Stephanie Harrison
speaker
575 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 24 Oct
Stephanie Harrison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
What is the old model of happiness? It's this cultural understanding of happiness that, oh, if I can just create this perfect dream life, then I will finally be happy. 40% of people say that they're incredibly lonely and have no one to confide in. The most effective strategy that people can use when they're lonely is not everything in life has to be optimized for our productivity.
You're more than just your business. You're more than just your performance or your achievements. What is the most important factor that you would say for long-term happiness? After 10 years of research, I've basically been able to boil it down that true happiness comes from... And the more that we can do that, the happier we can all become.
This is the heart of all of the work I do. So you just nailed it with this description. Honestly, it's because we live in a culture and a society that tells us to do certain things to become happy. And as you said so beautifully, even though it doesn't align with our own experience and our inner knowing, we end up being very much influenced by that.
And it ends up driving our actions to deprioritize the things that do make us happy and unfortunately pursue things that don't end up contributing to lasting well-being in the long term.
It's really what you described, this cultural understanding of happiness that teaches us that if you want to be happy, you need to perfect yourself. You need to achieve more and more and consume as much as you can. And you need to dominate other people and essentially cut yourself off from them and be completely independent. And these messages about happiness are
you know, they like seep into our lives in so many different ways, whether it's through our workplaces or through the institutions that we see or what we see in the media. And so it becomes very hard to untangle them if we don't have that awareness about what old happy is.
The first old happy lie is that you have to be perfect because you're not good enough. And so this pressure that we all feel, that voice in your head that tells you, I'm not worthy, there's something wrong with me, I'm broken, that we all have, it really comes from this old happy culture.
And in order to address it, we think that we have to perfect ourselves and essentially be almost like a robotic version of ourselves. You know, somebody who's always doing everything perfectly and never makes a mistake and never struggles. The second lie is really deeply connected to that, which is that you have to achieve more and more in order to prove how worthy you are.
And so that becomes a coping mechanism for so many people, particularly in our culture, where these things are rewarded and celebrated. And we end up doing things like burning ourselves out, working ourselves into sickness or ill-being, neglecting our relationships and doing all of these things in order to say, oh, I'll be happy when I get there.
And the third lie is that we're separate from other people, that the actions of another person don't influence us, that our culture and systems don't have an impact upon us, and that we can basically do everything alone. And I think all of us, as an entrepreneur myself, as entrepreneurs,
Somebody who has worked in a number of different environments, who has relationships with people who matter to me. I can pretty clearly acknowledge that I'm not able to do any of that by myself, even if I do some of those things independently. I'm still drawing upon support and resources and lessons and wisdom from other people at all those times. And so that's the third lie.
Yeah, I fell hook, line, and sinker for old happy. So I often say that the reason why I can write and talk about it is because I know it so well. It affected me so much. And I believe that, oh, if I can just create this perfect dream life for myself, then I will finally be happy. But in order to do that, I had to disconnect myself from others. I had to try and be perfect all the time.
And it was just exhausting. And I ended up being very lonely, very depressed, struggling with my physical health, struggling with my emotional well-being, with basically everything that you could think of because I was living in this way that was so deeply out of alignment with the true sources of well-being.
And eventually one day I found myself having a breakdown, lying on my bedroom floor, crying and realizing that maybe it wasn't that I wasn't trying hard enough or I wasn't doing enough. It was that I was doing things in the wrong way. And that's ultimately what led me to want to go and study the psychology of happiness and try to figure out a better pathway.
It was a long journey. I often think that sometimes from the outside, these experiences that people have to follow their purpose or their calling, they look... Very simple from the outside, but my experience is that it was very two steps forward, one step back. So I was living in New York. I was on a work visa, so I wasn't able to leave my job.
And I essentially thought, what are my options here to try and make one small step to move a little bit closer to a better life? And so I realized that I could move, and I ultimately ended up having my company move me out to California. where I thought I would be able to have a little bit of a different lifestyle and cultivate some of these new things that were coming into my life.
And then eventually I was recruited to go work at another company in the tech space where there was a great work-life balance and culture. It was a very supportive place to work. And while I was there, I also was able to go and pursue my graduate studies in positive psychology at the same time.
So working full time while studying, and then while I was in grad school, that's when I wrote the beginnings of this philosophy as my graduate thesis, arguing many of these same things. After I graduated, I had no idea what to do with it or how to use it or put it into practice or start a business.
And I ended up going to work for Arianna Huffington at Thrive Global, where I was responsible for building out and running the learning programs of her company. So I was able to take a lot of these learnings and apply them in an organization. But eventually I decided I wanted to run my own thing. And so I left in 2020 to do that.
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