Sharing Everyday Stories Can Make Us Happy

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For the last three spring semesters, I have been co-teaching a seminar course called “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” with both faculty and graduate student instructors. As a teaching team, we develop ideas and readings based on the specific graduate students teaching the course and we embark on a semester-long exploration with a group of students from across the college, majoring in everything from neuroscience to creative writing. The first time I taught this course, we went online mid-semester as the pandemic hit. The following spring, we were completely online. This spring, we started out online, as the omicron variant spread, but we are now in person. All of us, faculty and students alike, are ecstatic to be back in person. Yet I cannot help but notice how things have changed.

Yesterday, as we drifted into the classroom, each student sat down and began scrolling on their personal device—phone, laptop, iPad. No one chatted. There were no catch-up conversations, no quick “how are you” exchanges, or "let's get together for coffee”—nothing. We simply no longer chat. Julie Jargon wrote in the Wall Street Journal on Feb. 15, 2022, that “talk is a lost art on campus.” Rather than engaging with those literally around us, we drop into our devices to interact with online social media. Students are anxious about the lack of social relationships and friendships on campus. Indeed, in my multi-university study of the impact of the pandemic on students who were first-year when the lockdown occurred—a study I have discussed multiple times in previous posts—one of our major findings is the sense of alienation and isolation students feel, even as they return to campus. Perhaps especially for young adults who are in the process of exploring who they are and who they want to be as they navigate through their college years, the need for social interaction increases as the enduring effects of the pandemic decrease our social skills.

In the same Wall Street Journal issue, and serendipitously printed just below the article on talk as a lost art, is an article by Lindsay Ellis on a wildly popular class being taught at Harvard Business School on “Leadership and Happiness.” Students flock to this course to learn how to cultivate happiness in their careers and personal lives. Many of these ideas come from the field of positive psychology, such as gratitude-finding and valuing relationships. The class reinforces what the Gallup World Poll on Happiness finds over and over every year—the three most important things that make us happy are productive work, good health, and positive personal relationships.

Now that we are leaving our Zoom rooms and moving back to in-person interactions, have we lost the art of nurturing relationships? How do we return to the everyday chit-chat that is the critical background for creating and maintaining our personal relationships through time?

Yesterday in class, after our initial individual scrolling, we returned to our topic, “What does it mean to be human?” We have been discussing how humanity constructs a story about itself, about who we are and what is meaningful in our lives. As a class exercise, we all participated in a story circle. I have written about story circles in previous posts—they are simple yet powerful ways of connecting. In a small group of about 10 people or so, we go around the circle and each person tells a two-minute story in response to a prompt. Our prompt yesterday was, “Tell a story about a time when you heard someone else’s story and it changed how you thought about yourself or the world”—essentially asking how listening to other people’s stories changes us. As we went around the circle, telling and listening to each others’ stories, we learned something about ourselves and our connections to others. We showed our vulnerability and our resilience. We shed a tear or two and we nodded in understanding. We connected. We talked.

Maybe we have not lost the art of talking—maybe we just need to practice more. In our class yesterday, we concluded that being human means participating in the human story. Today, make a point of telling someone your story. And listen to their story. And, maybe, we will begin to revive our in-person connections, and create a little happiness. Talk is not a lost art, it just needs a nudge.