Welcome to Rhapsody

An exploration into what it means to be human, how to live a fulfilling life, and how to be happy.

About 12 years ago I watched the film Green Street Hooligans, which is about soccer hooligans, or rabid supporters of English soccer clubs. The film stars Elijah Wood as Matt Buckner - a journalism major who gets kicked out of Harvard. There’s a scene where Buckner is talking to his father, a journalist at the London Times, and his father says that if he wants to be a journalist, he should keep a journal. I was a journalism major at Ohio University and this logic seemed beyond dispute. So I started a journal.

In the beginning I more or less documented my days. I wrote about what I did, what I said, who I met. Over time, I remained in the journalism industry but moved to the so-called “business” side of things and I published less professional work. My journal became more of a place where I worked out problems in my head, and where I tried to think through life’s great problems — as they applied to me. It was a cross between a therapist and an idea space. I would write full blown essays and develop hypotheses and theories on a wide range of topics. 

I wrote most about living a happy life. How does one be happy? What did it mean to live a fulfilling life? What things mattered and what were distractions? How does my sense of self relate to my sense of happiness? How much does being happy depend on one’s ability to be happy depend on cultural factors? This question took on increased importance as I progressed at Talking Points Memo and became increasingly responsible, in some part, for the happiness of others. How does a business — or any organization — relate to the individuals within that organization? What values and processes are best equipped to making sure the people you’re responsible for live a happy life? What was the relationship between happiness & success? What even is success, how is it measured?

In some ways, the search for ways to make my coworkers happy was actually a search for my own meaning in life. If I could do that, then maybe I would also be happy. But as I read and learned more, it was increasingly clear to me that happiness in the workplace was much more fundamental to what it means to be a human than I had previously understood. This relationship between individuals, organizations and happiness has become an obsession of mine that extends beyond the office into the more general sense of why do we create organizations at all? What is the true purpose of the organization? It led to me researching all sorts of things such as the industrious (not industrial) revolution, motivational psychology, and various cultural ethnographies. 

I love to read biographies, and for awhile I fancied myself a business person. I was struck by how many supposed titans of industry could become wildly successful, yet seemed rather unhappy or unliked. At times, they seemed almost like sociopaths. I wondered if in order to be successful, you had to have some kind of severe character defect. When I read Steve Jobs by Walter Isaackson, I was taken aback by the concept people had of Jobs’ “reality distortion field” where he would just lie and make up realities to push people to do great things. I couldn’t push people like that. Was I missing something required to be great?

If you think this notion makes me sound naive, well, I’d agree with you. Keeping a journal where you can look back on what you believed to be the case years ago is quite humbling.

But within that book was something else that had a great impact on my life, and that was something John Lassiter said about Toy Story.

“Everyone has had the traumatic childhood experience of losing a toy. Our story takes the toy’s point of view as he loses and tries to regain the single thing most important to him: to be played with by children. This is the reason for the existence of all toys. It is the emotional foundation of their existence.”

I liked the simplicity and elegance of this sentiment: Toys want to be played with by children. That makes toys happy. I wondered if such humans had such an essence, if there was a way to explain what it meant to be human?

Years later, I was reading Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger, which asks why so often veterans will go on several tours of duty. Instead of asking what’s wrong with the veterans, he asks what’s wrong with the rest of society, why is there so much depression and sadness? He explores what modern society can learn about “loyalty, belonging and the quest for meaning” from tribal peoples. Junger zeroes in on a specific phenomena as a vehicle for exploring these concepts: American veterans who come home from a tour of duty only to feel lonely unfulfilled, leading them to prefer a theater of war to peace time. He also explores why suicide rates increase with affluence, and why there is no documented evidence of indigenous americans leaving their tribes to join western society, yet, there are innumerable examples of the reverse. He asks, why do public defenders enjoy happier lives than corporate lawyers, even though they make far less money?

“The findings are in keeping with something called self-determination theory, which holds that human beings need three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives, and they need to feel connected to others. These values are considered ‘intrinsic’ to human happiness and far outweigh ‘extrinsic values’ such as beauty, money, and status….Bluntly put, modern society seems to emphasize extrinsic values over intrinsic ones, and as a result mental health issues refuse to decline with growing wealth.”

This concept — Self Determination Theory — was the first explanation I’d heard of human contentedness that felt intuitively correct & broadly applicable. So I set out to learn as much as I could. I thought it could make me a better manager, a better friend, and a better, happier person. If I had a deeper understanding of human nature, then it seemed to me, everything else would fall into place.

In addition to journalism, I also studied philosophy in college. What you can draw from that is I am a big fan of asking questions and trying to learn about complicated subjects, and I like to straddle the abstract and the practical. My head is always somewhat in the clouds, but I do try to take the abstract and apply it the best I can. That’s what I want to do here. I want to write about and think about any number of subjects pertaining to what it means to be human, what it means to be happy, and how to do it. I am specifically interested in the relationship between individuals and various sorts of organizations (companies, families, sports teams, societies, the mafia, pirates, anything), and how those contexts affect happiness. 

I’ll write on a broad array of subjects including philosophy, biology, anthropology, economics, primatology, monetary policy, management theory, pop culture — any discipline where I think there’s something to be learned about human happiness, with a particular focus on the intersection of individuals and groups. I’ll write things that have headlines like “What does happiness mean, no literally what is the origin of that word?”, “Bhutan tracks Gross Domestic Happiness, does that work?”, “What can we all learn from “Avatar: The Last Airbender?” and “How Motivation Relates to Wellbeing.”

I’m not an expert on any of these subjects. But I’m not here to be an expert. Patrick N. Allitt, a British historian and academic who serves as the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University said in a lecture that “writing enables [students] to own the things  they’ve learned and put them in a sequence.” This is what I hope to achieve, and I hope it will be interesting for you as a reader and that, ultimately, we can all learn together. 

I don’t know how often I’ll publish things. Sometimes I might write long essays, sometimes just a paragraph on something I was reading about. I’ll try to interview people smarter than me. It will be a variety of things. I hope it will be fun. Will anyone read it? I don’t really know, but I’ve been writing this stuff in my journal for over a decade and nobody reads that but me, so wouldn’t be much of a change.

A note on the name, Rhapsody. Years ago I was with some TPM colleagues hanging out and a friend of mine, Tom Kludt, said, “When Joe talks, he rhapsodizes.” That stuck with me. Merriam Webster defines rhapsody as “effusively rapturous or extravagant discourse” and that is kind of how I talk. I get all excited and sort of monologue for a spell. There’s also kind of a few other double meanings in there. My favorite piece of music is Rhapsody on a Theme of Pagnini by Sergei Rachmaninoff, and growing up I used to watch RapCity (sounds like Rhapsody) The Basement every day, where in between hop hop videos, the host Big Tigger and his guest would just sort of shoot the shit about things. 

So anyway, welcome to Rhapsody. 

In the meantime, tell your friends!