Adam Brownlie
How I came to write Happypedia
An editor once asked me why I was the best person to write this book and what led me to these conclusions. The question, I thought, could be answered in both a spiritual and scientific way. From a scientific perspective, everything that I think is a result of my unique experiences and my genes. These unique circumstances have brought about within me habits and beliefs, which made happiness come easily for me and since they are unique to me, I am the best to share them.
I had no single, profound life event that brought me to write, but that is not necessary for someone to have a unique view that could change the world. So to fully answer the question, it was every tiny event of my life combined that led me to this understanding and these beliefs. It was the time I got a flat tire and the time my pencil lead broke. It was my parents tucking me in at night, and their call on my birthday. It was the time Mr. Weildic looked me in the eye and told me that if I put the effort into life that I put into that biology assignment I would be on a good path. It was the healthy body I am blessed with and access to good medical care. It was building cubby houses in trees with my brothers. It was the privileged but simple, happy life that I was given that led me to these conclusions. So the reason that I am the best person to write this is because I am just a farm boy, with life experience and genes like no one else.
I was born into a farming family and would one day become a fifth generation farmer. At the time my parents’ cotton farm was about 600 km north west of Queensland’s capital, Brisbane, in Australia. I was lucky: my parents loved each other and never quarrelled; they set a perfect example for their six children. They provided a copybook balance of care and freedom. Mum was Catholic and took us to town at least once per week to go to church and do the groceries; that was Dad’s time to have his space. Mum and Dad had a great partnership. Mum tended to her children, cooking, cleaning and teaching us in the classroom and Dad ran a successful farming enterprise. Together they had the means to provide us with everything we wanted, but they didn’t; they only gave us what we needed.
My parents later bought a farm about 700 km south west of Brisbane and living in an isolated area, we did “School of the Air” for much of our primary years. We had some contact with our teachers over the radio but were mostly taught by Mum. This usually meant a daily routine of breakfast, school, morning tea, school, lunch, free time, afternoon tea, free time, dinner, free time and bed. In our free time we were truly free—free to roam the farm on our bikes, build cubby houses and make mistakes. I once built a hang-glider made of old tarp and plastic pipe dreaming I would be able to fly off the top of our four-metre-high dam wall. It didn’t work. My brother built a bobsled to take to the snow. It never made it to the snow. We learned to work from a young age. The first paid work was before I could reach the pedals on Dad’s pickup truck. Sitting on the furthest forward edge of the driver’s seat, not able to see through the windscreen, I would depress the clutch, put it in gear, release the clutch, then climb onto the seat to see out the windscreen and steer along the irrigation channel. Driving the truck while Dad walked behind collecting irrigation pipes earned me about $2/hour.
When I was 11 years old, I was excited to leave the farm to join my eldest brother at boarding school. It was a 10-hour bus trip each way and I was excited to come home to the farm every 10 weeks or so for school holidays. Upon getting home from boarding school, I would eagerly do my scout around the farm on the motorbike, see what had grown and what hadn’t, and report back to Dad with what I had seen and give him some tips. Then I would collect any veggies not yet collected from the veggie patch and present them to Mum.
I always used to think a lot. In my early years of boarding school it was about people. There was a lot for me to learn: playing with my four brothers and one sister on the farm was different from being among the 2,000 kids at this school. I was always reflecting about how this or that interaction could have gone better, and why people responded like they did.
In my latter years of boarding school my thoughts moved from understanding people in general to girls specifically. But I also thought a lot about what I wanted in life. I would spend hours lying on my bed reflecting on this. Eventually I decided that I wanted to be rich enough to not have to work, and I wanted world peace, starting in the Middle East. For some reason this conflict really bugged me. It appeared to me that they had been fighting over the same thing for nearly 2,000 years. All the other major nations had not so long ago been involved in a world war but were able to resolve their differences and were now at peace. Why couldn’t those in the Promised Land do the same? I decided that the answer was because they were not following the teachings of their holy books. They had to learn to forgive and to treat their neighbour as they would like to be treated, not place so much value on material things and trust in God. With some forgiveness and some compassion for their enemy, they might be able to listen, understand, negotiate and compromise. My hope was to show from a more scientific perspective why they should forgive, in the hope that it might strengthen their resolve for forgiveness so that it might be more widely adopted and bring more peace.
I’m not sure what most other kids were doing during their school holidays – maybe some work, some socialising and some video games. I personally couldn’t stand watching TV or playing video games; it seemed like such a waste of time. I also wasn’t interested in seeing friends; I would see them when I went back to school. For me, my school holidays were just working towards my goals. But with little guidance, I made little progress. On the getting rich front, I did it the only way I knew how: working on the farm for basic pay, while also trying to learn new ways to make money like dabbling in the stock market. On the world peace front, I was completely lost, and did nothing more than spend hours laying on my bed philosophising and dreaming of how to spread these philosophies. Some of the dreams I had were along the lines of hiring a plane and littering the war-torn countryside with pamphlets preaching my beliefs or broadcasting my propaganda over some secret telecommunications systems promoting peace. In hindsight, these ideas show my naivety about the whole situation.
When my school years were coming to a close, I had saved a lot and made a little extra money on the stock market but was a long way from my goal of being rich or bringing about world peace. In the absence of any direction to achieve those goals, it seemed I had to choose a profession. In choosing, I considered that Dad was happy and had everything he needed. I knew how to do what he did and thought myself quite good at it, so it made sense for me to become a farmer. It was actually a little hard telling Dad I wanted to come home. I had nerves akin to proposing on one knee! I knew the answer would be yes, but there was a lot of emotion in telling Dad that this was what I wanted. Dad’s response was actually unexpected: he wanted me to go to university and get a degree before coming home, any degree, but for me to get educated was his decree.
I had good grades at school so I could study whatever I liked at uni, but I thought the smartest option was to choose the shortest, fastest degree so I could start my real life. I found a three-year degree in agronomy, and during this degree I started my first business; I wanted to increase the efficiencies in the grain market and spent my life savings on building the first online grain trading website in Australia. This gave me a taste for business and led me to continue university for another 18 months to attain a master’s degree in business.
The grain trading business never rescued me from living on the pension that the government offered students in Australia, but I lived very comfortably on the $10,000 a year it offered. It paid for my pantry-sized bedroom, food, beer, fuel and entertainment. Being a maths guy, I figured all I had to do was build my wealth to $100,000, invest that at a 10 percent return and I would achieve my first goal: I would have enough money to retire.
Now, working back on the farm, I set about doing this, working hard for basic pay, not spending a cent and borrowing as much as the bank would lend me to buy as many properties as they would let me. Once I had built my worth to $100,000, I was now earning $40,000 a year on the farm and had got used to this. So I thought it wouldn’t take me long to earn another $300,000 and I could live much more comfortably. By the time I built my worth to $300,000, Dad was now paying me $50,000 a year, and of course I moved the goal posts again. This cycle continued until I was earning $100,000 a year, which was when I finally decided this desire for more was never going to stop. I was going to have to be happy with what I had. So at 29 years of age, I retired from full-time work. I left the farm and a farm manager was hired to take my place.
After leaving the farm and further contemplating how I could achieve my second goal, I decided that I didn’t need to address what was happening on the other side of the world to make a difference as these relationship skills that might help to bring world peace could make a real difference right here in Australia.
If Australians had better relationship skills at home, there would be less family conflict and they would not be taking their drama from home to work with them in their heads, thereby boosting their productivity at work. Conversely, if people had better relationships at work, they would go home happier, less stressed and ready to be the person they wanted to be for their family.
I also believe that better relationships at work could increase businesses’ productivity and success in other ways too, as I had seen so many businesses fail because the leaders could not be vulnerable or empathise with and forgive each other. Teaching relationship skills in Australia could lead to a happier, more productive and competitive country.
Part of what drew me to the idea of world peace was the urge to stop the physical suffering and death caused by international conflicts. I now believed that greater social and emotional skills could help achieve this outcome not just in war-torn countries but in those at peace too. Heart attacks and strokes kill mountains more people each year than war. These diseases, along with obesity, loneliness, depression, anxiety and high blood pressure, are often the result of stress from a lack of good relationships with ourselves and others, often as a result of finding it hard to forgive ourselves and others. This got me thinking that if social and emotional skills were taught in schools, we could not just improve the productivity and happiness of nations across the world but save the lives of millions of people too.
During my journey of seeking a way to bring about this change, I started to see that the life I had wasn’t normal. When you have a certain life and all your friends and family seem to have the same, it is easy to assume that what you have isn’t anything special. To have your parents stay together and in love for your entire childhood, it turns out, is something to be treasured. To be raised in a household where your caregivers could talk out their differences without conflict is a privilege. Having parents who had the time to get to know and understand their children’s abilities and tailor flexible boundaries that keep their offspring safe without locking them up—it is a blessing I am truly thankful for. As will later be explored in this book, your childhood has a profound effect on the structure of your brain and the ease with which you can achieve happiness. In this way, happiness was handed to me on a platter, but having a good childhood alone is not sufficient to set you on the path of enduring happiness. You can hit challenges after you leave home and without the right foundational beliefs these can cause you to come unstuck. One of my brothers was raised in very similar conditions, by the same parents, but finds happiness a challenge.
When I moved from the country to the city, I started meeting a lot of people who seemed to have some anxiety, worry or concern that was often significantly affecting their happiness. Probably one of the most common stressors was that they were not achieving their goal soon enough or wondered if they were on the right path in life. I felt that a lot of people were not on the whole happy, but cobbled together ways to manage, while they continued to search for new answers, more ice baths, more therapy sessions, more, more, more. This got me thinking: what could be the solution?
When it finally struck me that I had something to share was in August 2022, I was in Tbilisi, Georgia contemplating life when I realised that my foundational belief was in a large part what made happiness easy for me. It seemed a bit out there, so I made a Telegram channel and started sharing my thoughts to see what objections I would get and if I could counter them. There was no push-back. I expected the strongest objections from Christians, so I thought I would run it past my best friend who is also a strong Christian believer. He also had no objection. What I was proposing was a new belief system, but I was against belief systems based solely on people’s intuition from their personal experience—I wanted something backed by science. So, I spent the next 12 months reading over 500 research papers to see if this belief system could be supported by research. The result is this book.