Let me start with what makes for a happy life in general. Research on happiness (see sources) largely agrees with a famous Spanish song:
Tres cosas hay en la vida,
salud, dinero y amor.
El que tenga estas tres cosas
que le dé gracias a Dios.
(Three things there are in life,
health, money, and love.
He [sic] who has these three things
should thank God.)
And, indeed, these three ingredients are key. First, you need to have your basic needs covered. Let’s be clear: despite all the romanticizing, “poor but happy” is a myth. While money doesn’t make you happy,* not having money does make you very unhappy. As does lack of health.
*There’s quite a bit of nuance to that.
After that, what matters the most for happiness are your social ties. You don’t need to have a ton of friends, or a super active social life; a few solid ties are enough. However, also shallower relations increase well-being, as does casual social contact (e.g. that brief chat with a fellow customer waiting in line at the post office).
What’s more, another important factor, generosity (aka pro-social behavior, or doing things for others) is also social in nature. Remember the last time you carefully prepared a gift for someone special? That’s the feeling. Generosity also brings happiness when directed at people outside our inner circle (e.g. helping a stranger find their way, volunteering, donating to charity). Which, to me, is our social nature bursting out of us.
(There are of course other relevant factors that are not social in nature, such as the freedom to choose what one wants to do in life; but social factors are much more important.)
I suspect that what makes for a happy life for a researcher is pretty much the same as what does it for the rest of humanity. But being a researcher comes with specific challenges with respect to all three of the main ingredients for happiness.
As for money, while a tenured researcher can typically make a decent living (although by no means in all countries!), the path to a permanent position is fraught with job instability and economic uncertainty. This conflicts with having one’s basic needs covered. As for health, our greatest occupational hazard is stress, stemming from both the aforementioned instability and the work overload typical of academia. These are crucial issues, and a great burden for so many of us; but they are also comparatively well known, and often discussed in academic forums.
In this post, I want to instead highlight challenges around that third precious ingredient, solid social ties. Our job has two key features that make it hard for us to obtain it. First, it’s very easy to get absorbed by our work. This has a good side to it (what we do for a living is stimulating and fulfilling), but it often leaves little room for a personal life, including the people that we care about –or could get to know and care about if we were not too busy for that.
There’s a palliative care nurse who compiled the most common regrets her patients expressed at the end of their lives. Very high in her list was working too much, and I could see that happening to many of us. Note that working a lot is not the regret; it’s working too much. “Too much” means that there’s no space for other things in life, and in particular for other people.
Moreover, we typically roam the Earth before settling somewhere, and we work in international teams. I for instance have lived in four different countries, and worked with people from countless more. This means that many of us have friends all over the world, but we can’t really go for a beer with them when we need to chat. At the same time, precisely because we have roamed so much, the ties from our childhood and early youth often become rather loose.
This is why, as researchers, we need to take extra care in building, maintaining and cherishing friendships and family ties. There is a silver lining, however: Our job instead makes generosity very easy. Even if you don’t have the time to, say, volunteer in an NGO, or the money to donate to charities, you get plenty of opportunities to help others simply by doing your job. And most researchers do that a lot, not only through research itself, which helps society, but also through teaching, mentoring, reviewing, participating in event organization, and more. This, to me, is one of the most rewarding aspects of our job.
I highly recommend the following, as entertaining and evidence-based sources about what makes us happy. You’ll also find pointers to the relevant scientific literature in them.
Also very interesting, and largely accessible, is the World Happiness Report, based on a yearly poll that evaluates happiness in 150+ countries.
Note: Most research on happiness has been done on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) populations, and there is evidence that many aspects around happiness vary cross-culturally. The World Happiness Report, luckily, covers a more diverse population, and supports what I’ve written in this post.
[Disclaimer: This post expresses my opinion, which is based on years of experience, therapy, readings, and podcasts. Use at your own discretion. Written in August-September 2024, CC BY-NC.]