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A few months ago, Nick Cave appeared on the BBC’s Newsnight. Near the end of the show, interviewer Kirsty Wark quoted Cave’s wife, fashion designer Susie Bick. Your wife Susie says that it takes a lot of courage for her to be happy.
The 65-year-old singer seemed slightly surprised. ‘She said that? Huh, she’s smart. Wark confirmed that yes, Bick had said that, and Cave paused, thought it over, then spoke. ‘It’s a challenging position, happiness, and she’s hard-earned. It’s a deep thing. I don’t believe there is such a thing as simple happiness. I think you lift the lid and there are all sorts of things underneath a person’s ability to be optimistic about the world. So, I agree with her. I agree with everything she says.
Cassie Holmes also agrees. “There’s a bit of grit involved in happiness,” she says. ‘It’s not this frivolous and easy thing that you move effortlessly through. It requires strength and we have agency in it. And ultimately it is a choice.
Holmes, 43, is a psychologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Business, specializing in happiness. For four years, she has been teaching a course called Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, which teaches burned-out MBA students how to make the most of their (limited) spare hours and be happier.
Illustration: Claire Benoist/thelicensingproject.com. Nick Cave was featured on BBC Newsnight, where Kirsty Wark quoted his wife. Fashion designer Susie Bick says that “it takes a lot of courage to be happy.”
The curriculum is not what you would expect in a business school. Holmes has his students write “thank you letters” to people who have influenced their lives; they have to perform ‘random acts of kindness’ with strangers; and they have to complete mandatory ‘digital detoxes’, during which they can’t check their phones for six hours. They love. So far, around 600 students have taken the course.
And now those of us who are not business graduates can also learn the secrets of happiness from Holmes; His debut book Happier Hour: How to Spend Your Time for a Better, More Meaningful Life comes out this month. The 310-page manual is based on Holmes’s course and was published last year in the US to spark interest from all kinds of commentators. The very commercial Forbes magazine said it was a ‘must read’; the very woo-woo Gwyneth Paltrow liked it so much that she interviewed Holmes on her Goop Podcast.
Holmes has always been happy. When she was a child, her family called her ‘Little Miss Happiness’. And today, on Zoom from her home in Santa Monica, surrounded by books, she’s really smiling. “Research shows that your inherent disposition has a huge influence on how happy you feel,” says Holmes, “and I’ve always had a very cheerful one.”
Once we realize that time is precious, simple things, even boring ones, are more likely to make us happy.
But life, as often happens, gets in the way. When Holmes was 27 years old, he became engaged to his childhood sweetheart. They planned a big wedding, the family flew in from all over the country, and then, two weeks before the event, as Holmes was driving in her wedding dress in the back of the car, his fiancée called and canceled the meeting.
He told me: ‘I’m not ready’. And I said, “Well, fuck you, I’ll never talk to you again.” Which I haven’t done! (Up to this point in our conversation, Holmes has been very light-hearted and American: he’s like “Oh my God,” not “Oh my God.” Hearing her swear is wonderful.)
Holmes is now married to another man and has two children. But, back then, the whole thing ‘shattered’ her happiness; for the first time, her naturally optimistic disposition wasn’t enough to keep her content. Still, Holmes didn’t wallow for long. She had already been researching happiness and her own misery was really helpful. She had new questions that she wanted to find answers to. ‘I was like, ‘How do I get out of this? How do I move through this?” Because, yes, time heals, but I’m impatient. I wanted to heal quickly.
What he discovered was that happiness has a lot to do with control and timing. On average, people are happiest if they have between two and five hours of ‘discretionary time’ a day. Less and you’ll feel stressed, more and you’ll feel aimless. As a former English student with only four hours of classes a week, I know the latter to be true.
And for everyone who thinks, ‘But I don’t have two hours of free time a day’, well, I probably do. Last year the average Briton spent four hours every day looking at his mobile phone and I doubt everyone would be happier for it. Holmes recommends banning phones for a few hours (‘phone-free zones’ as she calls them) at designated times during the week.
But if you really don’t have two hours to spare, Holmes has solutions for that, too. First, ‘packaging’: the act of combining an activity you hate (but can’t avoid) with another you like, to make it more bearable. So if you despise your trip, combine it with a podcast. If ironing makes you want to scream into the void, pair it with an episode of The Great British Bake Off.
Second, turn the routine into a ritual. According to Holmes, if he performs an activity regularly, he “often doesn’t think about it while doing it.” But if you reframe that activity as a ritual, it ‘makes that moment more special’, and you might even be happy doing it. For example, he has renamed his morning coffee with his daughter a ‘coffee date’. They go to the same place, order the same thing (a flat white and hot chocolate), and listen to the same songs (Whitney Houston and Cyndi Lauper) on the way.
Because really, Holmes says, time has a lot to do with perception. And, once we realize that time is precious, simple things, even boring ones, are more likely to make us happy. Holmes has a trick for this: he picks an activity and calculates how many times you’ve already done it; then he calculates how many times you are likely to do it again. The idea is that once he knows that he only has 65 times as much to walk his kid to school in the morning, he might not get so mad when it takes forever to put on his coat. With that being said, I did the math and I will have to take out the bins about 3120 more times in my life. Knowing this number does not make me feel happier.
But still, I like the idea of Holmes; he reminds me of the Wendy Cope poem The Orange. It’s about being happy with little things; in Cope’s case, having lunch with friends and eating a comically large orange. After speaking with Holmes, I googled The Orange and took a photo of the last verse on my phone:
‘The rest of my day was pretty easy. I did all the jobs on my list, enjoyed them and had some free time. Love you. I’m glad to exist.
- Cassie Holmes’ Happier Hour will be published on January 12 by Penguin Life*
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