Finding The New Happy
A different story about lasting happiness, and the mental reframe Stephanie Harrison uses 100 times a day
Hello friends.
Like so many of us, Stephanie Harrison’s journey toward happiness started with acute unhappiness.
During the dark days of the pandemic, she had quit her job to become a full time caregiver for her chronically ill partner. Out of her “personal desperation,” she started questioning some cultural myths about happiness : that it comes from external markers of success, material wealth, and individualistic achievement, that we are separate from others and need to beat out the competition. She dubbed this cluster of ideas “old happy.”
Combing through research studies, she determined that there’s a better set of tools for achieving lasting happiness: doing inner work, practicing self-compassion, cultivating mindfulness, and striving to connect and be of service to others. She calls this “The New Happy.” And, drawing on a childhood where she loved visiting art museums with her dad, she conceived of a colorful visual vocabulary to communicate her vision of “The New Happy” to others.
She remembers the first image that made her feel like she was really onto something.
“I was so sad because of everything that we were going through. And I made this image. It was a big gray circle, and underneath I captioned it ‘This is how it feels right now’ and then on the right hand side was a row of little circles with that gray circle much smaller, and a line with a whole bunch of other colored ones. And then underneath I wrote, ‘this is how it'll be someday soon.’ And it was like a little reminder to myself of, this is really hard, but one day this will be a memory. It was August of 2020 and so a lot of people, I think we're looking for the similar kind of feeling.”
Today, Stephanie’s Instagram account, where she shares simple, profound images liike these, has almost a million followers; she also has a newsletter, and a new bestselling book that collects her images and thoughts about The New Happy at greater length.
I was interested in talking to her because both of us are trying to strengthen the connection that people see between building their individual mental health and being of service to a world that really needs it. And I also really admire how she combines her own creative practice with her mission of helping others.
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