So, Apparently, Happiness Is Sexy

What If the Secret Is Just … Being Kind?

Carrie Jones

Mar 23, 2026

There’s a pretty fun article on Meant To Be Happy that says that “happiness is the new sexy” and writes:

“Sexiness adds spark to life. It’s the frosting on the cake that is a meaningful life. It’s the James Bondness of living. It is the appeal others have. It is attraction and an alluring “something” about a person.

“Some people confuse a “bad boy” or “nasty girl” quality with sexiness. But they’re wrong to make that connection. That’s a dated sort of pseudo-sexy. There is a new sexiness that is replacing the old.

“We’ve all known people who at first glance made us tremble a bit. Then, after getting to know them better, we’ve scratched our heads and wondered what we ever saw in them. True sexiness, the new sexiness, is much more than the length of a leg or the width of the shoulders. It is in the soul of the person radiating from a much more profound place than skin level.”

Happier people are apparently sexier people. Although, my friend Don once said he fell in love with his wife because she needed him because she was so sad and that made him feel important and happier. So, apparently not always?

Here’s the big truth: I have not been super happy this winter.

It might be the state of the world.

It might be me still not being able to get Jack the dog to walk well on his leash.

It might be the fact that wealthy men like to yell at me in the comments of our free newspaper.

It might be that I injured my foot and have spent 6 weeks now not being able to get shoes on.

Maybe I have seasonal affective disorder? Who knows?

I’m not sure.

But when I get unhappy, it becomes a bit of a spiral that I have to fight my way out of.

When I’m stressed or unhappy at night, my brain starts thinking about random things or else it’s yelling random things like, ‘Carrie! You will always be too chesty to wear a button down shirt, no matter what that French lady on YouTube says on her dress chic channel.

One night, my brain was hyper-focused on why we humans want to be happy. How does that relate to evolution and the struggle to survive?

And it led me to the work of Paul Zak. Zak said in conversation with Arthur Brooks,

“It seems unusual, because the normal view in evolution is that nature’s red in tooth and claw, as Tennyson said. We’re struggling to survive and the metric that tells us we are successful evolutionarily is grandchildren. I produce enough children who are high enough quality that they had children. How do we balance that struggle for survival with our obsession with happiness?

“It turns out in the last 20 years scientists have made a lot of progress to reconcile those two views, the struggles of survival versus being happy.

“And the traditional view is that evolution doesn’t care if you’re happy, it just cares if you reproduce. The solution to that is that individuals who are happier are more attractive as spouses. And they actually produce children who are more likely to get married and have children themselves.

“Happy people are people we want to be around as friends, as romantic partners.They live longer and they live healthier. There’s a real evolutionary, or biological reason, why we should be obsessed with happiness, because happy people are more successful evolutionarily.”

And this kind of hit me hard because I realized whenever I ask any significant other why they fell in love or like or whatever with me, they all said it was because I was so happy.

Is happiness some sort of sexy elixir? Is it a pheromone without the smell?

Those questions sent me down another wormhole before I fell asleep, of course, but I want to just sort of hyper focus on the brain mechanics of this. Our brains give off some oxytocin when we are with happy people.

From the Center for Neuroeconomics

Zak said of oxytocin,

“It’s an ancient chemical that’s made in the brainstem well outside conscious awareness that traditionally has been associated with these hallmarks of mammals. Childbirth, breastfeeding, it initiates all of that in the peripheral nervous system.

“But in the brain what we showed is that it has these profound effects on allowing us to be social creatures. We look at the neuroanatomy of the human brain. We have this the kind of nerve anatomy that we see in social living creatures, social living animals.

“In particular we have many receptors for oxytocin in our frontal cortex that allows us to be super sensitive, unconsciously, to social signals.

“What it means to be a social creature is that we thrive around others. And we can do that because we are acutely sensitive to the signals that we’re getting from those around us.

We don’t have to think about it, we intuit very easily who we want to be around, who we want to associate with, and who we want to avoid.

“The value of that from a happiness perspective is that we know that being embedded in community is one of those factors that increases our life satisfaction.

“How do we do that so naturally?

“Think of a cocktail party that you go to. You can meet someone right away and go, wow, this guy is great! Or this lady is great! I want to hang out with this person just as a friend, or an interesting person.

“How do we do that?

“We have to have a mechanism in the brain. And this larger network that oxytocin activates, which increases our sense of empathy.”

This is, of course, a lot of words saying that people like it when oxytocin is pumping through their bodies. So they try to get more of it subconsciously. If you make them feel that way, they are possibly going to try to get more of you. Wild right?

So, here is my question: If you make people happier, you then make yourself happier, why do we all spend so much time blustering and arguing and sending super kind people mean comments? Why do we default to mean so much? And how do we switch that drive off?

I think it might be in the simple moments.

This is a simple moment from 2022. This is Shaun helping a young man on our town’s pier at sunset.

I wrote about it at the time.

I wish that everyone could do that: could be kind and treat people with respect in free newspaper comments, social media posts, in real life.

I think that our community is part of the key to our happiness. And I think we need to make our communities (and maybe ourselves) a little sexier. Not by breaking our jaws to look more manly or yelling at reporters via the comment section at 1 a.m., but by realizing that we’re all humans and we all have issues, but most of us also have beauty inside—bits of goodness and light—that we can expand on, that we can celebrate, and that we can lean all the damn way into because this world? It needs that. We all need that.

LINKS TO LEARN MORE

http://meanttobehappy.com/the-sexiness-of-happiness/

Paul Zak’s books.

Paul Zak’s website.

The Center for Neuroeconomics.

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