So to use the Stoics as a model for happiness is really quite an interesting approach.
GS: Thank you.
DRG: So what about for the people who do believe that happiness is important—the people who are pushing back against the anti-happiness narrative, for those who say no, happiness is important and should be a goal in our lives—but there’s still a debate about where in our lives we should be pursuing it. It seems to me that one of the most contentious areas where this comes up is in the area of work. Should we be looking for happiness in work? Or should we be viewing our work as a means to an end and looking for our happiness elsewhere? Or should we be expecting that our work—our careers, our jobs—could make us happy?
GS: Right—so in an ideal world, yes, I think that we can obtain happiness from our chosen job or profession. Now, I will in a second explain what happens if we can’t get that from work. But for now, if I’m going to describe what are the key metrics that we should be aspiring to obtain in an ideal job, I would say there are two key metrics. Metric One, or Pursuit One: Any job that allows you to instantiate your creative impulse, all other things equal, is a direct path to purpose and meaning. Because the act of creation—immersing yourself in creativity—is by definition something that’s going to give you purpose and meaning. That can cover a very large panoply of professions. I could be a standup comic; I could be a chef; I could be an architect; I could be an author and professor; I could be a podcaster; each of these people are immersed in completely different domains. But they share one thing in common: they’re creating something new that heretofore didn’t exist until I came along and created this standup routine to make people laugh; created the dish that’s going to make a great culinary experience; created the bridge; created the book; created the podcast that we’re doing right now. The act of creation is akin to a mystical process. There’s something that is so beautiful in it. When I open my laptop, the first time I open it and open the document and strike the first letter of that new book and then through this incredible process of these neuronal firings happening in my brain translating into my fingers [I create the book] and then twelve months later, fourteen months later, I send that book to the publisher, and then a year after that people send me selfies of my book with them sitting on a beach somewhere, what could be more purposeful and meaningful than that, right? I have shared something from the deep recesses of my mind that now someone else is choosing to consume in their time. That person at the beach could choose one million things to do, and somehow for that small moment I won their attention. That’s very humbling, that’s very beautiful. And the same thing applies if I were a standup comic, or whatever other one of those creative professions. So, number one, if possible, if you do something with creativity, that’s going to give you purpose and meaning.
The second one is maybe a bit more earthly and less philosophical: Anything that grants you temporal freedom in your day-to-day is going to make you happy. So, I work very hard, I work very long days. But, I’m a vagabond. Right now I’m talking to you, and we’re having a fun conversation; then I’ll go off to the café for two hours and start thinking about my next book prospectus; then I’ll go and—in French you say “flâner”, like vagabond, I’m just kind of floating around—I’m always working, but I don’t have what I call “scheduling asphyxia.” Contrast that to the factory worker who doesn’t even have the dignity to decide when they can relieve themselves by going to the bathroom—at 10:15 there is a union-mandated bathroom break, and at 12 you get to eat for 25 minutes. And so that temporal freedom—the fact that I can go off and create, and that I can do so at my pace—that doesn’t mean that I don’t have specific meetings to go to. But generally speaking I can float around. That gives me great happiness. Now, what about the person who doesn’t have the luxury to do that? They have two children that they didn’t expect to have this early in their lives, they have to put food on the table and they become bus drivers—well, any honest job is dignified, but in this case, you may not be able to instantiate what I’m saying [about the link between creativity and happiness] within your job. How about after you finish your job? [Let’s say] you’ve always wanted to do glass-blowing as an art form. Why don’t you, instead of watching TV for four hours, sign up at the local high school where they have an adult learning center for glass-blowing and ceramics and do it then? So there’s still a way for me to instantiate my creative impulse ideally at my job. But even if not at my job I could do it elsewhere.
And if I could just add one more thing to my long-winded answer—even if you’re a bus driver, there are ways that you can approach your job that comes closer to the idea that I’m proposing. So for example, I have been on a bus ride where because I’m someone who has a very open spirit and I’m always looking to chat with random people about all sorts of interesting things, that serendipity of meeting strangers—the magic of that—I remember I think I was returning either from New York or from Albany back to Ithaca (I did my PhD at Cornell University which is in Ithaca, New York) and on that bus ride back, it was like a couple hours long, I struck up this incredible conversation with the bus driver, and it was a very intimate conversation. As I was leaving the bus a lady came up and she said “I just want to thank you.” I said “thank me for what?” I hadn’t even spoken to her. She said “I couldn’t help but overhearing you and the bus driver chatting, it was a beautiful conversation.” Well, that bus driver created the opportunity—talking about creativity—he was open to the world, he was open to having an exchange with a random stranger. Now contrast that to another bus driver who views his job as “I take people from A to B, otherwise I’m completely closed off.” Both of these people are bus drivers; one of them creates much more opportunities for communal bonding and so on. So I would say that those are the two fundamental markers that lead to occupational happiness.
DRG: Yes, splendid answer. There are so many different aspects of that that I would want to go into. One of them that jumped out to me—one aspect that you brought up—was planting the elements of happiness in your scheduling, of how you are able to find freedom within your work schedule. I really resonated with that part because as someone in a similar space—in academia and also as a writer, I don’t have that kind of nine-to-five schedule or a factory worker’s schedule, and so there’s a blessing in that, you could say, but also a kind of curse, at least as some might describe it, because you’re always working. Because you’re never free from what you do. You’re always thinking about ideas, always thinking about your writing, and even though you may not have a set office, your office is everywhere, because your ideas are everywhere.
GS: Your office is here! [pointing to his head.]
DRG: Yes, exactly! So from the moment you get up in the morning until the moment you hit the pillow at night you can always be working. But then you need to see if you can find some freedom within that perpetual work.
GS: Exactly.
DRG: Jerry Seinfeld once described that—I heard him being interviewed talking about this, about how he’s always working too, because ideas for his jokes are always coming to him, and he’s always trying to refine them. And so they asked him “isn’t that a kind of torture? That you can never be free from work?” So he said, “well, the optimal work that you want to find is the right kind of torture for you.” [Laughs.]
GS: Exactly [laughing].
DRG: So, maybe from your perspective you’re trying to shift the paradigm of that. Instead of looking at it as torture, to look at it as a kind of happiness, because you found that right form of “torture,” or burden or whatever it is you want to call it—you found the right one for you.
GS: I actually call it—I mean, not to use an ephemeral term—but I find that it’s a form of intellectual hedonism. I operate in the greatest pleasure-seeking ecosystem, which is the world of ideas; nothing could be more pleasurable than that. So even if we use the regular colloquialism of “Epicurean pursuits,” well, yes, juicy burgers are great, but juicy ideas? Now that’s really what titillates me. I understand that there’s the burden of always having the hyper-activation of your thinking, but if I’m thinking about important things—if I’m not thinking about the mundane administrative things of being a professor that is asphyxiating but the creative stuff, what should I think about for my next book, what would be the narrative of my next book, I could spend ten days without sleeping thinking about that stuff. I get high on it.
DRG: Yes, me too. And maybe that’s where you can bring in Epicureanism as a way to enjoy what you’re doing.
GS: Exactly. Yes, I agree.
DRG: For a concluding question, I’m intrigued by the connection between religion and happiness. In your book you talk about the links between religion and happiness. I’m curious if you think that people who are “tone deaf” to religion (as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin once described himself) have a lesser chance of being happy than those who have faith, because, as you discuss, there is this link between religion and happiness. So is religion one more means of attaining happiness? And for people who don’t have this religious sensibility, how could they be able to access the kind of happiness that religious people can experience?
GS: That’s a great question. I actually exactly address that, because I didn’t want the people who were irreligious to walk away thinking they’re doomed because they have fewer pathways to happiness. So you’re exactly right, there is a moderate positive correlation between religiosity and happiness—the more religious I am the happier I am. But I actually argue that there are very earthly reasons for why that link might exist. To the extent that religion provides me greater communality, greater cohesion within group members, it offers me some form of purpose and meaning, it allows me to have greater bonds of reciprocity within group members—those are all very earthly human needs. And then religion is simply instantiating those human needs—it’s offering a vehicle for those human needs. Then it makes perfect sense for the research to have found that there’s a positive correlation between religiosity and happiness.
But then right after that, to get to your question, I say “but wait a second— what if you’re not religious?” Well there I argue that there are still ways by which I can go out and grab the awe-inspiring spiritual experiences that cause life to be magisterial. So back to my earlier point about striking up a conversation with a random stranger. That moment when two people who until that moment did not know each other could immerse themselves in an intellectual tango for the next thirty minutes and both walk away feeling enriched—that was a spiritual experience. Looking at how my children are growing and developing into young teenagers who have a moral code, who have interesting ideas to discuss with me—that is a spiritual experience. So there are many ways by which I can tickle my spiritual itch. One way is through immersing myself in my faith, but there are many many other ways by which I can also achieve that goal.
I argue that there are—in addition to the religious pathway—there are two other ways by which we can all be immortal. If I don’t believe in religion I can still aspire to be immortal. It’s either through genetic propagation—I mean literally having children; this causes me to be immortal. My children are a vehicle of my immortality. I know it’s not romantic, but it’s literally true. The other way by which I can be immortal is through mimetic immortality. If I write a book that is going to be read for many years to come, that legacy causes my ideas to be immortalized—in a library, in other people’s minds, and so on. So there are many ways by which I can scratch that religious itch—either by reading some Jewish or Christian or Islamic text, or whichever your religion, or simply by appreciating the majesty of life.
DRG: That’s a really beautiful answer and a wonderful way to conclude this discussion. Thank you so much Dr. Saad for your time and your graciousness. The book is The Saad Truth About Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life, available now from Regnery. I highly recommend it to all readers out there.
GS: Thank you Dr. Goodman. Cheers!
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The featured image is “The Dance Pavilion” (1891) by Erik Henningsen, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The image of Gad Saad is This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.