LIFE PATH

Three Keys To Happiness

What I learned from 100 teenagers in 50 states

This is Eric Touchet.

I took this photo when he was 18, and we were on his shrimp boat in the Louisiana Bayou.

I was working on my book, One Hundred Young Americans, which is a cross section of youth culture in America.

We went to all 50 states, and I photographed and interviewed every kind of kid you can imagine.

Eric considered himself a country boy, and he told me,

“Country boys like to get muddy and go fishing.”

His favorite thing in the world was to go out shrimping — which you gotta do at night, because the shrimp stay buried in the mud when the sun’s out.

Of all hundred kids, Eric was the most easygoing and seemed the most content.

I remember talking to him and thinking,

“I can’t even imagine this kid getting angry.”

So I asked him…

“Eric, can you tell me about the last time you got angry at someone?”

He thought about it for a long time and then looked me in the eye and said, with a Cajun drawl,

“Mike, I don’t reckon I’ve ever been angry.”

I know you think that’s B.S. but — if you’d met this kid — you’d get it.

He was a lot like Calvin (left), a 17-year-old farm kid from Iowa.

And Mikayla (opposite), a 15-year-old from Wisconsin who grew up working in her family’s dairy, where 32 cows simultaneously got the milk sucked out of them — 10 gallons per day from each animal.

The day I took this photo was the last time I drank milk. I quit after seeing the process up close.

There was cow shit everywhere, and the hoses would constantly come loose from the cows’ teats; they’d fall into the poop and suck it up until someone came over to stick it back on the cow.

The poop would go down the tube and into the giant milk tanks.

Mikayla told me that everyone in her family had a glass of milk with every meal, but they got it from the supermarket, because the raw milk in those tanks wasn’t safe to drink.

Mikayla, Calvin and Eric were three of the happiest kids I’d ever met, and they had three things in common:

(1) They were totally in touch with the land — spending hours each day working outside.

(2) They had less screen time each day than anyone else I’d ever met.

(3) They were super-close with their families.

All three of these match up with findings of scientific studies on happiness.

In fact, these hundred kids taught me so much about what happiness is — and what it isn’t — that I became slightly obsessed with the science of happiness, which has exploded in the past decade.

The Harvard Happiness Study

The coolest study on happiness began over 80 years ago at Harvard, when they started following a group of 700 teenage boys in Boston.

They talked to them every single year since then, and 60 of them are still alive now — and still in the study!

The researchers looked at every conceivable factor in these guys’ lives to figure out what makes a happy life.

And what they found is shockingly simple.

Happiness, throughout life, depends mainly on two things:

(1) Having strong relationships

Higher quality relationships with spouses, friends and family resulted not only in greater happiness, but also in significantly higher income and career achievements.

Strong relationships were the main predictor of every kind of success they looked at.

And it wasn’t about the number of people in their lives; it was the quality of the relationships they had.

(2) Choosing to be happy

Virtually all the men in the study who lived into their 70s eventually recognized that happiness was a choice, and they began to do what made them happy, more and more as they aged.

But some of the men had that insight way earlier in life, and they lived much different lives.

They didn’t sweat the details as much as others.

They moved past failures and hard times more easily.

They saw life as being too short to waste on things that don’t matter.

And they understood that life is what’s happening right now — not some time in the future — so it’s worth finding a way to enjoy this moment in time.

That is exactly what kids do, because they don’t know any better.

Life for them is lived in the present.

For kids who are allowed to really be kids, life is all about having fun.

Which is why all major studies show that happiness peaks around age 16.

This graph shows the results of seven major studies covering a total of 1.3 million people in 51 countries.

Some of these studies asked people to rate how “happy” they were in life.

Others asked about “life satisfaction” or “fulfillment,” but they all got the same U-shaped curve.

We’re happiest as teenagers, and we get less and less happy — until around age 52 — and then it turns around.

These are averages, so your experience may be totally different.

I’m the happiest I’ve been in my whole life right now, and high school was a low point for me… so this curve does not fit me, but it does fit human beings overall.

Why would our happiness peak at age 16?

Well, I can tell you my opinion, based on these hundred kids, but first let me introduce a few more of them.

This is Griffin, a 16-year-old in Colorado who was born deaf and has two deaf parents.

I asked him if he’d get surgery to be able to hear (if and when that’s possible).

He told me that what I was saying was “sacrilege.”

He said being deaf isn’t a flaw.

It’s a blessing.

This is Brooks, an 18-year-old from Lexington, Kentucky.

He said he’d do anything on a dare.

So I asked if he’d eat his skateboard.

Turn the page to see his response.

And this is Brielle, a 14-year-old in Oregon who said she was proud to be called a “band geek.”

In her interview, she said,

“I want people to see that I have a silly side…

That I’m just a fun person.”

These kids capture the mindset that explains the U-shaped curve.

Griffin finds joy in deaf culture and has no interest in becoming anything other than he is right now.

Brooks loves the idea of doing anything he’s never done before, and he’ll go to ridiculous lengths to make other people laugh.

Brielle has chosen the identity of band geek — for the moment — and, like most of the kids I met, will move fluidly from one identity to another, without worrying at all about whether she’s doing the right thing.

She just flows and has fun.

Recently, I shot some videos in retirement communities around the country, and pretty much every single person I met had the same mindset as these kids — and they were definitely enjoying their final years.

They valued laughter, fun and human connection above all else, and they didn’t sweat any of the details.

They took every day as it came, and they were grateful to have another day to spend with their friends — playing bingo and doing chair yoga.

Now, here’s my question for you:

What if we all decided to adopt this mindset, starting right now?

No matter how far you are from being 16, you definitely have the power to choose to see life the way a 16-year-old does.

You can choose to focus more on fun and laughter than on the challenges you’re facing.

You can do the things you have fun doing, the things you’re happy doing — without feeling guilty about not being productive.

You can focus more on people and relationships and less on progress and outcomes.

You don’t need to wait until your golden years to do all of this.

All you need to do is decide to do it.

You just need to say, right now:

“I’m going to live life more like a kid and less like a grown-up.”

Because — when you think about it — is there anything more important than being happy?

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This article is an excerpt of the forthcoming book, Your Best Life: Tactics, Tools and Insights to Create a Life of Fulfillment, Joy and Abundance, by Mike X — to be released in October, 2022.

For more on Mike X, see mikex.blog.

And check out his YouTube channel, YouTube.com/mikeXtv.