The Contest of Happiness

Gad Saad has cracked the code of happiness, so says Saad. In The Saad Truth About Happiness, Saad shares what he regards as eight secrets of happiness. Truth is a self-help book, and it seems to help Saad. Readers may approach Truth with the goal of learning about the eight secrets, figuring out why they have lain hidden for so long, and then applying the lessons to their own lives. A barrier to the mastery of the eight secrets is that Saad's narrative is self-focused. Truth is a 200-page record of his trials and triumphs and of the ideas and the people he loves to hate, which is the great mass of mediocre academics and the cohort of progressive activists, who often are, so Saad, the same individuals. Let us try to cut through the chaff of self-congratulation and extract the wheat of life lessons, that is, the eight secrets of happiness. Here they are, as listed in Chapter 1 and again in Chapter 9, in slightly rumpled order: Finding the right spouse and the right profession (both addressed in Chapter 3), the wisdom of moderation (Chapter 4), the cultivation of a playful mindset (Chapter 5), variety seeking (in moderation; Chapter 6), persistence and antifragility (both in Chapter 7), and the minimization of regret (Chapters 8 and 9). These are valid issues, and the index, if not the main text, contains many useful references.In Chapter 1, without offering clear definitions of happiness or well-being, Saad introduces himself as “the Happy Professor” (p. 1), a warrior-like persona who rose from humble origins to become an academic celebrity (dust jacket), a public intellectual, and a “De Facto Global Therapist” (p. 5). Yet he remains grounded thanks to “existential gratitude” (p. 6) and the blessing of “a sunny disposition” (p. 8). Having claimed his expertise with lived experience, Saad stumbles through bits of literature and personal memories (Chapter 2). Money, he writes, yields diminishing hedonic returns. If this is no secret thanks to the Bernoullis, it might still be counterintuitive. Take Saad's family of origin. They had a black sheep in their midst; Gad was “far less interested in material things than in ideas” (p. 19). Fame, like money, yields diminishing returns without delivering a clear satiation point. People who hunger for fame will never have their fill. Saad shows a vulnerability here. Perhaps his self-image as a global professor is not enough. Fame must continually be shored up with flattery. Saad has us know that he met five Nobel laureates and that Herb Simon “has praised some of [his] work” (p. 20) when Saad was a mere doctoral student. The chapter ends with a first round of testy remarks about progressive activists and politicians and the “deeply socialist” (p. 22) Canadian society. “I find,” Saad writes, high levels of “taxation more soul-destroying than life-affirming; it certainly does not make me happy!” (p. 23). This comes only a few pages after Saad's earnest affirmation of his nonmaterialist attitude. Ataraxia now!Finding the right spouse (partner) and the right job are secrets 1 and 2 (Chapter 3). Saad did well here. Not surprisingly, people with partners and employment are, on average, happier than people without. Choosing the right partner and the right job, however, requires good decision making and a bit of luck. Someone who recounts the positive elements of their love and work life capitalizes on the positive outcome while begging the question of how one may find the perfect mate and job. It is necessary to look closely at what it is that makes a choice right. Then, we see that a good partnership and a gratifying job depend on the granular elements of happiness. These elements are the other six Saad secrets. Sadly, Saad overlooks the role of social interest and a lack of self-absorption, both pillars of Bertrand Russell's (1930) masterly analysis. If it is within your power, Russell tells us, get out of your ego and attend to the ones you're with and the work at hand. Russell did not like the Stoics, but Marcus Aurelius (2023) said much the same.In the chapters that follow, Saad remains self-focused. Readers are left wondering how well his life lessons translate into actionable advice. When research findings are described, important details are missing. For example, if there is a sweet spot in whatever you are doing or consuming (secret 3, described in Chapter 4), then how can you find it? Saad justly credits the ancient Greeks with the insight to avoid extremes. For them, this was hard-won wisdom, as they were familiar with excess and ecstasy. If happiness lies in the balance of the worship of Dionysos and Apollo, excess may be sought in moderation. The alternative, to remain locked into the sweet spot, sounds boring (Saad also counsels variety, secret 5, Chapter 6). Again, however, finding and enjoying the sweet spot risks question begging. How do we know where the sweet spot lies if we haven't seen the extremes (Parducci, 1965)? Is it in our power to stay in the happy middle? Moreover, the sweet spot logic does not always apply. Wealth and fame seekers face diminishing returns, but they keep pushing for more. The sweet spot is just one more million dollars or one more accolade away. The wisdom of moderation cannot be achieved through psychophysical calculations; it requires a change of attitude and a sensitivity to other domains, such as social sensitivity (recall Russell and Aurelius) or playfulness (secret 4, Chapter 5).Saad goes through a range of examples to show that less is more. How do we know that his chosen number of examples is sweet? Arguably, an even greater number of illustrations would lead into tedium, and perhaps a smaller number might be more pleasing. The sweet spot does not yield its secrets easily. Consider work. One of the most poignant late-life regrets is having worked too much and neglected friends and family (secret 8, Chapter 8). Saad takes himself to task for his perfectionism. And yet, “that I recognize that I possess a frailty in my personality (maladaptive perfectionism) speaks to the importance of having self-awareness, including the capacity to engage in self-criticism” (p. 69). This is humblebragging, which, we suspect, yields its own hedonic value. Working harder and longer is not easily dismissed because it is necessary for the attainment of world-class achievement (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer, 1993). At last, Saad reports that “the relationship between a scientist's best work and his age follows the now-expected inverted-U curve” (p. 73). This finding does not follow from psychophysical and psychobiological computations, and we would not want to go straight to middle age and stay there in order to do our best work. In short, Saad's treatment of the middle-is-best secret is shaky in its derivations and brittle in its implications. As to the latter, we wonder whether Saad might not take a more genial view of what he calls his mediocratic colleagues at Concordia University.Things get more lightheaded with playfulness (secret 4, Chapter 5). Young mammals enjoy play, which was once seen as an evolutionary puzzle. Play takes time away from resting and feeding, and it makes the animal more vulnerable to predation. Yet playful animals are fitter because they learn survival skills. Feelings of joy are the immediate reinforcers of play, and so human beings can play in order to be happy. The secret of playfulness has been hiding in plain view. Saad takes his own playfulness rather seriously, calling on Megyn Kelly as a character witness (p. 93). Science too, Saad observes, can be play. Experimentation requires a playful mind paired with a willingness to execute the work with patience and precision. Saad gets distracted from this critical point, noting his own antics as a rap star and his clowneries on his YouTube channel. A quieter path to happiness lies in exposure to and immersion in Nature. Nietzsche, and other German intellectuals, cultivated the art of walking and thinking. This is a sort of play, but only if the concept is broadly understood. Saad then returns home. Being playful with one's partner or dog brings oxytocin-laden happiness, but so does the frisson of being courted by a secret service. Saad played with the Mossad (or did they play with him?), to his mother's horror. Why, he “had truly graduated to becoming an international man of mystery” (p. 105).The magical tour continues with the variety effect (secret 5, Chapter 6). Boredom, Schopenhauer taught, is the enemy of happiness, second only to pain. Since we adapt to repeated positive stimulation, it is good to look for something completely different. After taking another testy swipe at the ideology of diversity, Saad takes on academic specialization. He is a generalist, you see, who once gave a talk titled “Musings of an Interdisciplinarian and Iconoclastic Evolutionary Consumer Scholar” (p. 114). Specialists won't muse all over the place, but they have greater impact than generalists. In one offensive passage, Saad derides the life's work of Alice Isen, a pioneer of the study of emotion. Her work will be remembered and admired for decades, while the prospects for Saad's work are less certain. This self-focused narrative is a pity because the hedonic relevance of variety is an important topic. And it is a tricky one. Sometimes, variety seeking clashes with cultural norms (e.g., sex), or it conflicts with the pull of the familiar (e.g., food). The secret seems to be not to maximize variety but to find the right dose and to not rattle your mother.For persistence and antifragility (secrets 6 and 7, Chapter 7), Saad recalls a string of personal triumphs attesting to his resilience and grit. Some anecdotes support the idea that if you keep trying you will ultimately succeed. This narrative suffers from survivor bias. The survivors of shipwrecks, Diagoras of Melos observed, have the pleasure of giving thanks to the gods. Those who drown are never heard from again. The psychological challenge is to know when to give up (Dawes, 1988). The advice to keep going no matter what sounds sage only when filtered by outcome. What makes this issue so difficult is that, by and large, greater persistence, resilience, and disdain of rejection are correlated with success. Shall we commit then to unrelenting effort until we prevail or die trying? Does having a Plan B undermine the will to win with Plan A? One senses that more secrets lie buried here.The final secret is the disutility of regret (Chapter 8). Regret is an aversive emotion. An evolutionary psychologist should have a story to tell about its adaptive benefits. Regrets of past actions or inactions can turn into anticipatory regret, that is, the foreknowledge of regret if such actions or inactions were repeated. Thus, regret may play a role helping a person to live more effectively. On this view, regret can be functional. The secret is how to manage regret in order to make rational decisions (Connolly & Zeelenberg, 2002). The advice to eradicate regret also has some appeal, especially when no more corrective action can be taken (Krueger, 2010). To die without regrets may not mean to die happy, but still, who wants to take their grief to the grave? Saad refers to some elements of regret research, but again his narrative is soul-searching. He seeks to convince the reader (and himself) that he has no regrets. Along the way, he confuses disappointment with regret. He did not become an international soccer star, and, more poignantly, he did not secure an appointment at a first-class university. “I had come close to landing the coveted Harvard position, but regrettably I was ultimately rejected (according to the grapevine, in part for reasons that had little to do with my dossier)” (p. 145). Being “authentic to a fault” and having “brutally exacting ethical and professional standards . . . made it difficult for other academics to support my candidacy for a professorship at their school. They might admire my professional CV, but I do not fit the expected mold of the ‘stay in your lane’ academic” (pp. 165–166). Saad's secret, it seems, is to lay the blame at the doorstep of others if things don't turn out as they should, given his qualities and credentials.After this tour of Saad's secrets, readers may be excused for being out of breath. At long last, they may find comfort in knowing that there is a flourishing science of happiness, that there are useful and enlightening references to original work in Saad's index, and that, thanks to playful and gritty scientists, Nature reveals herself in the peer-reviewed literature, one secret at a time.

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