How You Can Be Happy Like Malcolm Gladwell

Writing makes him the happiest man in the world despite being unmarried at 57

Malcolm Gladwell has dated a lot of women and he loves other people’s kids. But he has work to do. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Bruce Headlam did not reply to me.

I emailed him on 2 May. The moment I clicked the “send” button, I had this feeling that he would not write back. Why should he answer my inconsequential questions? I asked him about Malcolm Gladwell’s happiness. This is a subject I became intensely passionate about during my three-year stay in Finland, which topped the global happiness rankings for the fourth year in a row in 2021.

For sure, I could have written to Gladwell directly and asked him about his happiness. Why did I choose Headlam then? One, my happiness question involved Gladwell’s status as an unmarried man. Journalists in the past trying to know why he had remained unmarried by interviewing him directly met with little success. Gladwell revealed nothing concrete on that front. As a Bangladeshi journalist who neither lives in the US nor works at any big global media company nor has any recognised international presence, I thought I did not stand a chance.

Two, Headlam caught my interest because of one of Gladwell’s best articles so far. In his 2004 New Yorker piece The Ketchup Conundrum, Gladwell wrote, “The story of World’s Best Ketchup cannot properly be told without a…