Podcast
Three short films for Declan Edwards, host of How To Be Happy, each one cut so a single idea from the show can stand on its own.
Declan Edwards hosts How To Be Happy, the podcast he made as a compass for people who want a happier life without pretending the hard feelings disappear. He also founded BU Happiness College in 2017, after more than ten years studying the science of happiness and more than seven years coaching people across five countries. The show already had a way of talking that did not need smoothing out. These films had to do something narrower, which was to hold one idea at a time, so a stretch of an episode can live on its own when someone stops on it. The opening film is the show in a single thought. A happy life, as Declan frames it, is a life that still has room for grief, anger and fear, because those feelings are part of being a person. What changes the chapter is whether connection, meaning or appreciation is allowed to sit beside them.
Close connections
The longest study of adult life we have is the Harvard Study of Adult Development, now led by Robert Waldinger, which has followed people for more than eighty years. The finding Declan keeps coming back to is a plain one. The closest relationships, a partner, a child, the friend you can actually call, do more for how life goes later than status or a figure in an account. He sets that beside the particular loneliness of this moment, when a person can feel surrounded by other people online and still be short of anyone in the room. The film stays with that contrast, and with his belief that the relationships you keep are the ones that compound.
When Declan asks someone what they are working toward, a house often comes up, or a savings figure, or the next step that everyone around them seems to be taking. If he keeps asking why, the answer usually arrives in the same place. They believe the goal will make life happier. This film follows that conversation the long way around. It starts with security, then with the reason security matters, and then with the moment a person notices that the goal was sitting underneath a hope about the life they wanted.
Plenty of those goals arrive already decided. Buy the house. Take the next rung at work. Declan does not pick a fight with the goal itself. He stays with the quieter question of whether the path was chosen because it is the life the person wants, or because it was the path waiting for them when they got there. The film is happy to leave that question sitting with you, which is how he leaves it when he is talking on the show.
Three short films, each one idea from the show.
01
A film about a happy life that still has room for grief, anger and fear.
02
A film about the closest relationships, and why they do more for later life than status.
03
A film that follows a financial goal back to the life a person actually wants.
The work
Three short films for Declan Edwards, cut from How To Be Happy so that each idea can stand outside the episode it came from. The first is his argument that a happy life still has room for grief. The second follows the Harvard study through to the people you can actually call, which is the finding he trusts after eighty years of the research. The third takes a money goal and keeps asking why it was chosen, until the answer is about the life underneath it. He already had the teaching. The films give each idea somewhere to live on its own.
Back to the work