The Virtuous Circle of a Happy Personality
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A few weeks ago, I wrote about happiness and music but didn’t mention perhaps the most famously joyful work ever written: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, composed in 1824, which ends with the famous anthem “Ode to Joy,” based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem “An die Freude.” In the symphony’s fourth movement, with the orchestra playing at full volume, a huge choir belts out these famous lyrics: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken / Tochter aus Elysium / Wir betreten feuertrunken / Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!” In English: “Joy, thou shining spark of God / Daughter of Elysium / With fiery rapture, goddess / We approach thy shrine!”
You might assume that Beethoven, whose 254th birthday classical-music fans will celebrate this coming week, was a characteristically joyful man. You would be incorrect in that assumption. He was well known among his contemporaries as an irascible, melancholic, hypercritical grouch. He never sustained a romantic relationship that led to marriage, was mercurial in his friendships, and was sly about his professional obligations.
Perhaps all of that seems only natural, given the fact that Beethoven progressively lost his hearing and was therefore deaf when he wrote his later works (including the Ninth Symphony). But we have ample evidence that his unhappy personality predated his deafness. Even before his hearing loss set in, for example, he complained bitterly about his music’s shortcomings, as he saw them. He is said to have reviled what was probably his most popular early composition, the Septet in E-flat Major, as “that damned thing! I wish [the score] were burned!”
At the same time, he clearly saw—and regretted—the effects of his unhappy personality. “I can easily imagine what you must think of me,” he wrote to an “esteemed friend” in 1787, “and I cannot deny that you have too good grounds for an unfavorable opinion.”
Perhaps you can relate to Beethoven: You recognize that you have some unhappy personality traits—and, like him, you regret that. If you would like to know how to change and acquire a happier personality, here’s how.
[Read: Beethoven’s punk-rock 8th symphony]
Personality is a focus for many social scientists, myself included, and I have written about it in several different columns. The most common way to measure personality is by using the so-called Big Five Personality Traits, which can be remembered via the acronym OCEAN: openness (to experience), conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You can take this test yourself online and see how you rank on each dimension, compared with the overall population of test-takers.
Scholars have used the Big Five assessment in novel ways. For example, they have found that high conscientiousness is a good predictor of job performance, academic performance, and longevity. Extroversion, openness, and neuroticism are predictive of higher-than-average social-media use; the first two of these (but not the third) also correlate with leadership effectiveness. Risk-taking behavior is associated with high openness and low conscientiousness. Creativity is most related to openness—which makes sense, because a willingness to experiment and try new things is typically part of a creative process.
Scholars have also studied the role personality plays in happiness. Two psychologists writing in the Journal of Personality in 2024 found that up to 54 percent of well-being is explained by the combination that a person has of these personality traits. Researchers have also looked at what causes unhappiness; they identify high neuroticism (which typically makes people feel misunderstood), low extroversion (which can reduce people’s sense of excitement about life), and low conscientiousness (which tends to make a person indecisive).
Thanks to such studies, we can also break down life satisfaction into three components and see how different personality traits affect our happiness in various ways. For example, relationship satisfaction (with an intimate partner) is best predicted by high agreeableness, extroversion, and conscientiousness, and low neuroticism. Meanwhile, high conscientiousness best predicts work satisfaction, while agreeableness and extroversion are associated with highest social satisfaction. Very conscientious people tend to have good marriages and jobs; very agreeable people tend to have plenty of good friends.
Based on all of this, we can reconstruct a personality portrait of Beethoven. We know that he was generally unhappy, struggled with intimate relationships and close friendships, was intensely creative, and was passionate about his work, but unreliable and dissatisfied with it. So he probably scored very high in openness, fairly low in conscientiousness, low in extroversion, very low in agreeableness, and extremely high in neuroticism.
[From the March 2022 issue: I gave myself three months to change my personality]
What does your own personality profile say about your well-being? Mine is an accurate predictor of high happiness—though also of moderately high unhappiness. This is because I rate near the top in openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion, but am in the middle in agreeableness and neuroticism.
If, like my colleague Olga Khazan, who tried to change her personality, you suspect that your personality is keeping you from living your best life, you may want to accentuate the positive elements and dial down the negative parts. The research on this is clear: With targeted effort, you can do so.
To begin with, realize that what you do matters a lot more than what you feel. For example, just because you feel disagreeable doesn’t mean that you must inevitably behave disagreeably. To do so is to hand management of your life over to your limbic system (which processes emotions) rather than your prefrontal cortex (which enables you to make conscious decisions).
Being ruled by the limbic system is how your dog lives. You can do better.
Feelings aside, make a resolution to behave as a happier person would—someone who enjoys a good intimate relationship, close friendships, and their work. To follow that model, scholars recommend such habits and practices as taking an interest in others and engaging in acts of kindness, counting your blessings and savoring good moments, committing to goals, learning to worry less, increasing your faith or meditation practice, forgiving others, and taking positive steps to get physically healthier.
Easy, right? You don’t, in fact, need to do all of these things, but the research shows that happier people do many of them. And that effect can hold true regardless of your attitude toward doing them: You may feel no desire to do any of them, but if you can manage it anyway, that will probably make you happier.
Amazingly enough, getting happier in this way can change your personality, emphasizing the traits that make happiness easier to achieve and initiating an upward spiral. Researchers writing in the Journal of Personality in 2015 showed that people who score higher in well-being tend over time to become more conscientious, emotionally stable, and agreeable—all of which in turn makes happiness more available to them. Curiously, happiness also tends to make people less extroverted: I’d posit that this simply means that as satisfied people age, they prefer to stay home with loved ones and do their own thing.
We have no data on Beethoven’s happiness level as he grew older, nor about how his personality changed. A pleasing notion is that perhaps he followed something like the program I suggest above: To become happier, he chose to do something a happier composer might do and write an “Ode to Joy.”
He may even have succeeded. On May 7, 1824, he conducted the premiere to a packed house in Vienna. (In case you are wondering how a deaf man could conduct an orchestra, Beethoven had, standing behind him, another maestro whom the orchestra and chorus could follow.) At the end of the performance—culminating in what was the last movement of the last symphony he ever composed—the audience was jubilant. The attendees rose five times to give Beethoven a standing ovation, and threw their hats in the air, which the composer saw only when the musicians physically turned him around to face the audience.
There Beethoven stood, with an expression of amazement and, for a moment at least, of real happiness.