Top 5: Finding Joy in Any Job

This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Pushkin. It's an exciting time here at the Happiness Lab because the Happiness Lab is having a birthday. Our podcast has just turned five years old.

And to celebrate, I sent my producer Ryan Dilly deep into the archive to grab out the five episodes that I've found the most memorable from all the hundreds that we've made together. So Ryan, which episode is up next? So this show's from season two and it's called Working Your Way to Happiness. This is one where I have a slightly humiliating cameo appearance. But that's not why you chose it, right? No, it's totally why I chose it. I really enjoyed your scream in that episode. A lot of this show is built around, as listeners will find out, a lot of this show is built around me seeing a rat. Dead one into a house. Which is the part of the wonderful cameo because we get to hear at least a reenactment of the scream that you gave when you saw the rat. But the episode's not about Ryan or screaming. It's really about kind of the job of someone who has to deal with folks who see rats all the time.

We interviewed Yale's pest management person, Marty, and he was the perfect guest for this episode because it was an entire episode about what we can do to be happier at work and the misconceptions we have about happiness at work, like the idea that being a pest control person might not be the best job, when it turns out Marty really adores what he does for work. And this episode also includes a research backed idea that gets more pushback than any other thing that we mentioned about. People get so angry. And that is the amount of money that you make. Doesn't predict how happy you will be. Yeah, this is something that the science has shown us for a while with some nuance, right? If you're not making enough money to put food on the table or put a roof over your head, definitely more money will make you happier at work and beyond. But for folks making a reasonable wage, money doesn't seem to be the path to happiness that we think. At work, it seems to be other things, and that's really what Marty was so great at teaching us.

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