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0:00:47 If you could decide whether to be optimistic
0:00:50 or pessimistic all the time, which would you choose?
0:00:56 I think most of us would choose to be optimistic.
0:00:58 I mean, why not?
0:01:00 Who doesn’t want to feel good about the future?
0:01:04 But we all know it’s not that easy.
0:01:07 We can’t always control how we feel.
0:01:10 If we could, everyone would feel great all the time.
0:01:16 Still, it’s worth asking why being optimistic
0:01:18 can be so difficult sometimes,
0:01:20 especially when there are plenty of reasons to be.
0:01:25 If you’re like me, it often seems as though
0:01:27 your own mind is at war with itself.
0:01:30 Does it have to be that way though?
0:01:34 Or is it possible that we’re just wired to worry?
0:01:39 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:01:41 (upbeat music)
0:01:54 Today’s guest is Paul Blum.
0:01:57 He’s a professor at the University of Toronto
0:01:59 and the author of several great books,
0:02:02 including Psych, The Story of the Human Mind,
0:02:04 and The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering,
0:02:05 and The Search for Meaning.
0:02:10 I’m not dropping any official rankings here,
0:02:12 but Paul is one of my favorite psychologists
0:02:14 to read and talk to.
0:02:17 His books are fun, enlightening,
0:02:19 and full of practical wisdom.
0:02:25 So when we decided to do this series on optimism,
0:02:27 he was one of the first people I thought of.
0:02:31 I had a great conversation a few weeks ago
0:02:34 with another psychologist, Jamil Zaki,
0:02:37 about the temptations of cynicism and how to overcome them.
0:02:42 The episode is called Why Cynicism is Bad for You.
0:02:45 I hope you’ll listen to it if you haven’t already,
0:02:47 because it’s a really good companion
0:02:49 to today’s conversation with Paul.
0:02:52 In this one, we zoom out a little further
0:02:54 to talk about the nature of our minds,
0:02:57 what he’s come to learn about optimism,
0:03:00 and what any of it has to do with whether or not
0:03:01 we’re happy.
0:03:06 Paul Bloom, welcome to the gray area.
0:03:08 – Good to talk to you again, Sean.
0:03:10 – You know, I hesitate to start out this way,
0:03:12 but I’m a little disappointed in you.
0:03:13 – Go ahead.
0:03:16 – You have a lovely newsletter called Small Potatoes.
0:03:21 You recently had a post about your favorite podcast,
0:03:23 and we weren’t on it.
0:03:24 Kater, explain yourself.
0:03:26 – You know, you write these things
0:03:28 and you know you’re gonna miss somebody,
0:03:29 and then I hear from you and I missed you.
0:03:31 I am sorry.
0:03:34 The odd thing is, this is one of my favorite podcasts.
0:03:37 Maybe if you go back to the newsletter
0:03:38 and you go back to it,
0:03:40 you will find that there has been a stealth edit.
0:03:44 – All right, let’s get into this,
0:03:46 and I’ll start with a hardball.
0:03:52 Optimism, overrated or underrated?
0:03:55 – Oh, I like the sort of Tyler Cowan vibe he got here.
0:04:02 – Overrated, the whole question of optimism, pessimism,
0:04:04 is kinda stupid.
0:04:07 If optimism means you think things are gonna be better off
0:04:08 than they are in pessimism,
0:04:10 is that you think things are gonna be worse off?
0:04:13 Isn’t the rational thing to be realist?
0:04:14 So, overrated.
0:04:17 I think we should try to see things as they really are.
0:04:18 And on the same token,
0:04:20 I don’t think we should be pessimists either.
0:04:22 We should just try to be accurate.
0:04:25 – Wait, do you think realism and optimism
0:04:27 are mutually exclusive?
0:04:28 Can’t you be both?
0:04:30 – Well, I guess it depends what you mean by optimism.
0:04:33 If what you mean by optimism is seeing the world
0:04:35 in a good way in a positive light,
0:04:37 in cases where the world actually is good
0:04:40 and is positive, sure, then I believe in optimism.
0:04:41 But I always thought it means,
0:04:44 to some extent, rose-tinted lenses,
0:04:45 seeing things as a little bit more positive,
0:04:48 trying to see the bright side of things.
0:04:51 And we should try to see things as they are.
0:04:55 – Do you think of optimism as an attitude
0:05:00 or an orientation or something closer to a life strategy?
0:05:02 – Yeah, it’s a good question.
0:05:05 I mean, what I’m talking about now
0:05:07 is if it’s a way of assessing the odds.
0:05:08 Do you assess them as bright?
0:05:11 In cases of uncertainty, and it’s always uncertain,
0:05:12 you go for use and things are gonna be good
0:05:13 and things are gonna be bad.
0:05:16 And I’m saying, we should just try to accuracy.
0:05:19 There is a sort of attitude issue
0:05:21 where optimism could be defended,
0:05:23 where you get the odds right.
0:05:25 But optimism says, hey, let’s give it a shot.
0:05:27 Let’s not weigh the negatives.
0:05:30 Let’s not be so loss averse.
0:05:32 Let’s try to focus, let’s try to take a shot.
0:05:34 And so not worry too much about failure.
0:05:38 It can be under some circumstances, rational.
0:05:43 – I think about something like religious faith.
0:05:46 And we have pretty good evidence
0:05:50 that religious people are actually happier.
0:05:51 Now, there may be lots of reasons for that.
0:05:53 That’s a separate conversation,
0:05:55 but it seems to be a pretty consistent finding.
0:05:58 So there is this tangible benefit to faith,
0:06:01 completely independent of whether it’s true or not.
0:06:04 And maybe optimism is kind of like that.
0:06:07 – It’s interesting, it’s an interesting analogy.
0:06:09 And so you might challenge what I said before
0:06:12 and say, oh, wait, under circumstances in life
0:06:16 where there is a payoff to being wrong
0:06:21 in a certain systematic way to overestimate your chances.
0:06:22 Suppose I’m back to my teenage years
0:06:25 and I’m trying to approach women, go ask them out on dates
0:06:27 and I have a realistic assessment.
0:06:29 Honestly, the odds are not good for me,
0:06:31 but I inflate the odds.
0:06:33 And because I inflate the odds, it motivates me
0:06:36 to approach people and to talk to them and so on.
0:06:38 And I develop a relationship.
0:06:40 Maybe nobody would open up a business or a restaurant
0:06:42 or try for an academic job
0:06:45 if they had a realistic assessment of the odds.
0:06:48 So yeah, I could see it playing some role.
0:06:49 At the same time though, for each example
0:06:52 I’m giving of this sort, you could come back
0:06:55 with an example of how an over-optimistic perspective
0:06:57 could lead you into all sorts of trouble.
0:06:58 – Yeah, that’s fair.
0:07:02 I’m just an N of one, but I have to say in my experience
0:07:05 I have not found that there’s a positive relationship
0:07:07 between being realistic and being happy.
0:07:10 So I don’t know, make of that what you will.
0:07:11 – I think if you looked at your life,
0:07:14 you would find that getting things right
0:07:17 often leads to happiness or leads to more happiness
0:07:19 than alternative.
0:07:20 – Yeah, I don’t know.
0:07:23 I found that I’m often right when I least want to be.
0:07:23 (laughs)
0:07:26 But maybe that’s just me, that could just be me.
0:07:27 – Fair enough.
0:07:33 – It’s interesting when you think about happiness
0:07:36 which is obviously related to optimism in some ways.
0:07:40 And I know there’s research showing
0:07:43 that happiness over the course of someone’s life
0:07:45 takes the form of a U-shaped curve
0:07:48 where you’re most happy at the beginning
0:07:49 and the end of life.
0:07:51 And then there’s this big dip in the middle
0:07:54 which we call the midlife crisis.
0:07:58 Is there a similar finding on optimism and pessimism?
0:08:00 Do we tend to get more or less optimistic
0:08:02 or pessimistic as we age?
0:08:04 Or do we just have no idea?
0:08:05 – I have no idea.
0:08:07 Maybe there’s some people who know.
0:08:09 I mean, the U-shaped curve is interesting.
0:08:10 When it was originally discovered,
0:08:12 people said, well, that’s United States or our culture,
0:08:16 but it seems to replicate across all sorts of cultures
0:08:18 and all sorts of times.
0:08:19 And it’s actually really surprising.
0:08:21 You would expect to be happiest when you’re young
0:08:23 and then there’s all sorts of decline,
0:08:25 physical decline, cognitive decline,
0:08:28 even financial decline should bring you down.
0:08:30 But weirdly, when people hit their mid-50s,
0:08:32 there’s often this curve upwards.
0:08:34 And maybe this connects to optimism,
0:08:38 but one analysis of this is that your priorities change.
0:08:40 You’re no longer fully in the status game.
0:08:42 This is sort of zero-sum battle
0:08:46 for mating opportunities and money and power.
0:08:47 And you step back more towards,
0:08:51 I think, David Brooks calls some sort of eulogy virtues
0:08:54 where I don’t have good relationships with people.
0:08:56 I’ll develop fulfilling hobbies and so on.
0:08:58 And maybe you’re more optimistic
0:09:00 because then your goals are more realistic.
0:09:02 If my goal is to have my next book at number one,
0:09:03 a New York Times bestseller,
0:09:05 well, it’s nice to be optimistic,
0:09:08 but there’s a bit of frustration probably built into this.
0:09:10 On the other hand, if my goal is to spend some nice time
0:09:13 with my wife during crossword puzzles and talking,
0:09:16 well, you know, things get calibrated properly.
0:09:19 – Maybe the best case for being optimistic
0:09:23 is that it’s socially desirable that people like to be around
0:09:25 good vibes and positive attitudes.
0:09:28 And obviously the reverse is just as true.
0:09:30 People don’t like– – I think that’s definitely true.
0:09:34 There’s what psychologists call the Lake Wobegon effect.
0:09:35 – What is that?
0:09:36 – It’s from Garrison Keeler.
0:09:37 I’m gonna mangle the line.
0:09:39 But Garrison Keeler talks about Lake Wobegon
0:09:42 and says something where all the boys and girls
0:09:43 are above average.
0:09:46 And the idea is kind of just called the above average effect.
0:09:49 So you ask people, how good a driver are you?
0:09:52 You ask people how good they are as lovers, as friends.
0:09:54 How funny are they?
0:09:54 How good students are they?
0:09:56 How are good professors are they?
0:09:57 And the main findings,
0:10:00 just about everybody thinks they’re above average.
0:10:03 And there’s all different theories of why that happens.
0:10:05 One connects to something you said before,
0:10:07 which is kind of feedback.
0:10:10 So if I give a talk and most people hate it,
0:10:13 but some people come up to me and say, “Hey man, good talk.”
0:10:15 And I say, “I gave a good talk.”
0:10:20 Because in a polite world, the feedback is often positive.
0:10:21 But anyway, there does seem to be
0:10:24 this general kind of rosy glow effect.
0:10:28 – Even these terms, optimism and pessimism,
0:10:31 they’re very fuzzy categories.
0:10:34 Do you think they’re useful as a psychologist?
0:10:36 – I mean, just talking you and me right now,
0:10:37 I think that they’re too fuzzy to be useful.
0:10:40 Plainly, we came in with somewhat different ideas
0:10:41 of what optimism is.
0:10:44 You saw it more as an attitude towards life,
0:10:45 to motivation.
0:10:47 I was thinking it was a way to assess the situation.
0:10:51 So I think we need, as so often with psychology,
0:10:53 we need to kind of be clear what we talk about
0:10:54 and use terms properly.
0:10:58 I think optimism folds in too many things
0:11:00 to be a useful term.
0:11:04 – Well, you famously made the case against empathy.
0:11:05 – Yeah, and I got in so much trouble there
0:11:09 because people said, well, empathy just means goodness.
0:11:11 How come you’re against goodness?
0:11:13 And I was used to determine it in a different way,
0:11:14 but yeah, exactly.
0:11:16 And I try to be careful what I mean, but…
0:11:19 – Yeah, I mean, I ask in part, ’cause I wonder
0:11:22 if you would also make a case for pessimism.
0:11:24 I mean, let me ask that differently.
0:11:25 – You sound like my agent.
0:11:29 – Yeah, we’re trying to move merch here.
0:11:32 I think what I’m really asking is,
0:11:37 do you take pessimism seriously as a philosophical position?
0:11:41 Or do you think it’s just a mistake?
0:11:45 – I think it’s a mistake.
0:11:48 It involves seeing the world differently than it does.
0:11:52 And I think it’s a mistake we’re sometimes vulnerable to.
0:11:54 So I’m very persuaded by Stephen Pinker’s claims
0:11:57 that the world is in many ways getting better.
0:12:01 And Pinker points out that it’s a very unnatural belief
0:12:02 the world is getting better.
0:12:05 And this is in part because we have a negativity bias
0:12:06 when we see the world.
0:12:10 I saw the Trump-Harris debate,
0:12:12 and there’s a lot to be said about that.
0:12:17 But Trump’s view of the world is so unremittingly negative
0:12:20 as to how terrible it is.
0:12:22 The country’s falling apart, we’re being laughed at.
0:12:25 We’re not gonna be around in a few years and so on.
0:12:29 And I think this resonates to a lot of people.
0:12:30 Not for a sinister reason.
0:12:33 They just see, this is accurate.
0:12:34 – But what’s the appeal of that?
0:12:35 What is it satisfying?
0:12:39 – There’s different ways of thinking about it.
0:12:41 One way is it doesn’t satisfy an edge at all.
0:12:43 It’s just because of the way we absorb information.
0:12:46 So I hear about a terrible murder in Toronto,
0:12:48 and I say, oh my God, the city’s full of murders.
0:12:50 But I don’t hear about old people who aren’t murdered.
0:12:52 So there’s this negativity bias news
0:12:54 just gives me this wrong impression
0:12:56 even if it doesn’t fulfill a purpose.
0:12:59 But I actually think that some extent it does
0:13:02 fulfill a purpose and at least some people.
0:13:06 I think among other things, there’s kind of,
0:13:07 I’m gonna try this out.
0:13:09 I’m sort of thinking of, but I’ve always felt this,
0:13:13 which is some people are excited by the idea
0:13:16 that things are horrible, things are chaotic.
0:13:18 These are the end of days.
0:13:21 It makes you feel important that you’re in the middle
0:13:24 of this enormous historic decline
0:13:29 that we have about five years before AI makes us slaves.
0:13:34 Before climate change turns us into a hellhole,
0:13:37 before the fascist like Trump or a socialist like Harris
0:13:39 turn us into a third world country.
0:13:41 And there’s some excitement to that.
0:13:44 Can you feel that in your soul?
0:13:47 You hear this, do you feel a little shiver of, huh?
0:13:49 – I don’t know if I feel a shiver,
0:13:51 but it does seem right.
0:13:55 And sometimes it reminds me a little bit of the way
0:13:57 I think about conspiracy theories sometimes.
0:14:01 I always wonder, what is the appeal of that?
0:14:04 What is it doing psychologically for people?
0:14:09 And in some sense, for me, the answer is,
0:14:13 well, you might look at the world and think it’s broken
0:14:17 or unfair or inexplicable.
0:14:19 And there’s something empowering about having
0:14:22 an explanation for that that justifies your contempt
0:14:24 for a world that you feel divorced from
0:14:26 in some fundamental way.
0:14:29 I don’t know if pessimism or the negativity bias
0:14:31 is operating in a similar way.
0:14:32 – That’s interesting.
0:14:35 The alternative to the idea that a world is run
0:14:38 by conspiracies is that we live in an uncaring world
0:14:40 where people are just serving their own interests
0:14:42 and the interests of those they love and so on.
0:14:44 And maybe we’re feeling screwed,
0:14:45 but nobody’s trying to screw us.
0:14:48 Just things are just grinding away.
0:14:52 The conspiracy theory says that in some way
0:14:54 there’s a structure to the world.
0:14:56 It almost connects to religion.
0:14:58 It’s not, these things are not accidents.
0:15:02 There’s deeper interest and deeper desires going on.
0:15:05 And maybe even if we think the conspiracies are evil,
0:15:07 there’s a comfort to that.
0:15:10 – Yeah, I think shit happens.
0:15:12 It’s just not a satisfactory explanation for people.
0:15:15 So they need a story with good guys and bad guys
0:15:18 and a beginning and an end and it all sort of hangs together.
0:15:20 – I did research a while ago
0:15:23 of a brilliant graduate student, Kony Manerjee,
0:15:26 on the notion that everything happens for a reason.
0:15:28 It’s a slogan I hate with all my heart.
0:15:32 But it turned out we assess people’s beliefs.
0:15:33 We asked them, for instance, about their beliefs
0:15:34 about everyday life.
0:15:37 We asked them about special events, good events,
0:15:38 like birth of a child, bad events,
0:15:39 like death of a loved one.
0:15:42 And we asked them, did they believe things happen
0:15:43 for a reason?
0:15:46 And we found that religious people believe it very much.
0:15:49 But even atheists who said, I’d say there’s no such thing
0:15:52 as God, yeah, but things happen for a reason.
0:15:56 There’s karma, there’s structure, there’s justice.
0:15:59 And a conspiracy theory may not be the kind of reason
0:16:00 you want, it makes you happy.
0:16:01 It’s not people improving your life,
0:16:03 but it’s still a reason.
0:16:07 – Yeah, I think for a lot of people,
0:16:09 the only thing that’s truly intolerable
0:16:11 is not having a reason.
0:16:13 – That’s right.
0:16:14 And I don’t know about you,
0:16:18 my own metacrysical idea is that that sad truth is correct.
0:16:21 Realists about morality, I think there’s right and wrong.
0:16:23 I think that there’s meaning to be had in life.
0:16:26 But the universe itself is a cold and uncaring place.
0:16:29 And so is American politics.
0:16:32 There’s not this deep state orchestrating at all.
0:16:36 There’s not this, it’s just a whole lot of shit happens.
0:16:39 – I’m realizing that maybe shit happens
0:16:40 is the closest thing we have
0:16:44 to a grand unified theory of the world.
0:16:48 – It’s a great truth and it’s a very difficult truth.
0:16:52 And maybe one of the reasons why religion is reassuring
0:16:54 and conspiracy theories are reassuring.
0:16:57 And even a sort of pessimism could be reassuring
0:17:01 is it says there’s design here, there’s structure here.
0:17:03 You know, my life might not be very interesting,
0:17:05 but at least I’m in the end of days.
0:17:07 That’s something exciting.
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0:18:29 (gentle music)
0:18:32 (gentle music)
0:18:40 – You know, I’ll ask,
0:18:42 and I should say I’m just gonna assume
0:18:44 that this is not a question
0:18:48 for which there is a definitive scientific answer.
0:18:51 It’s maybe speculation more than anything else.
0:18:53 Do you think people are just
0:18:58 constitutionally wired to be one or the other?
0:19:00 Or that maybe it’s more complicated,
0:19:02 environmental factors, and all this other stuff.
0:19:03 But I mean, I just,
0:19:05 I wonder if you think people are born
0:19:07 more optimistic or more pessimistic,
0:19:10 and maybe by extension,
0:19:13 is it something we can change if we want?
0:19:15 – So whenever somebody asks you,
0:19:15 you know, there’s two alternatives.
0:19:18 One is, is it really simple and kind of dumb,
0:19:21 or is it more complicated and subtle and rich?
0:19:23 I kind of see which answer you’re kind of pointing me towards.
0:19:27 And I will actually give you the predicted answer.
0:19:28 – I’m not pointing you anywhere, sir.
0:19:29 – No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
0:19:30 – I’m just asking questions.
0:19:32 – You are just, you are leading me.
0:19:35 You are leading me to say the truth,
0:19:37 which is I would imagine one’s optimism
0:19:41 and pessimism has to do a lot with all sorts of things.
0:19:43 It has to do with the culture that they’re in,
0:19:46 which tells you to some extent how to see the world.
0:19:51 It has to do with their individual life experiences.
0:19:53 If you live the life of extraordinary good fortune
0:19:55 at every spot, you know, of course you can be optimistic,
0:19:58 but it’s just fits the data.
0:20:00 And many people live terrible lives,
0:20:02 and I’m sure they’re pessimistic because they’re not dumb.
0:20:04 They say up to now it sucked.
0:20:05 Why not?
0:20:06 Why not assume that induction is right
0:20:08 and it’ll suck in the future?
0:20:10 I will, however, say it’s probably also
0:20:12 just by some heritable part of it.
0:20:16 Just because, you know, the first law of behavioral genetics,
0:20:17 which admits of no exception,
0:20:21 is that every psychological trait is somewhat heritable.
0:20:24 Meaning that if I took your biological mother
0:20:28 and biological father, and then I asked them each,
0:20:30 are you an optimist or pessimist?
0:20:31 Are you a cynic?
0:20:32 How do you think?
0:20:33 You have a lot of hope.
0:20:36 And then I asked you, your answers would correlate
0:20:37 even if you had never met them.
0:20:41 – This to me leads to something else
0:20:44 I wanted to talk to you about, which is children.
0:20:44 – Yeah.
0:20:45 – And for people who don’t know,
0:20:49 I mean, you’ve done a lot of work on child psychology,
0:20:52 and that intersects with this conversation
0:20:55 and interesting ways for me.
0:20:58 Let me start this way.
0:21:03 Do you think children are capable of being optimistic
0:21:04 or pessimistic?
0:21:07 – Yeah, I think they are.
0:21:10 I mean, there are children and there are children.
0:21:12 So I’m not sure you could sensibly ask this
0:21:14 about a 10 month old.
0:21:15 There’s a certain point where children
0:21:18 probably don’t in some way reflect upon the future.
0:21:20 And so the question doesn’t make much sense.
0:21:22 But you talk about, you know, four and five year olds,
0:21:25 three, four and five year olds running around,
0:21:27 I think they can have attitudes about the world
0:21:30 where we could talk about as pessimism and optimism,
0:21:33 even cynicism, the way we’re talking about it.
0:21:36 And the answer, and there’s a fair amount of studies
0:21:40 on this seems to be they’re really optimistic.
0:21:41 They’re really positive.
0:21:45 They are positive about their own abilities,
0:21:47 tending to overstate what they can do,
0:21:48 what their futures will be like.
0:21:50 They’re optimistic about the abilities
0:21:53 of the people they know and they care about.
0:21:55 Christy Lockhart, who’s my colleague at Yale,
0:21:57 did a study where she asked kids what would happen.
0:22:00 And these are kids who, like four year olds, whatever,
0:22:02 what happens when someone gets their finger chopped off?
0:22:04 What would he be like as an adult?
0:22:06 And they often say, “It’ll grow back.”
0:22:08 They have this weird folk view that limbs grow back,
0:22:10 that we recover, we heal.
0:22:13 So kids are pretty hardcore optimists.
0:22:15 There’s such a thing as childhood depression,
0:22:17 but it’s rare, it’s very rare,
0:22:18 and doesn’t happen quite young.
0:22:22 Kids tend to be, I think, somewhat naturally cheerful.
0:22:27 – Yeah, I mean, I can’t imagine a seven year old nihilist.
0:22:31 It doesn’t even make sense, right?
0:22:33 Now, is that just a failure of my imagination?
0:22:37 And if I’m right, if a six or seven year old nihilist
0:22:39 is just not a thing that happens in the world,
0:22:41 there must be some reason for that, right?
0:22:43 They’re psychologically incapable of it.
0:22:46 And if they are, what’s that reason?
0:22:47 – That’s a good question.
0:22:51 I also can’t think of a seven year old moral skeptic
0:22:54 or a seven year old skeptic in general.
0:22:58 So, you know, adult philosophers and adult non-philosophers
0:23:00 often come to certain conclusions about the world.
0:23:03 They might think, “Oh my God, there’s no morality,
0:23:06 “there’s no meaning, there’s no purpose.
0:23:08 “Everyone else is just a zombie.”
0:23:11 And all these views adults come to have.
0:23:12 Putting aside whether they’re true,
0:23:16 and I think none of them are true, they’re not natural.
0:23:20 It’s very natural to see the world imbued with meaning,
0:23:24 with morality, with hope, I’d say,
0:23:26 with promise of different sorts.
0:23:29 And I think kids see the world that way.
0:23:31 And it’s only as a result of education and contemplation
0:23:33 so when you can kind of look, turn things around
0:23:37 and develop these sort of unusual philosophical views.
0:23:39 – And look, seven year olds
0:23:42 may not be virtue, ethicists or whatever,
0:23:45 but they do have very strong moral intuitions, right?
0:23:47 – Absolutely.
0:23:51 And I think they’re properly seen as moral realists.
0:23:54 If they’re really mad because they were treated unfair,
0:23:57 and you say, “Yeah, but if you were in a different time
0:23:58 “and place, this wouldn’t be unfair.”
0:24:00 But can you look at it like you’re an idiot.
0:24:02 This is unfair, period.
0:24:04 It’s unfair like grass is green,
0:24:07 like it’s warm outside, it’s a fact.
0:24:10 And I think the kids get it right, actually.
0:24:13 I think some sort of moral realism is right.
0:24:17 But we had these evolved systems that give rise
0:24:20 to feelings, gut feelings of right and wrong and so on.
0:24:24 And they’re fully engaged by the time the kid is about seven.
0:24:27 And then it’s only as adults, we could say,
0:24:31 “Oh, you know, what murder is wrong in our culture.”
0:24:33 And then the adults come to some sort of crazy,
0:24:35 more relativist view.
0:24:36 But whatever you think about that,
0:24:38 it’s not something kids will do.
0:24:40 – Yeah, I learned about the default mode network
0:24:44 when I was reporting on psychedelic therapy.
0:24:46 And for people who don’t know,
0:24:50 this is basically the part of the brain that comes online
0:24:52 when you’re thinking about yourself.
0:24:55 And this part of the brain isn’t fully developed
0:24:58 until at some point later in childhood.
0:25:02 And so my thinking was that in order to be optimistic
0:25:06 or pessimistic, you have to cross some threshold
0:25:09 of self-consciousness to the point where you’re able,
0:25:11 where there is a voice in your head
0:25:13 telling yourself stories about yourself
0:25:16 and the future and the past and that sort of thing.
0:25:20 And that until you make that transition categories
0:25:24 like optimism or pessimism or nihilism or whatever,
0:25:27 don’t really make much sense.
0:25:28 But you’re the psychologist.
0:25:29 – No, I think that’s right.
0:25:32 Although I do think that at the ages
0:25:35 we’re talking about children have a notion of themselves.
0:25:37 They know they’ll persist over time.
0:25:39 They know they have a history.
0:25:40 On the other hand,
0:25:42 there’s some really nice psychological research
0:25:45 suggesting really interesting differences
0:25:46 between kids and adults.
0:25:48 And some of this work is done by my wife,
0:25:50 Christina Starmans, who’s a psychologist
0:25:52 who also studies kids.
0:25:54 So here’s some findings from her lab
0:25:55 and other labs have it too.
0:25:58 You ask kids, a five-year-old, six-year-old,
0:26:01 when you grow up, are you gonna be the same size
0:26:03 as you are gonna be taller?
0:26:04 ‘Cause I’ll be taller.
0:26:06 And you ask a bunch of questions
0:26:08 and they understand your body’s wage.
0:26:10 And there’s other people’s body’s wage.
0:26:13 But then you ask about your psychological choices.
0:26:16 So you say stuff like, do you like to drink coffee?
0:26:17 Oh, coffee’s gross.
0:26:19 When you’re an adult, we like to drink coffee.
0:26:20 And I’ll say, no, it’s gross.
0:26:23 Would you like to kiss people?
0:26:25 Oh, it’s disgusting.
0:26:27 When you’re an adult, you like to kiss people.
0:26:28 Now, if you ask them these questions
0:26:30 about somebody else, one of their friends, say, yeah,
0:26:32 when he gets older, he’ll like to kiss people
0:26:33 and drink coffee.
0:26:37 But for themselves, they can’t get around the fact
0:26:39 that coffee is gross and kissing is gross
0:26:43 and playing with Legos wonderfully fun and so on.
0:26:45 And they think they’ll stay this way forever.
0:26:48 Yeah, that’s interesting.
0:26:49 You’re a parent, right?
0:26:53 Yeah, two kids, old adults now.
0:26:54 How old are they?
0:26:55 They’re 26 and 28.
0:27:00 So has observing them grow up?
0:27:08 Changed how you think about optimism and human happiness
0:27:11 and what it means and how to do it
0:27:14 and what it doesn’t mean?
0:27:16 Yeah, probably not.
0:27:18 It’s just alarming how little I’ve learned
0:27:19 from watching movies.
0:27:20 Really?
0:27:21 Not even a little bit?
0:27:23 You know, you get anecdotes in some of my books.
0:27:26 Oh, this kid, he did this, he did that.
0:27:28 I gotta say, this is something I’ll say about my kids.
0:27:30 And I don’t want to talk too much
0:27:34 about their prior consent, but something they taught me
0:27:36 and they didn’t have to do my kids to teach me this.
0:27:36 They could have been somebody else
0:27:38 but I know them extremely well.
0:27:40 Is that they’re two very different guys.
0:27:43 They’re very different styles of interacting with the world.
0:27:44 They have different homies.
0:27:45 They have different likes and dislikes.
0:27:47 And they are both extremely happy.
0:27:49 They’re both living very fulfilling lives.
0:27:52 And it reminded me that there’s more
0:27:55 than one way to do this, right?
0:27:56 And that was useful to know.
0:27:59 It also says, and this is something in your distant future
0:28:02 which is there’s a real joy in having adult children.
0:28:04 It’s something that’s so strange.
0:28:07 There’s this kid, you changed their diapers,
0:28:08 you exude them when they were crying.
0:28:09 You rocked them to sleep.
0:28:11 And there they are and they’re this big,
0:28:14 big hairy guy who could easily take you in a fight.
0:28:15 And you’ve got to treat them nice
0:28:17 because there’s their people now
0:28:18 and they don’t have to listen to you.
0:28:21 But there’s a huge amount of delight in that.
0:28:26 – For me, one of the really the great privileges
0:28:31 of being a parent is watching this little person
0:28:36 move through the world with fresh eyes and a fresh mind
0:28:39 and have come to really appreciate
0:28:42 that instinctive wisdom that children have.
0:28:47 It’s a kind of wisdom that we lose when we become adults,
0:28:52 when we fall into habits and routines
0:28:56 and that sense of wonder disappears.
0:28:57 – Oh, I like that.
0:29:01 I’ve never been so into the sort of wisdom of kids stuff.
0:29:04 I think kids are just often as ignorant as they seem
0:29:07 and often prejudice and simple and unfair.
0:29:09 But the one edge kids have over us,
0:29:13 you perfectly summarize which is they see the world fresh.
0:29:17 It also, by the way, since you ping me on empathy a bit,
0:29:18 I’ll say something in favor of empathy.
0:29:20 So my objections to empathy have to do
0:29:22 with its role in moral decisions.
0:29:23 But empathy is often great.
0:29:26 And Adam Smith gives a good example of this.
0:29:29 Taking empathy is putting yourself in another person’s shoes
0:29:30 and feeling what they feel.
0:29:34 One of the great joys of having kids
0:29:36 is that it allows you sometimes,
0:29:38 it sounds like you’ve been doing this,
0:29:41 to see the world fresh, to see the world realized,
0:29:44 to see fireworks, which you’ve seen a million times before,
0:29:46 for the first time over again.
0:29:50 To taste ice cream for the first time through them.
0:29:52 And that’s that rocks, that’s terrific.
0:29:57 – Yeah, I mean, I was gonna ask you
0:29:59 what you think we have to learn from children
0:30:03 about how to be happy, but maybe that’s the answer.
0:30:05 – Sort of beginner’s mind stuff.
0:30:07 – Yeah, yeah.
0:30:11 – Yeah, it’s something we get angry them for.
0:30:14 But I think there’s a reason why
0:30:16 we don’t walk around with beginners in mind
0:30:18 because you don’t wanna be sitting down,
0:30:21 drink a cup of coffee and stare at the coffee and smell.
0:30:23 Oh my God, I’m gonna taste it all anew.
0:30:26 We never do stuff.
0:30:29 There’s a logic behind the fact that we automate.
0:30:31 We become used to things, we habituate.
0:30:33 Because you don’t wanna drive home from work
0:30:36 as if you were the first time in a car again.
0:30:39 You wanna be able to do things automatically.
0:30:41 And the cost of that is you give up
0:30:42 this beautiful beginner’s mind.
0:30:45 But I don’t think we should or could retain it.
0:30:49 – Yeah, I can see that it’s not entirely practical
0:30:52 to be that immersed in the present
0:30:56 that it’s definitely a luxury of being cared for
0:30:59 and not having responsibilities or a job
0:31:01 or a mortgage, that kind of thing.
0:31:06 But it sounds like you think I’m being too romantic
0:31:07 about kids.
0:31:09 I mean, look, they do shit their pants.
0:31:11 – You wanna go back to shitting your pants, Sean.
0:31:14 – No, I do not wanna go back to shitting my pants,
0:31:17 but I would love to have more.
0:31:20 I don’t know what the right balance is,
0:31:22 but I would love to have more of that beginner’s mind.
0:31:24 I mean, look, I’ve stared at a pine cone
0:31:25 for three hours before,
0:31:27 but I took a lot of mushrooms to do that.
0:31:29 I can’t, I couldn’t.
0:31:31 And again, that’s not practical either,
0:31:36 but that sense of awe at something so simple like that
0:31:37 is possible when you’re–
0:31:41 – No, I get that, I agree with that.
0:31:42 And it’s actually a part of my life,
0:31:44 which I don’t think I have anywhere near enough of,
0:31:45 I mean, after this conversation,
0:31:47 I’m gonna go find some mushrooms.
0:31:50 But I think that in everyday life,
0:31:54 you give up too much to always find yourself
0:31:56 in beginner’s mind.
0:31:59 But I do feel that loss.
0:32:03 – I guess that’s sort of come to think of self-consciousness
0:32:05 as a bit of a paradox.
0:32:07 I mean, on the one hand, it is a gift in lots of ways,
0:32:12 but it does seem also to be a machine for unhappiness,
0:32:15 all that ruminating and self-reflection
0:32:19 and the anxieties and the neuroses and the pathologies.
0:32:21 I mean, I don’t know,
0:32:23 you think I’m throwing too much shade
0:32:26 on self-consciousness here?
0:32:26 I mean–
0:32:29 – No, I think that there are tragic dilemmas.
0:32:32 To be an intelligent, conscious, self-conscious,
0:32:36 capable adult involves falling yourself
0:32:39 into a situation where there’s a lot of suffering,
0:32:41 a lot of doubt, a lot of concern,
0:32:42 where you lose beginner’s mind,
0:32:44 where you question yourself.
0:32:47 And that’s just a trade-off.
0:32:49 I think it’s inevitable.
0:32:50 I think it’s great to be a kid,
0:32:52 but there’s a lot of bad things
0:32:53 and it’s great to be an adult,
0:32:54 but there’s a lot of bad things
0:32:57 and you’re just kind of stuck with these traders.
0:33:00 I mean, you talk about another mystery, take podcasts.
0:33:03 So when I go from place to place,
0:33:04 I always have headphones on.
0:33:06 I’m listening to a podcast.
0:33:08 Always your podcast, by the way,
0:33:09 but I’m listening to podcasts.
0:33:11 And a friend of mine, I was saying,
0:33:13 I’ll go downstairs to the kitchen to get a snack
0:33:14 and I’ll put on my headphones.
0:33:16 I could listen to podcasts on the way downstairs
0:33:18 so I’m not to waste valuable time.
0:33:20 A friend of mine gave me a really hard time.
0:33:22 I said, “Dude, leave your phone at home,
0:33:25 walk through, experience the world as it is.”
0:33:27 And I could see the pluses behind that,
0:33:29 but then I’d miss out on a great podcast.
0:33:31 There’s trade-offs.
0:33:33 – Always trade-offs.
0:33:36 You’re making me think.
0:33:38 Have you read Nietzsche’s “Human, All Too Human”?
0:33:39 – I have very, very little Nietzsche.
0:33:41 – No, what would I have learned?
0:33:47 – I don’t know a lot, but there’s a line.
0:33:50 I may mess this up, but it’s something like,
0:33:53 the first sign that an animal has become human
0:33:57 is that it is no longer dedicated to its momentary comfort,
0:34:00 but rather to its enduring comfort.
0:34:01 – Oh, I like that.
0:34:05 – He, look, that guy packs a lot into a sentence.
0:34:07 – He’s an aphorism guy, like an aphorism machine.
0:34:09 – Yeah, but it sort of speaks to this,
0:34:14 that in that transition from consciousness to self-consciousness,
0:34:18 one of the tolls you pay is that you sort of,
0:34:23 you get robbed of the joy of just living in the moment,
0:34:26 living in your body and all these other sorts of pathologies
0:34:29 we’re talking about become possible.
0:34:32 And that is just, I guess you said it, trade-offs.
0:34:33 That’s the trade-off.
0:34:37 – And you describe this as a cost of self-consciousness,
0:34:41 and it is, but it’s also a cost of morality.
0:34:44 I mean, were you a father, for instance?
0:34:46 I don’t think you could be a good father
0:34:48 if you didn’t think about your kid,
0:34:49 if you didn’t worry about your kid.
0:34:53 If you didn’t, in these perfect moments of solitude
0:34:55 and so on and say, hey, how’s the kid doing?
0:34:57 And, you know, and as he had his shots,
0:35:01 and is he on his way to becoming educated,
0:35:03 is he healthy, is he changed, is he, dah, dah, dah, dah,
0:35:04 and all of these things.
0:35:08 And so the more we have human connections
0:35:11 and love and moral obligations,
0:35:14 the more we’re stretched outside of our body
0:35:17 and just worry about shit all the time.
0:35:19 And this is actually, you know,
0:35:23 the one Christopher Hitchens joke I remember is,
0:35:25 did you hear about the Buddhist vacuum cleaner?
0:35:27 It has no attachments.
0:35:30 And this is in some way both, you know,
0:35:34 you phrase it as a strength or weakness of Buddhism,
0:35:39 but the strict doctrine renounces special attachments.
0:35:41 And what if you don’t wanna renounce special attachments?
0:35:44 – It feels like I’m kind of making the case
0:35:45 against our brains here,
0:35:49 that they do not seem to be wired to make us happy.
0:35:51 That just does not seem to be a goal.
0:35:52 – That is God’s truth.
0:35:57 That is, you know, Evolution 101 is that natural selection
0:36:00 that our winnie in process that gave us our brains,
0:36:04 we have does not care one bit about our happiness.
0:36:07 It cares about building machines that survive and reproduce.
0:36:12 And happiness exists, I think to put it crudely,
0:36:15 as part of a feedback system saying you’re doing well,
0:36:18 you fall in love, you have an orgasm,
0:36:21 you fill your belly, you get some status, you feel good.
0:36:24 And that’s Evolution’s thumbs up, do more of that.
0:36:27 But it also falls in and there we get consciousness
0:36:29 and intelligence and so on
0:36:32 to what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill,
0:36:35 which is soon a happiness will fade,
0:36:38 because evolution doesn’t want you taking victory laps
0:36:41 and everything, it wants you doing more stuff.
0:36:43 Accumulate more food, build a bigger shelter,
0:36:45 protect your family.
0:36:48 And so it drives us endlessly.
0:36:49 I’ve talked to Robert right about this,
0:36:53 I think he views Buddhism as an anti-Darwin thing.
0:36:55 We’ve evolved this way, let’s fight it.
0:36:59 Let’s renounce our evolved capacity, our evolved desires.
0:37:01 Utilitarianism, a lot of moral views are saying,
0:37:04 “Evolution gave us these biases, let’s fight it.”
0:37:07 And there’s a lot to be said about that.
0:37:10 But yeah, you are sick and tired of the brains
0:37:12 that Darwin has given us.
0:37:14 And there’s a lot to be annoyed by it.
0:37:18 – You know the stand up comic Pete Holmes?
0:37:19 – I’ve seen him, yeah.
0:37:21 – I saw this great bit of his the other day
0:37:23 where he was just, I don’t remember what he said exactly,
0:37:25 but it was something like, he’s like,
0:37:28 you know, if you think about it,
0:37:32 our brains are unbelievable assholes.
0:37:36 They have all the ingredients they need to make us happy.
0:37:41 The dopamine and the serotonin, all that stuff.
0:37:45 But they’re constantly making you feel like shit, right?
0:37:49 We’re supposed to be the commanders-in-chief of our brains,
0:37:51 but we’re just helpless passengers.
0:37:53 – Nice. – It kind of sucks.
0:37:54 – It’s a deep point.
0:37:56 And it’s because the system is not our friend.
0:38:01 The system is not evolved to sort of follow our conscious will.
0:38:05 I think just pursuing something else we talked about,
0:38:07 there’s a sweet spot of anxiety.
0:38:11 People who have too much anxiety
0:38:13 and go to shrinks and psychologists
0:38:15 and they take drugs and they try to meditate
0:38:17 and they suffer and they try to fix that.
0:38:18 If you have too much anxiety,
0:38:20 if you have too little anxiety,
0:38:23 you end up in prison or dead, you don’t worry enough.
0:38:25 And so bad things happen to you.
0:38:28 You’re fearless, it’s not so good.
0:38:32 So some sort of anxiety, which is very rarely pleasant,
0:38:33 is just part of our package.
0:38:36 And so some sort of sadness and self-consciousness,
0:38:38 doubt, worry.
0:38:42 – If our brain does anything that reflects it,
0:38:45 there has to be some evolutionary reason for it, right?
0:38:47 It may be maladapted to that moment.
0:38:50 – Yeah, that’s right, or to this world.
0:38:54 If somebody mocks me on Twitter and I fall into a rage,
0:38:56 even though he’s an anonymous rando,
0:38:59 but my mind hasn’t evolved to deal with anonymous rando,
0:39:00 it’s evolved to deal with people
0:39:03 that I would bump into day after day after day.
0:39:06 – Right, so this strong instinct we have to care
0:39:10 about what other people think of us made a lot of sense
0:39:12 when you lived in tribes of 30 or 40 people,
0:39:15 that was high-stakes stuff to be ostracized.
0:39:16 But to care about what other people think
0:39:18 in a world of Twitter.
0:39:19 – Yes.
0:39:22 – Where 10,000 anonymous bots can tell you
0:39:26 what a piece of shit you are, that’s, boy, that’s not,
0:39:29 there’s a bit of a disjunction there.
0:39:31 – And this is the Pete Holmes point,
0:39:34 which is knowing that doesn’t make it go away.
0:39:38 If there’s a big bag of M&Ms downstairs
0:39:43 and I’m really hungry, I know that my body has evolved
0:39:45 to try to absorb a normal amount of sugar
0:39:48 ’cause in the world I involved in,
0:39:50 I was constantly at a risk of dying of starvation.
0:39:53 I’m not in a risk now, so just put down the sugar,
0:39:55 but it doesn’t make my hunger stop.
0:39:59 It doesn’t make my shame, my anger, my jealousy stop,
0:40:02 knowing that it’s a poor fit for my world right now.
0:40:06 To the extent our conversation is having a theme,
0:40:08 it’s gone surprisingly dark,
0:40:10 which is that we’ve evolved these minds
0:40:12 that have evolved through,
0:40:14 I don’t know what a trigger warning or something on it,
0:40:16 but that have evolved through natural selection,
0:40:19 and now it has left us utterly screwed.
0:40:20 We’ve lost our balance,
0:40:23 and we’ve certainly lost our beginner’s mind
0:40:25 that we have a brief period of as children.
0:40:26 – You know what the best part is?
0:40:27 – Yeah.
0:40:30 – This conversation is part of a series about optimism.
0:40:31 – Oh.
0:40:34 (gentle music)
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0:41:57 (upbeat music)
0:42:12 – Let’s do a little rapid fire and see where it goes.
0:42:13 First question.
0:42:16 Do most of us really know what makes us happy?
0:42:18 I think we all think we do, but do we?
0:42:19 – No, no.
0:42:23 We have, as psychologists, some understanding
0:42:24 of what makes people happy,
0:42:28 and it’s not what people think makes them happy.
0:42:31 So many people think, including me a lot of days,
0:42:33 like I wanna make more money and I’ll make me happy.
0:42:34 And it’s not totally wrong.
0:42:36 There’s a correlation in money and happiness.
0:42:41 But basically, the shortest answer to what makes us happy
0:42:45 is social contact with people.
0:42:46 And I’m kind of an introvert.
0:42:47 And I feel like sometimes I avoid
0:42:50 so I find uncomfortable, but there’s so much evidence
0:42:53 that social contact is such a core to happiness
0:42:55 and relationships.
0:42:57 There was a nice study, a nice big review came out
0:43:01 by this guy, Dunnigan Folk and Liz Dunn.
0:43:03 And they reviewed all of the research
0:43:05 on people’s attempts to make them happy,
0:43:07 what works and what doesn’t.
0:43:08 And the most robust experiments.
0:43:10 And it’s kind of surprising.
0:43:13 Volunteering doesn’t make you happy,
0:43:17 but giving strangers money makes you happy.
0:43:18 Why?
0:43:22 Oh, I don’t know, ’cause it’s a subtle difference, right?
0:43:24 And I recommend people like read the literature
0:43:27 and just look at, there’s some interesting findings.
0:43:29 But don’t listen to people who just kind of say,
0:43:30 oh, here’s what I think.
0:43:34 Look at the studies, ’cause the studies are surprising.
0:43:38 Is it a mistake to think of happiness as the goal of life?
0:43:39 Yes.
0:43:41 Or even a primary goal of life?
0:43:43 It’s a good goal, everybody wants to be happy.
0:43:45 Everybody wants to just even zoom it in more.
0:43:46 Everybody likes pleasure.
0:43:49 It’s a hot day, drink some cool water,
0:43:50 have an extra slice of pie.
0:43:53 That’s great.
0:43:58 But no, I think, this is not science now.
0:44:00 This is just my own view,
0:44:05 but I think meaningful pursuits are an important part of life.
0:44:10 Being good, it’s the data over whether you raising a child,
0:44:16 of the age of your child, whether it makes you happy,
0:44:20 it’s by no means clear that it does on average.
0:44:22 Particularly in the United States,
0:44:23 and there are many studies find that
0:44:25 in the alternative world where you didn’t have a kid,
0:44:26 you’d actually be happier.
0:44:30 Doesn’t we ask you how happier, you’d actually be happier.
0:44:32 But it’d be ridiculous for me to say,
0:44:34 therefore you’ve probably made a mistake.
0:44:35 What you would say, and what I would say,
0:44:38 having raised kids is, it wasn’t not a happiness
0:44:42 in some simple dumb sense, it’s fulfillment, it’s love.
0:44:45 It’s a feeling of doing something meaningful and important.
0:44:48 What’s another meaningful pursuit
0:44:51 other than having children?
0:44:53 – There’s a line from Freud,
0:44:56 which apparently was misattributed, but it works,
0:45:00 which is what matters in life is love and work.
0:45:04 And under love, I put under broad ambit of relationships,
0:45:08 raising kids, having a partner you care for,
0:45:10 taking care of somebody who needs care.
0:45:13 And for work, I put projects.
0:45:15 And it could be a project actually at work
0:45:18 where they send the forms to the IRS and everything.
0:45:20 But it could also just be,
0:45:21 it could be somebody setting up a podcast
0:45:22 and working hard at it.
0:45:25 I think love and work are the two things that really matter.
0:45:28 – So if I asked you what you think
0:45:31 people should maximize in life, you would say meaning?
0:45:34 – Yeah. – Meaningful pursuits?
0:45:36 – Meaningful pursuits and relationships.
0:45:40 And I would also say to some extent, if you do that,
0:45:42 maybe happiness will follow.
0:45:45 One of the findings in happiness literature
0:45:49 is that you ask people how much do you work to become happy?
0:45:51 And then you get their answer and ask them how happy are you?
0:45:53 The answers are negatively correlated.
0:45:56 The pursuit of happiness is a miserable pursuit.
0:45:59 It’s like probably trying to be really good at kissing
0:46:01 gets in the way of being good at kissing.
0:46:04 Sometimes focusing on things makes this thing harder to get.
0:46:07 So make sleep is a good example of that.
0:46:09 So don’t try to be happy.
0:46:12 Instead, try to maximize meaning and relationships.
0:46:15 And then, and don’t even think about this ever,
0:46:17 but maybe I’ll make you happy.
0:46:21 – How do you distinguish happiness from satisfaction?
0:46:24 – Again, we’re entering sort of terminology things,
0:46:28 but I would say sort of happiness is some narrower sense,
0:46:30 involving sort of hedonic aspects
0:46:34 like pleasure, smiling, feeling good.
0:46:36 Well, satisfaction could be deeper.
0:46:41 So again, raising a kid are taking care of a loved one who’s sick.
0:46:43 You could say, this is satisfying.
0:46:45 I’m doing good stuff.
0:46:46 I’m making the world a better place.
0:46:48 I’m proud of myself.
0:46:49 Even I’m not smiling very much.
0:46:52 Even though I don’t, you know, this is hard.
0:46:56 I probably have more fun playing pickleball or getting high,
0:46:58 but that wouldn’t be satisfying.
0:47:00 That’d just be fun.
0:47:03 – How much of life is about what we choose
0:47:05 to pay attention to?
0:47:07 I mean, I sort of always believed on some level
0:47:10 that we’ve become what we pay attention to.
0:47:12 And if you want to be optimistic,
0:47:15 there are plenty of reasons to justify it.
0:47:16 If you want to be pessimistic,
0:47:18 you know where to look to justify it.
0:47:22 Does it really just come down to what you choose
0:47:24 to pay attention to in the end?
0:47:28 – I think it probably comes down to an enormous extent
0:47:31 on what you pay attention to.
0:47:33 There’s this line, I think with Shakespeare,
0:47:35 there’s nothing neither good nor bad,
0:47:37 but thinking makes it so.
0:47:39 It’s how you see the world.
0:47:44 But how much we can choose is a dicey question.
0:47:48 If we could choose, then we’d all be happy.
0:47:49 We’d say, “I’m looking on the bright side of things.”
0:47:52 And boom, we’d be happy, plainly, that doesn’t work.
0:47:55 If I’m feeling terrible pain in my leg,
0:47:58 terrible chronic pain, and you used to say,
0:48:01 “Well, Paul, don’t focus on it.”
0:48:05 Well, the thing about pain is it calls to your attention.
0:48:08 The thing about having a child you’re worried about
0:48:11 or a career that’s failing is you can’t just
0:48:13 switch off your focus, and maybe you shouldn’t,
0:48:14 even if you could.
0:48:18 So I kind of agree with the part that how you see the world,
0:48:21 what you focus on, this is a great lesson of stoicism.
0:48:22 I think it’s right.
0:48:24 It has an enormous effect on your life.
0:48:29 But getting control over that is easier said than done.
0:48:32 – I have all these years of study in the mind
0:48:36 and thinking about the happiness and meaning
0:48:39 and what makes a good life.
0:48:41 Made you any happier, any more optimistic?
0:48:43 Do you think it’s had any noticeable effect?
0:48:45 Do you think you’ve been changed at all by it,
0:48:47 or do you think you would be exactly what you are now,
0:48:51 whether or not you became a psychologist or not?
0:48:56 – I think at the margins in certain ways,
0:48:58 I picked up things through studying the mind
0:49:01 that has made my own life better.
0:49:02 – Like what?
0:49:07 – Well, for instance, I’m very convinced of the power
0:49:10 in both the short term and the long term
0:49:12 of social contact and social connections.
0:49:17 So if I’m really down, my temptation is
0:49:20 to lie in bed, flip up my laptop,
0:49:22 and watch YouTube videos for four hours or something,
0:49:24 or just sit and sulk.
0:49:27 But I know that if I could reach out,
0:49:30 get one of my kids on Zoom, grab one of my friends
0:49:33 for a beer, it will cheer me up.
0:49:35 And I don’t always succeed in doing it,
0:49:39 but I know that solitude and just grumping will not work.
0:49:41 I’m better off doing other things.
0:49:42 I’ve learned through psychology,
0:49:44 this is actually not my own,
0:49:46 far, very far from my own work,
0:49:48 I’ve learned about the idea of flow states,
0:49:50 and that’s, I read this book by,
0:49:52 she sent me an I about flow,
0:49:53 where he says that, you know,
0:49:55 people aren’t happy doing the thing.
0:49:57 This goes back to what you were saying actually,
0:49:59 which is people think they love vacations,
0:50:00 but they don’t tend to love vacations.
0:50:02 They just spend a lot of time sitting by the beach,
0:50:04 feeling kind of bored and anxious,
0:50:07 what people get a lot out of is flow states
0:50:08 where they’re really into a project,
0:50:11 they’re really focused and zoomed in.
0:50:13 And I realize that’s particularly true for me.
0:50:15 So, you know, when I travel on vacation,
0:50:18 I bring my laptop and I could spend a couple of hours
0:50:20 in the morning writing, and that’s actually often,
0:50:22 I love that.
0:50:24 I’m maybe not supposed to love it, but I love it.
0:50:28 – I have to ask, because this is a series on optimism,
0:50:32 if you had to make a pitch for being optimistic,
0:50:34 what do you got?
0:50:39 – I would go for the self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:50:41 I would go for this fact that, you know,
0:50:43 it’s easier to make a pitch for being things right,
0:50:44 being irrational and all that stuff,
0:50:47 but I would say that that in some way,
0:50:49 the person who thinks their odds are better
0:50:53 than they are paradoxically ends up doing better.
0:50:56 And this also connects with your conversation
0:50:58 with Jamil Zaki, which is interactions
0:50:59 of other people.
0:51:03 Suppose it actually turns out, as a matter of fact,
0:51:07 that 50% of people in this situation can be trusted.
0:51:10 But suppose I go into the world thinking it’s 80%.
0:51:13 You might think, well, I’m gonna get really screwed,
0:51:16 but maybe by going at people, trusting them,
0:51:19 taking a shot at them, I transform some
0:51:22 of the non-trust worthy 50%, and it works out for me.
0:51:27 So, optimism, and in fact, one of the things
0:51:30 that works in the happiness intervention literature
0:51:33 is something they call acting happy,
0:51:36 which is, they say, and part of the experiment,
0:51:39 you’re thinking that, well, put on a happy face, smile,
0:51:41 talk to people in a cheerful tone.
0:51:43 Now, if you’re depressed, you just say, go die.
0:51:46 What’s the worthless, ugly advice?
0:51:51 But weirdly, acting positive makes people positive
0:51:54 towards you, and it can again be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:52:00 – Yeah, I’d also say, believing that the world can be better
0:52:04 is a precondition for creating that world,
0:52:08 and pessimism seems, just on purely strategic grounds,
0:52:11 to undercut the motivation to do anything, really.
0:52:15 It’s pure passivity, and that just seems
0:52:18 like a poor strategy.
0:52:19 – That’s right.
0:52:20 I think that even if it’s a long shot
0:52:23 that you could make the world a better place,
0:52:25 maybe, I’ll raise this, maybe the person
0:52:30 who isn’t smart enough to know it’s a long shot, tries,
0:52:32 and if you get enough people trying, you’ll get success,
0:52:34 where if everyone else, everyone is realistic
0:52:37 and say, listen, it’s not worth it, you get favor.
0:52:40 – Well, Paul, what can I say?
0:52:42 We may not be one of your favorite pods,
0:52:43 but you’re one of my favorite guests.
0:52:45 – This is always fun, Sean.
0:52:47 – Paul Bloom, everyone, this has been great.
0:52:49 You know it’s always a joy to have you on stuff.
0:52:51 – Thanks again, thanks for having me.
0:52:54 (upbeat music)
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0:53:08 I had a lot of fun.
0:53:11 I hope you also had a lot of fun.
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0:00:47 If you could decide whether to be optimistic
0:00:50 or pessimistic all the time, which would you choose?
0:00:56 I think most of us would choose to be optimistic.
0:00:58 I mean, why not?
0:01:00 Who doesn’t want to feel good about the future?
0:01:04 But we all know it’s not that easy.
0:01:07 We can’t always control how we feel.
0:01:10 If we could, everyone would feel great all the time.
0:01:16 Still, it’s worth asking why being optimistic
0:01:18 can be so difficult sometimes,
0:01:20 especially when there are plenty of reasons to be.
0:01:25 If you’re like me, it often seems as though
0:01:27 your own mind is at war with itself.
0:01:30 Does it have to be that way though?
0:01:34 Or is it possible that we’re just wired to worry?
0:01:39 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:01:41 (upbeat music)
0:01:54 Today’s guest is Paul Blum.
0:01:57 He’s a professor at the University of Toronto
0:01:59 and the author of several great books,
0:02:02 including Psych, The Story of the Human Mind,
0:02:04 and The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering,
0:02:05 and The Search for Meaning.
0:02:10 I’m not dropping any official rankings here,
0:02:12 but Paul is one of my favorite psychologists
0:02:14 to read and talk to.
0:02:17 His books are fun, enlightening,
0:02:19 and full of practical wisdom.
0:02:25 So when we decided to do this series on optimism,
0:02:27 he was one of the first people I thought of.
0:02:31 I had a great conversation a few weeks ago
0:02:34 with another psychologist, Jamil Zaki,
0:02:37 about the temptations of cynicism and how to overcome them.
0:02:42 The episode is called Why Cynicism is Bad for You.
0:02:45 I hope you’ll listen to it if you haven’t already,
0:02:47 because it’s a really good companion
0:02:49 to today’s conversation with Paul.
0:02:52 In this one, we zoom out a little further
0:02:54 to talk about the nature of our minds,
0:02:57 what he’s come to learn about optimism,
0:03:00 and what any of it has to do with whether or not
0:03:01 we’re happy.
0:03:06 Paul Bloom, welcome to the gray area.
0:03:08 – Good to talk to you again, Sean.
0:03:10 – You know, I hesitate to start out this way,
0:03:12 but I’m a little disappointed in you.
0:03:13 – Go ahead.
0:03:16 – You have a lovely newsletter called Small Potatoes.
0:03:21 You recently had a post about your favorite podcast,
0:03:23 and we weren’t on it.
0:03:24 Kater, explain yourself.
0:03:26 – You know, you write these things
0:03:28 and you know you’re gonna miss somebody,
0:03:29 and then I hear from you and I missed you.
0:03:31 I am sorry.
0:03:34 The odd thing is, this is one of my favorite podcasts.
0:03:37 Maybe if you go back to the newsletter
0:03:38 and you go back to it,
0:03:40 you will find that there has been a stealth edit.
0:03:44 – All right, let’s get into this,
0:03:46 and I’ll start with a hardball.
0:03:52 Optimism, overrated or underrated?
0:03:55 – Oh, I like the sort of Tyler Cowan vibe he got here.
0:04:02 – Overrated, the whole question of optimism, pessimism,
0:04:04 is kinda stupid.
0:04:07 If optimism means you think things are gonna be better off
0:04:08 than they are in pessimism,
0:04:10 is that you think things are gonna be worse off?
0:04:13 Isn’t the rational thing to be realist?
0:04:14 So, overrated.
0:04:17 I think we should try to see things as they really are.
0:04:18 And on the same token,
0:04:20 I don’t think we should be pessimists either.
0:04:22 We should just try to be accurate.
0:04:25 – Wait, do you think realism and optimism
0:04:27 are mutually exclusive?
0:04:28 Can’t you be both?
0:04:30 – Well, I guess it depends what you mean by optimism.
0:04:33 If what you mean by optimism is seeing the world
0:04:35 in a good way in a positive light,
0:04:37 in cases where the world actually is good
0:04:40 and is positive, sure, then I believe in optimism.
0:04:41 But I always thought it means,
0:04:44 to some extent, rose-tinted lenses,
0:04:45 seeing things as a little bit more positive,
0:04:48 trying to see the bright side of things.
0:04:51 And we should try to see things as they are.
0:04:55 – Do you think of optimism as an attitude
0:05:00 or an orientation or something closer to a life strategy?
0:05:02 – Yeah, it’s a good question.
0:05:05 I mean, what I’m talking about now
0:05:07 is if it’s a way of assessing the odds.
0:05:08 Do you assess them as bright?
0:05:11 In cases of uncertainty, and it’s always uncertain,
0:05:12 you go for use and things are gonna be good
0:05:13 and things are gonna be bad.
0:05:16 And I’m saying, we should just try to accuracy.
0:05:19 There is a sort of attitude issue
0:05:21 where optimism could be defended,
0:05:23 where you get the odds right.
0:05:25 But optimism says, hey, let’s give it a shot.
0:05:27 Let’s not weigh the negatives.
0:05:30 Let’s not be so loss averse.
0:05:32 Let’s try to focus, let’s try to take a shot.
0:05:34 And so not worry too much about failure.
0:05:38 It can be under some circumstances, rational.
0:05:43 – I think about something like religious faith.
0:05:46 And we have pretty good evidence
0:05:50 that religious people are actually happier.
0:05:51 Now, there may be lots of reasons for that.
0:05:53 That’s a separate conversation,
0:05:55 but it seems to be a pretty consistent finding.
0:05:58 So there is this tangible benefit to faith,
0:06:01 completely independent of whether it’s true or not.
0:06:04 And maybe optimism is kind of like that.
0:06:07 – It’s interesting, it’s an interesting analogy.
0:06:09 And so you might challenge what I said before
0:06:12 and say, oh, wait, under circumstances in life
0:06:16 where there is a payoff to being wrong
0:06:21 in a certain systematic way to overestimate your chances.
0:06:22 Suppose I’m back to my teenage years
0:06:25 and I’m trying to approach women, go ask them out on dates
0:06:27 and I have a realistic assessment.
0:06:29 Honestly, the odds are not good for me,
0:06:31 but I inflate the odds.
0:06:33 And because I inflate the odds, it motivates me
0:06:36 to approach people and to talk to them and so on.
0:06:38 And I develop a relationship.
0:06:40 Maybe nobody would open up a business or a restaurant
0:06:42 or try for an academic job
0:06:45 if they had a realistic assessment of the odds.
0:06:48 So yeah, I could see it playing some role.
0:06:49 At the same time though, for each example
0:06:52 I’m giving of this sort, you could come back
0:06:55 with an example of how an over-optimistic perspective
0:06:57 could lead you into all sorts of trouble.
0:06:58 – Yeah, that’s fair.
0:07:02 I’m just an N of one, but I have to say in my experience
0:07:05 I have not found that there’s a positive relationship
0:07:07 between being realistic and being happy.
0:07:10 So I don’t know, make of that what you will.
0:07:11 – I think if you looked at your life,
0:07:14 you would find that getting things right
0:07:17 often leads to happiness or leads to more happiness
0:07:19 than alternative.
0:07:20 – Yeah, I don’t know.
0:07:23 I found that I’m often right when I least want to be.
0:07:23 (laughs)
0:07:26 But maybe that’s just me, that could just be me.
0:07:27 – Fair enough.
0:07:33 – It’s interesting when you think about happiness
0:07:36 which is obviously related to optimism in some ways.
0:07:40 And I know there’s research showing
0:07:43 that happiness over the course of someone’s life
0:07:45 takes the form of a U-shaped curve
0:07:48 where you’re most happy at the beginning
0:07:49 and the end of life.
0:07:51 And then there’s this big dip in the middle
0:07:54 which we call the midlife crisis.
0:07:58 Is there a similar finding on optimism and pessimism?
0:08:00 Do we tend to get more or less optimistic
0:08:02 or pessimistic as we age?
0:08:04 Or do we just have no idea?
0:08:05 – I have no idea.
0:08:07 Maybe there’s some people who know.
0:08:09 I mean, the U-shaped curve is interesting.
0:08:10 When it was originally discovered,
0:08:12 people said, well, that’s United States or our culture,
0:08:16 but it seems to replicate across all sorts of cultures
0:08:18 and all sorts of times.
0:08:19 And it’s actually really surprising.
0:08:21 You would expect to be happiest when you’re young
0:08:23 and then there’s all sorts of decline,
0:08:25 physical decline, cognitive decline,
0:08:28 even financial decline should bring you down.
0:08:30 But weirdly, when people hit their mid-50s,
0:08:32 there’s often this curve upwards.
0:08:34 And maybe this connects to optimism,
0:08:38 but one analysis of this is that your priorities change.
0:08:40 You’re no longer fully in the status game.
0:08:42 This is sort of zero-sum battle
0:08:46 for mating opportunities and money and power.
0:08:47 And you step back more towards,
0:08:51 I think, David Brooks calls some sort of eulogy virtues
0:08:54 where I don’t have good relationships with people.
0:08:56 I’ll develop fulfilling hobbies and so on.
0:08:58 And maybe you’re more optimistic
0:09:00 because then your goals are more realistic.
0:09:02 If my goal is to have my next book at number one,
0:09:03 a New York Times bestseller,
0:09:05 well, it’s nice to be optimistic,
0:09:08 but there’s a bit of frustration probably built into this.
0:09:10 On the other hand, if my goal is to spend some nice time
0:09:13 with my wife during crossword puzzles and talking,
0:09:16 well, you know, things get calibrated properly.
0:09:19 – Maybe the best case for being optimistic
0:09:23 is that it’s socially desirable that people like to be around
0:09:25 good vibes and positive attitudes.
0:09:28 And obviously the reverse is just as true.
0:09:30 People don’t like– – I think that’s definitely true.
0:09:34 There’s what psychologists call the Lake Wobegon effect.
0:09:35 – What is that?
0:09:36 – It’s from Garrison Keeler.
0:09:37 I’m gonna mangle the line.
0:09:39 But Garrison Keeler talks about Lake Wobegon
0:09:42 and says something where all the boys and girls
0:09:43 are above average.
0:09:46 And the idea is kind of just called the above average effect.
0:09:49 So you ask people, how good a driver are you?
0:09:52 You ask people how good they are as lovers, as friends.
0:09:54 How funny are they?
0:09:54 How good students are they?
0:09:56 How are good professors are they?
0:09:57 And the main findings,
0:10:00 just about everybody thinks they’re above average.
0:10:03 And there’s all different theories of why that happens.
0:10:05 One connects to something you said before,
0:10:07 which is kind of feedback.
0:10:10 So if I give a talk and most people hate it,
0:10:13 but some people come up to me and say, “Hey man, good talk.”
0:10:15 And I say, “I gave a good talk.”
0:10:20 Because in a polite world, the feedback is often positive.
0:10:21 But anyway, there does seem to be
0:10:24 this general kind of rosy glow effect.
0:10:28 – Even these terms, optimism and pessimism,
0:10:31 they’re very fuzzy categories.
0:10:34 Do you think they’re useful as a psychologist?
0:10:36 – I mean, just talking you and me right now,
0:10:37 I think that they’re too fuzzy to be useful.
0:10:40 Plainly, we came in with somewhat different ideas
0:10:41 of what optimism is.
0:10:44 You saw it more as an attitude towards life,
0:10:45 to motivation.
0:10:47 I was thinking it was a way to assess the situation.
0:10:51 So I think we need, as so often with psychology,
0:10:53 we need to kind of be clear what we talk about
0:10:54 and use terms properly.
0:10:58 I think optimism folds in too many things
0:11:00 to be a useful term.
0:11:04 – Well, you famously made the case against empathy.
0:11:05 – Yeah, and I got in so much trouble there
0:11:09 because people said, well, empathy just means goodness.
0:11:11 How come you’re against goodness?
0:11:13 And I was used to determine it in a different way,
0:11:14 but yeah, exactly.
0:11:16 And I try to be careful what I mean, but…
0:11:19 – Yeah, I mean, I ask in part, ’cause I wonder
0:11:22 if you would also make a case for pessimism.
0:11:24 I mean, let me ask that differently.
0:11:25 – You sound like my agent.
0:11:29 – Yeah, we’re trying to move merch here.
0:11:32 I think what I’m really asking is,
0:11:37 do you take pessimism seriously as a philosophical position?
0:11:41 Or do you think it’s just a mistake?
0:11:45 – I think it’s a mistake.
0:11:48 It involves seeing the world differently than it does.
0:11:52 And I think it’s a mistake we’re sometimes vulnerable to.
0:11:54 So I’m very persuaded by Stephen Pinker’s claims
0:11:57 that the world is in many ways getting better.
0:12:01 And Pinker points out that it’s a very unnatural belief
0:12:02 the world is getting better.
0:12:05 And this is in part because we have a negativity bias
0:12:06 when we see the world.
0:12:10 I saw the Trump-Harris debate,
0:12:12 and there’s a lot to be said about that.
0:12:17 But Trump’s view of the world is so unremittingly negative
0:12:20 as to how terrible it is.
0:12:22 The country’s falling apart, we’re being laughed at.
0:12:25 We’re not gonna be around in a few years and so on.
0:12:29 And I think this resonates to a lot of people.
0:12:30 Not for a sinister reason.
0:12:33 They just see, this is accurate.
0:12:34 – But what’s the appeal of that?
0:12:35 What is it satisfying?
0:12:39 – There’s different ways of thinking about it.
0:12:41 One way is it doesn’t satisfy an edge at all.
0:12:43 It’s just because of the way we absorb information.
0:12:46 So I hear about a terrible murder in Toronto,
0:12:48 and I say, oh my God, the city’s full of murders.
0:12:50 But I don’t hear about old people who aren’t murdered.
0:12:52 So there’s this negativity bias news
0:12:54 just gives me this wrong impression
0:12:56 even if it doesn’t fulfill a purpose.
0:12:59 But I actually think that some extent it does
0:13:02 fulfill a purpose and at least some people.
0:13:06 I think among other things, there’s kind of,
0:13:07 I’m gonna try this out.
0:13:09 I’m sort of thinking of, but I’ve always felt this,
0:13:13 which is some people are excited by the idea
0:13:16 that things are horrible, things are chaotic.
0:13:18 These are the end of days.
0:13:21 It makes you feel important that you’re in the middle
0:13:24 of this enormous historic decline
0:13:29 that we have about five years before AI makes us slaves.
0:13:34 Before climate change turns us into a hellhole,
0:13:37 before the fascist like Trump or a socialist like Harris
0:13:39 turn us into a third world country.
0:13:41 And there’s some excitement to that.
0:13:44 Can you feel that in your soul?
0:13:47 You hear this, do you feel a little shiver of, huh?
0:13:49 – I don’t know if I feel a shiver,
0:13:51 but it does seem right.
0:13:55 And sometimes it reminds me a little bit of the way
0:13:57 I think about conspiracy theories sometimes.
0:14:01 I always wonder, what is the appeal of that?
0:14:04 What is it doing psychologically for people?
0:14:09 And in some sense, for me, the answer is,
0:14:13 well, you might look at the world and think it’s broken
0:14:17 or unfair or inexplicable.
0:14:19 And there’s something empowering about having
0:14:22 an explanation for that that justifies your contempt
0:14:24 for a world that you feel divorced from
0:14:26 in some fundamental way.
0:14:29 I don’t know if pessimism or the negativity bias
0:14:31 is operating in a similar way.
0:14:32 – That’s interesting.
0:14:35 The alternative to the idea that a world is run
0:14:38 by conspiracies is that we live in an uncaring world
0:14:40 where people are just serving their own interests
0:14:42 and the interests of those they love and so on.
0:14:44 And maybe we’re feeling screwed,
0:14:45 but nobody’s trying to screw us.
0:14:48 Just things are just grinding away.
0:14:52 The conspiracy theory says that in some way
0:14:54 there’s a structure to the world.
0:14:56 It almost connects to religion.
0:14:58 It’s not, these things are not accidents.
0:15:02 There’s deeper interest and deeper desires going on.
0:15:05 And maybe even if we think the conspiracies are evil,
0:15:07 there’s a comfort to that.
0:15:10 – Yeah, I think shit happens.
0:15:12 It’s just not a satisfactory explanation for people.
0:15:15 So they need a story with good guys and bad guys
0:15:18 and a beginning and an end and it all sort of hangs together.
0:15:20 – I did research a while ago
0:15:23 of a brilliant graduate student, Kony Manerjee,
0:15:26 on the notion that everything happens for a reason.
0:15:28 It’s a slogan I hate with all my heart.
0:15:32 But it turned out we assess people’s beliefs.
0:15:33 We asked them, for instance, about their beliefs
0:15:34 about everyday life.
0:15:37 We asked them about special events, good events,
0:15:38 like birth of a child, bad events,
0:15:39 like death of a loved one.
0:15:42 And we asked them, did they believe things happen
0:15:43 for a reason?
0:15:46 And we found that religious people believe it very much.
0:15:49 But even atheists who said, I’d say there’s no such thing
0:15:52 as God, yeah, but things happen for a reason.
0:15:56 There’s karma, there’s structure, there’s justice.
0:15:59 And a conspiracy theory may not be the kind of reason
0:16:00 you want, it makes you happy.
0:16:01 It’s not people improving your life,
0:16:03 but it’s still a reason.
0:16:07 – Yeah, I think for a lot of people,
0:16:09 the only thing that’s truly intolerable
0:16:11 is not having a reason.
0:16:13 – That’s right.
0:16:14 And I don’t know about you,
0:16:18 my own metacrysical idea is that that sad truth is correct.
0:16:21 Realists about morality, I think there’s right and wrong.
0:16:23 I think that there’s meaning to be had in life.
0:16:26 But the universe itself is a cold and uncaring place.
0:16:29 And so is American politics.
0:16:32 There’s not this deep state orchestrating at all.
0:16:36 There’s not this, it’s just a whole lot of shit happens.
0:16:39 – I’m realizing that maybe shit happens
0:16:40 is the closest thing we have
0:16:44 to a grand unified theory of the world.
0:16:48 – It’s a great truth and it’s a very difficult truth.
0:16:52 And maybe one of the reasons why religion is reassuring
0:16:54 and conspiracy theories are reassuring.
0:16:57 And even a sort of pessimism could be reassuring
0:17:01 is it says there’s design here, there’s structure here.
0:17:03 You know, my life might not be very interesting,
0:17:05 but at least I’m in the end of days.
0:17:07 That’s something exciting.
0:17:09 (upbeat music)
0:17:12 (upbeat music)
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0:18:29 (gentle music)
0:18:32 (gentle music)
0:18:40 – You know, I’ll ask,
0:18:42 and I should say I’m just gonna assume
0:18:44 that this is not a question
0:18:48 for which there is a definitive scientific answer.
0:18:51 It’s maybe speculation more than anything else.
0:18:53 Do you think people are just
0:18:58 constitutionally wired to be one or the other?
0:19:00 Or that maybe it’s more complicated,
0:19:02 environmental factors, and all this other stuff.
0:19:03 But I mean, I just,
0:19:05 I wonder if you think people are born
0:19:07 more optimistic or more pessimistic,
0:19:10 and maybe by extension,
0:19:13 is it something we can change if we want?
0:19:15 – So whenever somebody asks you,
0:19:15 you know, there’s two alternatives.
0:19:18 One is, is it really simple and kind of dumb,
0:19:21 or is it more complicated and subtle and rich?
0:19:23 I kind of see which answer you’re kind of pointing me towards.
0:19:27 And I will actually give you the predicted answer.
0:19:28 – I’m not pointing you anywhere, sir.
0:19:29 – No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
0:19:30 – I’m just asking questions.
0:19:32 – You are just, you are leading me.
0:19:35 You are leading me to say the truth,
0:19:37 which is I would imagine one’s optimism
0:19:41 and pessimism has to do a lot with all sorts of things.
0:19:43 It has to do with the culture that they’re in,
0:19:46 which tells you to some extent how to see the world.
0:19:51 It has to do with their individual life experiences.
0:19:53 If you live the life of extraordinary good fortune
0:19:55 at every spot, you know, of course you can be optimistic,
0:19:58 but it’s just fits the data.
0:20:00 And many people live terrible lives,
0:20:02 and I’m sure they’re pessimistic because they’re not dumb.
0:20:04 They say up to now it sucked.
0:20:05 Why not?
0:20:06 Why not assume that induction is right
0:20:08 and it’ll suck in the future?
0:20:10 I will, however, say it’s probably also
0:20:12 just by some heritable part of it.
0:20:16 Just because, you know, the first law of behavioral genetics,
0:20:17 which admits of no exception,
0:20:21 is that every psychological trait is somewhat heritable.
0:20:24 Meaning that if I took your biological mother
0:20:28 and biological father, and then I asked them each,
0:20:30 are you an optimist or pessimist?
0:20:31 Are you a cynic?
0:20:32 How do you think?
0:20:33 You have a lot of hope.
0:20:36 And then I asked you, your answers would correlate
0:20:37 even if you had never met them.
0:20:41 – This to me leads to something else
0:20:44 I wanted to talk to you about, which is children.
0:20:44 – Yeah.
0:20:45 – And for people who don’t know,
0:20:49 I mean, you’ve done a lot of work on child psychology,
0:20:52 and that intersects with this conversation
0:20:55 and interesting ways for me.
0:20:58 Let me start this way.
0:21:03 Do you think children are capable of being optimistic
0:21:04 or pessimistic?
0:21:07 – Yeah, I think they are.
0:21:10 I mean, there are children and there are children.
0:21:12 So I’m not sure you could sensibly ask this
0:21:14 about a 10 month old.
0:21:15 There’s a certain point where children
0:21:18 probably don’t in some way reflect upon the future.
0:21:20 And so the question doesn’t make much sense.
0:21:22 But you talk about, you know, four and five year olds,
0:21:25 three, four and five year olds running around,
0:21:27 I think they can have attitudes about the world
0:21:30 where we could talk about as pessimism and optimism,
0:21:33 even cynicism, the way we’re talking about it.
0:21:36 And the answer, and there’s a fair amount of studies
0:21:40 on this seems to be they’re really optimistic.
0:21:41 They’re really positive.
0:21:45 They are positive about their own abilities,
0:21:47 tending to overstate what they can do,
0:21:48 what their futures will be like.
0:21:50 They’re optimistic about the abilities
0:21:53 of the people they know and they care about.
0:21:55 Christy Lockhart, who’s my colleague at Yale,
0:21:57 did a study where she asked kids what would happen.
0:22:00 And these are kids who, like four year olds, whatever,
0:22:02 what happens when someone gets their finger chopped off?
0:22:04 What would he be like as an adult?
0:22:06 And they often say, “It’ll grow back.”
0:22:08 They have this weird folk view that limbs grow back,
0:22:10 that we recover, we heal.
0:22:13 So kids are pretty hardcore optimists.
0:22:15 There’s such a thing as childhood depression,
0:22:17 but it’s rare, it’s very rare,
0:22:18 and doesn’t happen quite young.
0:22:22 Kids tend to be, I think, somewhat naturally cheerful.
0:22:27 – Yeah, I mean, I can’t imagine a seven year old nihilist.
0:22:31 It doesn’t even make sense, right?
0:22:33 Now, is that just a failure of my imagination?
0:22:37 And if I’m right, if a six or seven year old nihilist
0:22:39 is just not a thing that happens in the world,
0:22:41 there must be some reason for that, right?
0:22:43 They’re psychologically incapable of it.
0:22:46 And if they are, what’s that reason?
0:22:47 – That’s a good question.
0:22:51 I also can’t think of a seven year old moral skeptic
0:22:54 or a seven year old skeptic in general.
0:22:58 So, you know, adult philosophers and adult non-philosophers
0:23:00 often come to certain conclusions about the world.
0:23:03 They might think, “Oh my God, there’s no morality,
0:23:06 “there’s no meaning, there’s no purpose.
0:23:08 “Everyone else is just a zombie.”
0:23:11 And all these views adults come to have.
0:23:12 Putting aside whether they’re true,
0:23:16 and I think none of them are true, they’re not natural.
0:23:20 It’s very natural to see the world imbued with meaning,
0:23:24 with morality, with hope, I’d say,
0:23:26 with promise of different sorts.
0:23:29 And I think kids see the world that way.
0:23:31 And it’s only as a result of education and contemplation
0:23:33 so when you can kind of look, turn things around
0:23:37 and develop these sort of unusual philosophical views.
0:23:39 – And look, seven year olds
0:23:42 may not be virtue, ethicists or whatever,
0:23:45 but they do have very strong moral intuitions, right?
0:23:47 – Absolutely.
0:23:51 And I think they’re properly seen as moral realists.
0:23:54 If they’re really mad because they were treated unfair,
0:23:57 and you say, “Yeah, but if you were in a different time
0:23:58 “and place, this wouldn’t be unfair.”
0:24:00 But can you look at it like you’re an idiot.
0:24:02 This is unfair, period.
0:24:04 It’s unfair like grass is green,
0:24:07 like it’s warm outside, it’s a fact.
0:24:10 And I think the kids get it right, actually.
0:24:13 I think some sort of moral realism is right.
0:24:17 But we had these evolved systems that give rise
0:24:20 to feelings, gut feelings of right and wrong and so on.
0:24:24 And they’re fully engaged by the time the kid is about seven.
0:24:27 And then it’s only as adults, we could say,
0:24:31 “Oh, you know, what murder is wrong in our culture.”
0:24:33 And then the adults come to some sort of crazy,
0:24:35 more relativist view.
0:24:36 But whatever you think about that,
0:24:38 it’s not something kids will do.
0:24:40 – Yeah, I learned about the default mode network
0:24:44 when I was reporting on psychedelic therapy.
0:24:46 And for people who don’t know,
0:24:50 this is basically the part of the brain that comes online
0:24:52 when you’re thinking about yourself.
0:24:55 And this part of the brain isn’t fully developed
0:24:58 until at some point later in childhood.
0:25:02 And so my thinking was that in order to be optimistic
0:25:06 or pessimistic, you have to cross some threshold
0:25:09 of self-consciousness to the point where you’re able,
0:25:11 where there is a voice in your head
0:25:13 telling yourself stories about yourself
0:25:16 and the future and the past and that sort of thing.
0:25:20 And that until you make that transition categories
0:25:24 like optimism or pessimism or nihilism or whatever,
0:25:27 don’t really make much sense.
0:25:28 But you’re the psychologist.
0:25:29 – No, I think that’s right.
0:25:32 Although I do think that at the ages
0:25:35 we’re talking about children have a notion of themselves.
0:25:37 They know they’ll persist over time.
0:25:39 They know they have a history.
0:25:40 On the other hand,
0:25:42 there’s some really nice psychological research
0:25:45 suggesting really interesting differences
0:25:46 between kids and adults.
0:25:48 And some of this work is done by my wife,
0:25:50 Christina Starmans, who’s a psychologist
0:25:52 who also studies kids.
0:25:54 So here’s some findings from her lab
0:25:55 and other labs have it too.
0:25:58 You ask kids, a five-year-old, six-year-old,
0:26:01 when you grow up, are you gonna be the same size
0:26:03 as you are gonna be taller?
0:26:04 ‘Cause I’ll be taller.
0:26:06 And you ask a bunch of questions
0:26:08 and they understand your body’s wage.
0:26:10 And there’s other people’s body’s wage.
0:26:13 But then you ask about your psychological choices.
0:26:16 So you say stuff like, do you like to drink coffee?
0:26:17 Oh, coffee’s gross.
0:26:19 When you’re an adult, we like to drink coffee.
0:26:20 And I’ll say, no, it’s gross.
0:26:23 Would you like to kiss people?
0:26:25 Oh, it’s disgusting.
0:26:27 When you’re an adult, you like to kiss people.
0:26:28 Now, if you ask them these questions
0:26:30 about somebody else, one of their friends, say, yeah,
0:26:32 when he gets older, he’ll like to kiss people
0:26:33 and drink coffee.
0:26:37 But for themselves, they can’t get around the fact
0:26:39 that coffee is gross and kissing is gross
0:26:43 and playing with Legos wonderfully fun and so on.
0:26:45 And they think they’ll stay this way forever.
0:26:48 Yeah, that’s interesting.
0:26:49 You’re a parent, right?
0:26:53 Yeah, two kids, old adults now.
0:26:54 How old are they?
0:26:55 They’re 26 and 28.
0:27:00 So has observing them grow up?
0:27:08 Changed how you think about optimism and human happiness
0:27:11 and what it means and how to do it
0:27:14 and what it doesn’t mean?
0:27:16 Yeah, probably not.
0:27:18 It’s just alarming how little I’ve learned
0:27:19 from watching movies.
0:27:20 Really?
0:27:21 Not even a little bit?
0:27:23 You know, you get anecdotes in some of my books.
0:27:26 Oh, this kid, he did this, he did that.
0:27:28 I gotta say, this is something I’ll say about my kids.
0:27:30 And I don’t want to talk too much
0:27:34 about their prior consent, but something they taught me
0:27:36 and they didn’t have to do my kids to teach me this.
0:27:36 They could have been somebody else
0:27:38 but I know them extremely well.
0:27:40 Is that they’re two very different guys.
0:27:43 They’re very different styles of interacting with the world.
0:27:44 They have different homies.
0:27:45 They have different likes and dislikes.
0:27:47 And they are both extremely happy.
0:27:49 They’re both living very fulfilling lives.
0:27:52 And it reminded me that there’s more
0:27:55 than one way to do this, right?
0:27:56 And that was useful to know.
0:27:59 It also says, and this is something in your distant future
0:28:02 which is there’s a real joy in having adult children.
0:28:04 It’s something that’s so strange.
0:28:07 There’s this kid, you changed their diapers,
0:28:08 you exude them when they were crying.
0:28:09 You rocked them to sleep.
0:28:11 And there they are and they’re this big,
0:28:14 big hairy guy who could easily take you in a fight.
0:28:15 And you’ve got to treat them nice
0:28:17 because there’s their people now
0:28:18 and they don’t have to listen to you.
0:28:21 But there’s a huge amount of delight in that.
0:28:26 – For me, one of the really the great privileges
0:28:31 of being a parent is watching this little person
0:28:36 move through the world with fresh eyes and a fresh mind
0:28:39 and have come to really appreciate
0:28:42 that instinctive wisdom that children have.
0:28:47 It’s a kind of wisdom that we lose when we become adults,
0:28:52 when we fall into habits and routines
0:28:56 and that sense of wonder disappears.
0:28:57 – Oh, I like that.
0:29:01 I’ve never been so into the sort of wisdom of kids stuff.
0:29:04 I think kids are just often as ignorant as they seem
0:29:07 and often prejudice and simple and unfair.
0:29:09 But the one edge kids have over us,
0:29:13 you perfectly summarize which is they see the world fresh.
0:29:17 It also, by the way, since you ping me on empathy a bit,
0:29:18 I’ll say something in favor of empathy.
0:29:20 So my objections to empathy have to do
0:29:22 with its role in moral decisions.
0:29:23 But empathy is often great.
0:29:26 And Adam Smith gives a good example of this.
0:29:29 Taking empathy is putting yourself in another person’s shoes
0:29:30 and feeling what they feel.
0:29:34 One of the great joys of having kids
0:29:36 is that it allows you sometimes,
0:29:38 it sounds like you’ve been doing this,
0:29:41 to see the world fresh, to see the world realized,
0:29:44 to see fireworks, which you’ve seen a million times before,
0:29:46 for the first time over again.
0:29:50 To taste ice cream for the first time through them.
0:29:52 And that’s that rocks, that’s terrific.
0:29:57 – Yeah, I mean, I was gonna ask you
0:29:59 what you think we have to learn from children
0:30:03 about how to be happy, but maybe that’s the answer.
0:30:05 – Sort of beginner’s mind stuff.
0:30:07 – Yeah, yeah.
0:30:11 – Yeah, it’s something we get angry them for.
0:30:14 But I think there’s a reason why
0:30:16 we don’t walk around with beginners in mind
0:30:18 because you don’t wanna be sitting down,
0:30:21 drink a cup of coffee and stare at the coffee and smell.
0:30:23 Oh my God, I’m gonna taste it all anew.
0:30:26 We never do stuff.
0:30:29 There’s a logic behind the fact that we automate.
0:30:31 We become used to things, we habituate.
0:30:33 Because you don’t wanna drive home from work
0:30:36 as if you were the first time in a car again.
0:30:39 You wanna be able to do things automatically.
0:30:41 And the cost of that is you give up
0:30:42 this beautiful beginner’s mind.
0:30:45 But I don’t think we should or could retain it.
0:30:49 – Yeah, I can see that it’s not entirely practical
0:30:52 to be that immersed in the present
0:30:56 that it’s definitely a luxury of being cared for
0:30:59 and not having responsibilities or a job
0:31:01 or a mortgage, that kind of thing.
0:31:06 But it sounds like you think I’m being too romantic
0:31:07 about kids.
0:31:09 I mean, look, they do shit their pants.
0:31:11 – You wanna go back to shitting your pants, Sean.
0:31:14 – No, I do not wanna go back to shitting my pants,
0:31:17 but I would love to have more.
0:31:20 I don’t know what the right balance is,
0:31:22 but I would love to have more of that beginner’s mind.
0:31:24 I mean, look, I’ve stared at a pine cone
0:31:25 for three hours before,
0:31:27 but I took a lot of mushrooms to do that.
0:31:29 I can’t, I couldn’t.
0:31:31 And again, that’s not practical either,
0:31:36 but that sense of awe at something so simple like that
0:31:37 is possible when you’re–
0:31:41 – No, I get that, I agree with that.
0:31:42 And it’s actually a part of my life,
0:31:44 which I don’t think I have anywhere near enough of,
0:31:45 I mean, after this conversation,
0:31:47 I’m gonna go find some mushrooms.
0:31:50 But I think that in everyday life,
0:31:54 you give up too much to always find yourself
0:31:56 in beginner’s mind.
0:31:59 But I do feel that loss.
0:32:03 – I guess that’s sort of come to think of self-consciousness
0:32:05 as a bit of a paradox.
0:32:07 I mean, on the one hand, it is a gift in lots of ways,
0:32:12 but it does seem also to be a machine for unhappiness,
0:32:15 all that ruminating and self-reflection
0:32:19 and the anxieties and the neuroses and the pathologies.
0:32:21 I mean, I don’t know,
0:32:23 you think I’m throwing too much shade
0:32:26 on self-consciousness here?
0:32:26 I mean–
0:32:29 – No, I think that there are tragic dilemmas.
0:32:32 To be an intelligent, conscious, self-conscious,
0:32:36 capable adult involves falling yourself
0:32:39 into a situation where there’s a lot of suffering,
0:32:41 a lot of doubt, a lot of concern,
0:32:42 where you lose beginner’s mind,
0:32:44 where you question yourself.
0:32:47 And that’s just a trade-off.
0:32:49 I think it’s inevitable.
0:32:50 I think it’s great to be a kid,
0:32:52 but there’s a lot of bad things
0:32:53 and it’s great to be an adult,
0:32:54 but there’s a lot of bad things
0:32:57 and you’re just kind of stuck with these traders.
0:33:00 I mean, you talk about another mystery, take podcasts.
0:33:03 So when I go from place to place,
0:33:04 I always have headphones on.
0:33:06 I’m listening to a podcast.
0:33:08 Always your podcast, by the way,
0:33:09 but I’m listening to podcasts.
0:33:11 And a friend of mine, I was saying,
0:33:13 I’ll go downstairs to the kitchen to get a snack
0:33:14 and I’ll put on my headphones.
0:33:16 I could listen to podcasts on the way downstairs
0:33:18 so I’m not to waste valuable time.
0:33:20 A friend of mine gave me a really hard time.
0:33:22 I said, “Dude, leave your phone at home,
0:33:25 walk through, experience the world as it is.”
0:33:27 And I could see the pluses behind that,
0:33:29 but then I’d miss out on a great podcast.
0:33:31 There’s trade-offs.
0:33:33 – Always trade-offs.
0:33:36 You’re making me think.
0:33:38 Have you read Nietzsche’s “Human, All Too Human”?
0:33:39 – I have very, very little Nietzsche.
0:33:41 – No, what would I have learned?
0:33:47 – I don’t know a lot, but there’s a line.
0:33:50 I may mess this up, but it’s something like,
0:33:53 the first sign that an animal has become human
0:33:57 is that it is no longer dedicated to its momentary comfort,
0:34:00 but rather to its enduring comfort.
0:34:01 – Oh, I like that.
0:34:05 – He, look, that guy packs a lot into a sentence.
0:34:07 – He’s an aphorism guy, like an aphorism machine.
0:34:09 – Yeah, but it sort of speaks to this,
0:34:14 that in that transition from consciousness to self-consciousness,
0:34:18 one of the tolls you pay is that you sort of,
0:34:23 you get robbed of the joy of just living in the moment,
0:34:26 living in your body and all these other sorts of pathologies
0:34:29 we’re talking about become possible.
0:34:32 And that is just, I guess you said it, trade-offs.
0:34:33 That’s the trade-off.
0:34:37 – And you describe this as a cost of self-consciousness,
0:34:41 and it is, but it’s also a cost of morality.
0:34:44 I mean, were you a father, for instance?
0:34:46 I don’t think you could be a good father
0:34:48 if you didn’t think about your kid,
0:34:49 if you didn’t worry about your kid.
0:34:53 If you didn’t, in these perfect moments of solitude
0:34:55 and so on and say, hey, how’s the kid doing?
0:34:57 And, you know, and as he had his shots,
0:35:01 and is he on his way to becoming educated,
0:35:03 is he healthy, is he changed, is he, dah, dah, dah, dah,
0:35:04 and all of these things.
0:35:08 And so the more we have human connections
0:35:11 and love and moral obligations,
0:35:14 the more we’re stretched outside of our body
0:35:17 and just worry about shit all the time.
0:35:19 And this is actually, you know,
0:35:23 the one Christopher Hitchens joke I remember is,
0:35:25 did you hear about the Buddhist vacuum cleaner?
0:35:27 It has no attachments.
0:35:30 And this is in some way both, you know,
0:35:34 you phrase it as a strength or weakness of Buddhism,
0:35:39 but the strict doctrine renounces special attachments.
0:35:41 And what if you don’t wanna renounce special attachments?
0:35:44 – It feels like I’m kind of making the case
0:35:45 against our brains here,
0:35:49 that they do not seem to be wired to make us happy.
0:35:51 That just does not seem to be a goal.
0:35:52 – That is God’s truth.
0:35:57 That is, you know, Evolution 101 is that natural selection
0:36:00 that our winnie in process that gave us our brains,
0:36:04 we have does not care one bit about our happiness.
0:36:07 It cares about building machines that survive and reproduce.
0:36:12 And happiness exists, I think to put it crudely,
0:36:15 as part of a feedback system saying you’re doing well,
0:36:18 you fall in love, you have an orgasm,
0:36:21 you fill your belly, you get some status, you feel good.
0:36:24 And that’s Evolution’s thumbs up, do more of that.
0:36:27 But it also falls in and there we get consciousness
0:36:29 and intelligence and so on
0:36:32 to what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill,
0:36:35 which is soon a happiness will fade,
0:36:38 because evolution doesn’t want you taking victory laps
0:36:41 and everything, it wants you doing more stuff.
0:36:43 Accumulate more food, build a bigger shelter,
0:36:45 protect your family.
0:36:48 And so it drives us endlessly.
0:36:49 I’ve talked to Robert right about this,
0:36:53 I think he views Buddhism as an anti-Darwin thing.
0:36:55 We’ve evolved this way, let’s fight it.
0:36:59 Let’s renounce our evolved capacity, our evolved desires.
0:37:01 Utilitarianism, a lot of moral views are saying,
0:37:04 “Evolution gave us these biases, let’s fight it.”
0:37:07 And there’s a lot to be said about that.
0:37:10 But yeah, you are sick and tired of the brains
0:37:12 that Darwin has given us.
0:37:14 And there’s a lot to be annoyed by it.
0:37:18 – You know the stand up comic Pete Holmes?
0:37:19 – I’ve seen him, yeah.
0:37:21 – I saw this great bit of his the other day
0:37:23 where he was just, I don’t remember what he said exactly,
0:37:25 but it was something like, he’s like,
0:37:28 you know, if you think about it,
0:37:32 our brains are unbelievable assholes.
0:37:36 They have all the ingredients they need to make us happy.
0:37:41 The dopamine and the serotonin, all that stuff.
0:37:45 But they’re constantly making you feel like shit, right?
0:37:49 We’re supposed to be the commanders-in-chief of our brains,
0:37:51 but we’re just helpless passengers.
0:37:53 – Nice. – It kind of sucks.
0:37:54 – It’s a deep point.
0:37:56 And it’s because the system is not our friend.
0:38:01 The system is not evolved to sort of follow our conscious will.
0:38:05 I think just pursuing something else we talked about,
0:38:07 there’s a sweet spot of anxiety.
0:38:11 People who have too much anxiety
0:38:13 and go to shrinks and psychologists
0:38:15 and they take drugs and they try to meditate
0:38:17 and they suffer and they try to fix that.
0:38:18 If you have too much anxiety,
0:38:20 if you have too little anxiety,
0:38:23 you end up in prison or dead, you don’t worry enough.
0:38:25 And so bad things happen to you.
0:38:28 You’re fearless, it’s not so good.
0:38:32 So some sort of anxiety, which is very rarely pleasant,
0:38:33 is just part of our package.
0:38:36 And so some sort of sadness and self-consciousness,
0:38:38 doubt, worry.
0:38:42 – If our brain does anything that reflects it,
0:38:45 there has to be some evolutionary reason for it, right?
0:38:47 It may be maladapted to that moment.
0:38:50 – Yeah, that’s right, or to this world.
0:38:54 If somebody mocks me on Twitter and I fall into a rage,
0:38:56 even though he’s an anonymous rando,
0:38:59 but my mind hasn’t evolved to deal with anonymous rando,
0:39:00 it’s evolved to deal with people
0:39:03 that I would bump into day after day after day.
0:39:06 – Right, so this strong instinct we have to care
0:39:10 about what other people think of us made a lot of sense
0:39:12 when you lived in tribes of 30 or 40 people,
0:39:15 that was high-stakes stuff to be ostracized.
0:39:16 But to care about what other people think
0:39:18 in a world of Twitter.
0:39:19 – Yes.
0:39:22 – Where 10,000 anonymous bots can tell you
0:39:26 what a piece of shit you are, that’s, boy, that’s not,
0:39:29 there’s a bit of a disjunction there.
0:39:31 – And this is the Pete Holmes point,
0:39:34 which is knowing that doesn’t make it go away.
0:39:38 If there’s a big bag of M&Ms downstairs
0:39:43 and I’m really hungry, I know that my body has evolved
0:39:45 to try to absorb a normal amount of sugar
0:39:48 ’cause in the world I involved in,
0:39:50 I was constantly at a risk of dying of starvation.
0:39:53 I’m not in a risk now, so just put down the sugar,
0:39:55 but it doesn’t make my hunger stop.
0:39:59 It doesn’t make my shame, my anger, my jealousy stop,
0:40:02 knowing that it’s a poor fit for my world right now.
0:40:06 To the extent our conversation is having a theme,
0:40:08 it’s gone surprisingly dark,
0:40:10 which is that we’ve evolved these minds
0:40:12 that have evolved through,
0:40:14 I don’t know what a trigger warning or something on it,
0:40:16 but that have evolved through natural selection,
0:40:19 and now it has left us utterly screwed.
0:40:20 We’ve lost our balance,
0:40:23 and we’ve certainly lost our beginner’s mind
0:40:25 that we have a brief period of as children.
0:40:26 – You know what the best part is?
0:40:27 – Yeah.
0:40:30 – This conversation is part of a series about optimism.
0:40:31 – Oh.
0:40:34 (gentle music)
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0:41:57 (upbeat music)
0:42:12 – Let’s do a little rapid fire and see where it goes.
0:42:13 First question.
0:42:16 Do most of us really know what makes us happy?
0:42:18 I think we all think we do, but do we?
0:42:19 – No, no.
0:42:23 We have, as psychologists, some understanding
0:42:24 of what makes people happy,
0:42:28 and it’s not what people think makes them happy.
0:42:31 So many people think, including me a lot of days,
0:42:33 like I wanna make more money and I’ll make me happy.
0:42:34 And it’s not totally wrong.
0:42:36 There’s a correlation in money and happiness.
0:42:41 But basically, the shortest answer to what makes us happy
0:42:45 is social contact with people.
0:42:46 And I’m kind of an introvert.
0:42:47 And I feel like sometimes I avoid
0:42:50 so I find uncomfortable, but there’s so much evidence
0:42:53 that social contact is such a core to happiness
0:42:55 and relationships.
0:42:57 There was a nice study, a nice big review came out
0:43:01 by this guy, Dunnigan Folk and Liz Dunn.
0:43:03 And they reviewed all of the research
0:43:05 on people’s attempts to make them happy,
0:43:07 what works and what doesn’t.
0:43:08 And the most robust experiments.
0:43:10 And it’s kind of surprising.
0:43:13 Volunteering doesn’t make you happy,
0:43:17 but giving strangers money makes you happy.
0:43:18 Why?
0:43:22 Oh, I don’t know, ’cause it’s a subtle difference, right?
0:43:24 And I recommend people like read the literature
0:43:27 and just look at, there’s some interesting findings.
0:43:29 But don’t listen to people who just kind of say,
0:43:30 oh, here’s what I think.
0:43:34 Look at the studies, ’cause the studies are surprising.
0:43:38 Is it a mistake to think of happiness as the goal of life?
0:43:39 Yes.
0:43:41 Or even a primary goal of life?
0:43:43 It’s a good goal, everybody wants to be happy.
0:43:45 Everybody wants to just even zoom it in more.
0:43:46 Everybody likes pleasure.
0:43:49 It’s a hot day, drink some cool water,
0:43:50 have an extra slice of pie.
0:43:53 That’s great.
0:43:58 But no, I think, this is not science now.
0:44:00 This is just my own view,
0:44:05 but I think meaningful pursuits are an important part of life.
0:44:10 Being good, it’s the data over whether you raising a child,
0:44:16 of the age of your child, whether it makes you happy,
0:44:20 it’s by no means clear that it does on average.
0:44:22 Particularly in the United States,
0:44:23 and there are many studies find that
0:44:25 in the alternative world where you didn’t have a kid,
0:44:26 you’d actually be happier.
0:44:30 Doesn’t we ask you how happier, you’d actually be happier.
0:44:32 But it’d be ridiculous for me to say,
0:44:34 therefore you’ve probably made a mistake.
0:44:35 What you would say, and what I would say,
0:44:38 having raised kids is, it wasn’t not a happiness
0:44:42 in some simple dumb sense, it’s fulfillment, it’s love.
0:44:45 It’s a feeling of doing something meaningful and important.
0:44:48 What’s another meaningful pursuit
0:44:51 other than having children?
0:44:53 – There’s a line from Freud,
0:44:56 which apparently was misattributed, but it works,
0:45:00 which is what matters in life is love and work.
0:45:04 And under love, I put under broad ambit of relationships,
0:45:08 raising kids, having a partner you care for,
0:45:10 taking care of somebody who needs care.
0:45:13 And for work, I put projects.
0:45:15 And it could be a project actually at work
0:45:18 where they send the forms to the IRS and everything.
0:45:20 But it could also just be,
0:45:21 it could be somebody setting up a podcast
0:45:22 and working hard at it.
0:45:25 I think love and work are the two things that really matter.
0:45:28 – So if I asked you what you think
0:45:31 people should maximize in life, you would say meaning?
0:45:34 – Yeah. – Meaningful pursuits?
0:45:36 – Meaningful pursuits and relationships.
0:45:40 And I would also say to some extent, if you do that,
0:45:42 maybe happiness will follow.
0:45:45 One of the findings in happiness literature
0:45:49 is that you ask people how much do you work to become happy?
0:45:51 And then you get their answer and ask them how happy are you?
0:45:53 The answers are negatively correlated.
0:45:56 The pursuit of happiness is a miserable pursuit.
0:45:59 It’s like probably trying to be really good at kissing
0:46:01 gets in the way of being good at kissing.
0:46:04 Sometimes focusing on things makes this thing harder to get.
0:46:07 So make sleep is a good example of that.
0:46:09 So don’t try to be happy.
0:46:12 Instead, try to maximize meaning and relationships.
0:46:15 And then, and don’t even think about this ever,
0:46:17 but maybe I’ll make you happy.
0:46:21 – How do you distinguish happiness from satisfaction?
0:46:24 – Again, we’re entering sort of terminology things,
0:46:28 but I would say sort of happiness is some narrower sense,
0:46:30 involving sort of hedonic aspects
0:46:34 like pleasure, smiling, feeling good.
0:46:36 Well, satisfaction could be deeper.
0:46:41 So again, raising a kid are taking care of a loved one who’s sick.
0:46:43 You could say, this is satisfying.
0:46:45 I’m doing good stuff.
0:46:46 I’m making the world a better place.
0:46:48 I’m proud of myself.
0:46:49 Even I’m not smiling very much.
0:46:52 Even though I don’t, you know, this is hard.
0:46:56 I probably have more fun playing pickleball or getting high,
0:46:58 but that wouldn’t be satisfying.
0:47:00 That’d just be fun.
0:47:03 – How much of life is about what we choose
0:47:05 to pay attention to?
0:47:07 I mean, I sort of always believed on some level
0:47:10 that we’ve become what we pay attention to.
0:47:12 And if you want to be optimistic,
0:47:15 there are plenty of reasons to justify it.
0:47:16 If you want to be pessimistic,
0:47:18 you know where to look to justify it.
0:47:22 Does it really just come down to what you choose
0:47:24 to pay attention to in the end?
0:47:28 – I think it probably comes down to an enormous extent
0:47:31 on what you pay attention to.
0:47:33 There’s this line, I think with Shakespeare,
0:47:35 there’s nothing neither good nor bad,
0:47:37 but thinking makes it so.
0:47:39 It’s how you see the world.
0:47:44 But how much we can choose is a dicey question.
0:47:48 If we could choose, then we’d all be happy.
0:47:49 We’d say, “I’m looking on the bright side of things.”
0:47:52 And boom, we’d be happy, plainly, that doesn’t work.
0:47:55 If I’m feeling terrible pain in my leg,
0:47:58 terrible chronic pain, and you used to say,
0:48:01 “Well, Paul, don’t focus on it.”
0:48:05 Well, the thing about pain is it calls to your attention.
0:48:08 The thing about having a child you’re worried about
0:48:11 or a career that’s failing is you can’t just
0:48:13 switch off your focus, and maybe you shouldn’t,
0:48:14 even if you could.
0:48:18 So I kind of agree with the part that how you see the world,
0:48:21 what you focus on, this is a great lesson of stoicism.
0:48:22 I think it’s right.
0:48:24 It has an enormous effect on your life.
0:48:29 But getting control over that is easier said than done.
0:48:32 – I have all these years of study in the mind
0:48:36 and thinking about the happiness and meaning
0:48:39 and what makes a good life.
0:48:41 Made you any happier, any more optimistic?
0:48:43 Do you think it’s had any noticeable effect?
0:48:45 Do you think you’ve been changed at all by it,
0:48:47 or do you think you would be exactly what you are now,
0:48:51 whether or not you became a psychologist or not?
0:48:56 – I think at the margins in certain ways,
0:48:58 I picked up things through studying the mind
0:49:01 that has made my own life better.
0:49:02 – Like what?
0:49:07 – Well, for instance, I’m very convinced of the power
0:49:10 in both the short term and the long term
0:49:12 of social contact and social connections.
0:49:17 So if I’m really down, my temptation is
0:49:20 to lie in bed, flip up my laptop,
0:49:22 and watch YouTube videos for four hours or something,
0:49:24 or just sit and sulk.
0:49:27 But I know that if I could reach out,
0:49:30 get one of my kids on Zoom, grab one of my friends
0:49:33 for a beer, it will cheer me up.
0:49:35 And I don’t always succeed in doing it,
0:49:39 but I know that solitude and just grumping will not work.
0:49:41 I’m better off doing other things.
0:49:42 I’ve learned through psychology,
0:49:44 this is actually not my own,
0:49:46 far, very far from my own work,
0:49:48 I’ve learned about the idea of flow states,
0:49:50 and that’s, I read this book by,
0:49:52 she sent me an I about flow,
0:49:53 where he says that, you know,
0:49:55 people aren’t happy doing the thing.
0:49:57 This goes back to what you were saying actually,
0:49:59 which is people think they love vacations,
0:50:00 but they don’t tend to love vacations.
0:50:02 They just spend a lot of time sitting by the beach,
0:50:04 feeling kind of bored and anxious,
0:50:07 what people get a lot out of is flow states
0:50:08 where they’re really into a project,
0:50:11 they’re really focused and zoomed in.
0:50:13 And I realize that’s particularly true for me.
0:50:15 So, you know, when I travel on vacation,
0:50:18 I bring my laptop and I could spend a couple of hours
0:50:20 in the morning writing, and that’s actually often,
0:50:22 I love that.
0:50:24 I’m maybe not supposed to love it, but I love it.
0:50:28 – I have to ask, because this is a series on optimism,
0:50:32 if you had to make a pitch for being optimistic,
0:50:34 what do you got?
0:50:39 – I would go for the self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:50:41 I would go for this fact that, you know,
0:50:43 it’s easier to make a pitch for being things right,
0:50:44 being irrational and all that stuff,
0:50:47 but I would say that that in some way,
0:50:49 the person who thinks their odds are better
0:50:53 than they are paradoxically ends up doing better.
0:50:56 And this also connects with your conversation
0:50:58 with Jamil Zaki, which is interactions
0:50:59 of other people.
0:51:03 Suppose it actually turns out, as a matter of fact,
0:51:07 that 50% of people in this situation can be trusted.
0:51:10 But suppose I go into the world thinking it’s 80%.
0:51:13 You might think, well, I’m gonna get really screwed,
0:51:16 but maybe by going at people, trusting them,
0:51:19 taking a shot at them, I transform some
0:51:22 of the non-trust worthy 50%, and it works out for me.
0:51:27 So, optimism, and in fact, one of the things
0:51:30 that works in the happiness intervention literature
0:51:33 is something they call acting happy,
0:51:36 which is, they say, and part of the experiment,
0:51:39 you’re thinking that, well, put on a happy face, smile,
0:51:41 talk to people in a cheerful tone.
0:51:43 Now, if you’re depressed, you just say, go die.
0:51:46 What’s the worthless, ugly advice?
0:51:51 But weirdly, acting positive makes people positive
0:51:54 towards you, and it can again be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
0:52:00 – Yeah, I’d also say, believing that the world can be better
0:52:04 is a precondition for creating that world,
0:52:08 and pessimism seems, just on purely strategic grounds,
0:52:11 to undercut the motivation to do anything, really.
0:52:15 It’s pure passivity, and that just seems
0:52:18 like a poor strategy.
0:52:19 – That’s right.
0:52:20 I think that even if it’s a long shot
0:52:23 that you could make the world a better place,
0:52:25 maybe, I’ll raise this, maybe the person
0:52:30 who isn’t smart enough to know it’s a long shot, tries,
0:52:32 and if you get enough people trying, you’ll get success,
0:52:34 where if everyone else, everyone is realistic
0:52:37 and say, listen, it’s not worth it, you get favor.
0:52:40 – Well, Paul, what can I say?
0:52:42 We may not be one of your favorite pods,
0:52:43 but you’re one of my favorite guests.
0:52:45 – This is always fun, Sean.
0:52:47 – Paul Bloom, everyone, this has been great.
0:52:49 You know it’s always a joy to have you on stuff.
0:52:51 – Thanks again, thanks for having me.
0:52:54 (upbeat music)
0:53:07 – All right, that was great.
0:53:08 I had a lot of fun.
0:53:11 I hope you also had a lot of fun.
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0:53:26 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
0:53:29 and Travis Larchuk, edited by Jorge Just,
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0:54:53 (upbeat music)
Children live with a beginner’s mind. Every day is full of new discoveries, powerful emotions, and often unrealistically positive assumptions about the future. As adults, beginner’s mind gives way to the mundane drudgeries of existence — and our brains seem to make it much harder for us to be happy. Should we be cool with that?
We wrap up our three-part series on optimism with Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind and Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. He offers his thoughts on optimism and pessimism and walks Sean Illing through the differences between what we think makes us happy versus what actually does.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling)
Guest: Paul Bloom (@paulbloom), psychologist, author and writer of the Substack Small Potatoes
Support The Gray Area by becoming a Vox Member: https://www.vox.com/support-now
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