Ask most people what happiness is and they’ll describe a feeling: a warm glow, a mood, a moment of contentment. Arthur Brooks, professor at Harvard and co-author of Build the Life You Want with Oprah Winfrey, thinks that’s a problem. Happiness, he argues, is not a feeling at all, and neither is it a destination: it’s a direction. You can’t achieve perfect happiness on earth, and chasing it as though you can will only frustrate you. What you can do is move towards it.
Psychologist and author Isabel Rojas puts it even more vividly: happiness, she says, is like an airline blanket; it's always a little too short, always leaving some part of you uncovered. Accepting that imperfection, rather than fighting it, is one of the most important things a young person can do.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Brooks and Rojas explore the hidden traps that keep young people from flourishing, from the perfectionist who’s mapped out her entire life on a spreadsheet and feels “behind” at twenty-nine, to the restless student who can’t find meaning in a university classroom. The two agree that vocation rarely announces itself neatly: you find it by living, asking hard questions (why was I born? what would I give my life for?), and being willing to look for the answers somewhere unexpected.
They’re equally direct about friendship: in an age of abundant contacts and profound loneliness, fewer but deeper relationships are worth far more than a full social calendar. Physical presence and time together matter in ways that no number of message threads can replace.
The most striking thread in the conversation might be the one neither guest planned to make the centrepiece: love as a practical strategy. Brooks describes sending a friendly reply to a reader who had emailed to call him an idiot, and receiving an invitation to dinner fifteen minutes later. Rojas recalls a follower who left harsh comments on her posts but showed up at her lecture a year later, transformed. Both see something bigger than politeness in these stories. In a culture that has made contempt cheap and easy, responding with genuine warmth is genuinely countercultural. It disarms. It changes your critics and, more importantly, it changes you.
“The World is Waiting for Us” is inspired by point 290 of St. Josemaría’s book Furrow: “The world awaits us. Yes! We love the world passionately because God has taught us to: God so loved the world. And we love it because it is there that we fight our battles in a most beautiful war of charity, so that everyone may find the peace that Christ has come to establish.”
The audio above is a translated and abridged version of the original interview with Arthur Brooks and Isabel Rojas. It was re-recorded with AI tools. You can listen to the full original conversation in Spanish here:
