How to be happy

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0:01:03 – This week we have a special treat for you.
0:01:06 We’re sharing an episode from another podcast
0:01:07 that we think you’ll dig.
0:01:10 It’s an episode about happiness and how to find it
0:01:14 from one of our favorite podcasts, Stay Tuned with Preet,
0:01:17 hosted by former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
0:01:21 The episode aired over the holidays,
0:01:24 but it’s the kind of conversation we have here
0:01:26 on this show all year long.
0:01:28 And we thought you’d enjoy it,
0:01:30 so we wanted to share it with you.
0:01:35 – From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network,
0:01:37 welcome to Stay Tuned.
0:01:39 I’m Preet Bharara.
0:01:43 – I think we, as laypeople, kind of get happiness wrong,
0:01:46 and I think that leads to lots of misconceptions.
0:01:49 I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about
0:01:51 positive emotion on all the time, right?
0:01:53 Often very high arousal positive emotion,
0:01:56 but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
0:01:59 (upbeat music)
0:02:02 That’s Dr. Laurie Santos.
0:02:05 She’s the Chandraka and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology
0:02:08 and Head of Silamon College at Yale University.
0:02:10 She teaches Psychology and the Good Life,
0:02:13 a course on finding happiness and fulfillment
0:02:15 that quickly became the most popular class at Yale
0:02:17 in over 300 years.
0:02:21 Dr. Santos also hosts the podcast, The Happiness Lab,
0:02:23 and offers an online version of her Yale course
0:02:25 titled The Science of Well-Being.
0:02:27 We discuss what happiness really means
0:02:28 and how to achieve it,
0:02:31 why negative emotions are crucial to the equation,
0:02:33 how job crafting can bring purpose to any career,
0:02:37 the parenting paradox, and so much more.
0:02:38 That’s coming up.
0:02:39 Stay tuned.
0:02:41 (upbeat music)
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0:06:42 (upbeat music)
0:06:50 – What does it take to be happy?
0:06:54 Happiness scientist Dr. Laurie Santos joins me to discuss.
0:07:00 Professor Laurie Santos, welcome to the show.
0:07:01 – Thanks so much for having me on.
0:07:03 – I’m very happy to have you on.
0:07:04 – I know.
0:07:05 – Did you see what I did there?
0:07:06 – Yeah, it was fun.
0:07:08 – So I have a lot of questions as I told you
0:07:10 before we hit the record button.
0:07:12 We’re coming to the end of the year.
0:07:15 Lots of people have issues that they care about
0:07:19 politically, socially or otherwise.
0:07:21 The holidays are a tough time for a lot of folks
0:07:23 because people have experienced loss.
0:07:26 We’ve had that in my family and a lot of families.
0:07:27 So there are things to deal with
0:07:30 and the future’s uncertain and there seems to be
0:07:34 a greater amount of worry and concern
0:07:35 and depression and loneliness.
0:07:40 So you are a perfect guest to have as our last episode
0:07:43 of the year that was 2024.
0:07:46 Could we start with an understanding of what we mean
0:07:48 or at least what you mean when you teach your class,
0:07:50 when you write about these issues?
0:07:52 What do you mean by happiness?
0:07:53 – Yeah, I’m glad we started there, I think,
0:07:57 ’cause I think we as laypeople kind of get happiness wrong
0:07:59 and I think that leads to lots of misconceptions.
0:08:00 – Unhappiness.
0:08:01 – Yeah, lots of unhappiness.
0:08:03 I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about,
0:08:06 you know, positive emotion on all the time, right?
0:08:08 Often very high arousal positive emotion,
0:08:10 but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
0:08:13 I mean, the social scientist definition of happiness
0:08:15 is really kind of thinking about the happiness
0:08:18 that you experience in your life and with your life.
0:08:19 This is sort of definition I like.
0:08:21 So the happiness you experience in your life
0:08:24 is the set of positive emotions you have, right?
0:08:27 So it’s, you know, your sense of joy, your sense of laughter
0:08:29 and the ratio of those positive emotions
0:08:32 to negative emotions, things like anger, frustration,
0:08:34 sadness, being happy doesn’t necessarily mean
0:08:36 you get rid of all those negative emotions,
0:08:39 but it means ideally that ratio between the positive ones
0:08:41 and the not so positive ones is pretty decent.
0:08:44 So that’s kind of being happy in your life.
0:08:45 But being happy with your life
0:08:47 is how you think your life is going.
0:08:49 It’s your answer to the question,
0:08:52 all things considered, am I satisfied with my life?
0:08:54 And social scientists use this definition
0:08:56 because it kind of encompasses this,
0:08:57 what they often call the affective
0:08:59 and the cognitive parts of happiness.
0:09:01 So the kind of emotional parts of happiness,
0:09:02 how you feel in your life,
0:09:03 but also the cognitive parts,
0:09:05 how you think your life is going.
0:09:08 And the best case scenario is that we find strategies,
0:09:11 behaviors, mindset shifts and so on
0:09:13 that can boost both of those at the same time.
0:09:14 – I guess my question is how do they interact
0:09:17 with each other and don’t they overlap?
0:09:19 – They overlap a bunch, but I think it’s worth noting
0:09:20 that there are times in our life
0:09:22 and maybe people that we know
0:09:25 where we see those two parts of happiness dissociating, right?
0:09:27 I mean, I think, you know, maybe on the show
0:09:28 you’ve interacted with folks
0:09:31 who have every hedonic pleasure in their life,
0:09:33 you know, kind of getting positive emotion all the time,
0:09:36 but maybe they’re experiencing a lack of meaning
0:09:37 or don’t know what their life is about.
0:09:40 I think, you know, I’m often called upon to these events
0:09:41 with very rich people
0:09:43 where I sometimes see they’re kind of going through that,
0:09:44 like lots of hedonic pleasure,
0:09:47 but kind of a lack of meaning.
0:09:51 – So can you just for the record define
0:09:54 and then give examples of hedonic pleasure?
0:09:55 – Yes.
0:09:56 – We don’t say hedonic a lot on this podcast.
0:09:57 – Yeah, no, it’s true.
0:09:59 So hedonic pleasure is just kind of like, you know,
0:10:02 the hedonism kinds of things that you experience in life,
0:10:05 you know, so drinking the best wine,
0:10:07 you know, sleeping in the comfy things.
0:10:08 Hershey’s bar I think is strong.
0:10:10 I think people would quibble about whether
0:10:13 that’s the best hedonic pleasure chocolate, you know.
0:10:16 – It was what was available in the cafeteria.
0:10:17 – Yeah, so, but that’s, but yeah, exactly.
0:10:20 Like, you know, popping into a Hershey’s bar
0:10:22 is kind of experiencing that moment of hedonic pleasure.
0:10:24 Probably it will give you a little mini boost
0:10:26 of positive emotion.
0:10:28 But, you know, if that was it without a sense of purpose.
0:10:31 – It did, it worked for me prior to the show.
0:10:34 So explain something else so that we understand
0:10:35 what we’re measuring.
0:10:38 So if you ask me the question, and I’m very lucky
0:10:41 and I think I’m a generally happy person,
0:10:42 am I happy in my life?
0:10:45 I am, am I happy with my life?
0:10:46 I sure am.
0:10:48 There are moments that I’m unhappy.
0:10:49 – Yeah.
0:10:53 – So, you know, catch me on a day that things
0:10:55 are not going well or there’s something wrong
0:10:57 with my kids, I’m not happy.
0:10:58 But that’s not what you mean.
0:11:01 So when the question is asked, are you,
0:11:04 or are you not unhappy, over what time period?
0:11:08 Is it that day, like, what’s the snapshot value
0:11:10 versus overall, or how you felt last week?
0:11:11 How do you think about that?
0:11:14 – Yeah, researchers use different time horizons on that.
0:11:16 You know, how are you feeling in your life right now?
0:11:18 That could be literally right now.
0:11:19 You know, we’re having this conversation,
0:11:20 you just had that chocolate bar.
0:11:22 How are you feeling right now?
0:11:24 Often it’s done in the last week, you know,
0:11:27 self-report these positive emotions, right?
0:11:29 But the idea is that what we’re trying to get at
0:11:31 is a kind of on average, how are you feeling?
0:11:34 And I think that first one, how you’re feeling
0:11:36 in your life, that one tends reasonably, I think,
0:11:38 to move around a little bit more with the circumstances.
0:11:40 You know, you just had the chocolate bar,
0:11:41 you might be feeling a little happier in your life.
0:11:44 But hopefully the chocolate bar isn’t necessarily changing.
0:11:46 All things considered, how satisfied are you
0:11:47 with your life?
0:11:48 That one tends to be a little unstable.
0:11:50 – I mean, the problem is, so let’s say
0:11:54 I get on the scale tomorrow and I really didn’t need,
0:11:58 or in my higher order brain function,
0:12:01 didn’t need the 26 grams of carbs.
0:12:05 And let’s say, you know, I’m not happy
0:12:07 with the scale the next day, how should I think about
0:12:10 the fact that I had the chocolate bar the day before?
0:12:14 How do we think about delay gratification
0:12:16 and this relationship to happiness?
0:12:18 – Yeah, this is an important philosophical question, right?
0:12:20 And when we talk about maximizing happiness,
0:12:22 we have to ask the question,
0:12:25 in some ways, who’s happiness are we maximizing, right?
0:12:28 And I think we often think about the case
0:12:30 that you’re bringing up, right, which is, you know,
0:12:32 you today is eating this high carb chocolate bar
0:12:34 that might make you tomorrow kind of sad, right?
0:12:37 This is cases of what’s often called
0:12:38 sort of temporal discounting, right?
0:12:40 We discount us in the future
0:12:41 and we kind of give in to temptation now
0:12:42 and kind of–
0:12:43 – Yeah, ’cause that’s a different guy.
0:12:44 Tomorrow’s guy is a totally different guy.
0:12:47 – Tomorrow, Larry is a totally different.
0:12:49 But interestingly, happiness researchers
0:12:51 also talk about the other problem,
0:12:53 which is if it’s myopic
0:12:55 to kind of screw over your future self,
0:12:58 you can think of cases of what you might call hyperopia.
0:13:00 And by that, I mean, many of us have, you know,
0:13:02 that really nice bottle of wine
0:13:04 that’s been sitting on the shelf for that perfect day,
0:13:06 or, you know, those frequent flyer miles
0:13:09 that are adding up for the perfect time to take a vacation,
0:13:11 you know, or me, I think women have this,
0:13:13 there’s like these spa products,
0:13:14 I bought this nice bath bomb or this candle
0:13:17 that I’m gonna use on the perfect night when I have time.
0:13:19 And then the bottle of wine, the frequent flyer miles,
0:13:21 all these things kind of expire over time
0:13:23 ’cause we haven’t gotten around to them.
0:13:24 And so I think for happiness,
0:13:27 we also have to worry about these cases of hyperopia too.
0:13:29 Are we really kind of, you know,
0:13:31 kind of messing up the happiness
0:13:32 that we could be experiencing now
0:13:34 because we’re so worried about the future
0:13:37 that we wind up not maximizing overall?
0:13:38 – Well, so that’s a very important question.
0:13:41 And I have a personal anecdote
0:13:47 in which what you just said resonates a lot.
0:13:50 I got married 25 years ago and we went to Italy
0:13:52 and we bought, could barely afford,
0:13:55 but we bought these nice bottles of red wine in Tuscany,
0:13:58 Granola de Montalcino,
0:14:01 one of the great wines on planet Earth.
0:14:03 And, you know, we had a bunch left over
0:14:07 and they sat in the wine fridge during the cellar
0:14:07 for years and years.
0:14:10 And then I happened to be in Italy this year
0:14:15 and I overheard someone at a wine tasting say,
0:14:17 you know, these Brunello’s are wonderful wines
0:14:19 are the great wines, they last about 30 years.
0:14:22 And the wines that we had bought 25 years ago
0:14:25 were themselves about five years old.
0:14:28 So I realized we had these bottles of wine
0:14:31 that we kept saving for some special day in the future.
0:14:34 So at the first opportunity,
0:14:37 we took a couple of bottles to good friends of ours
0:14:41 and opened them and, you know, one of the bottles was ruined.
0:14:42 So lesson learned, right?
0:14:45 – Yeah, I mean, that’s classic case of hyperapia,
0:14:47 but I think it happens in these, you know,
0:14:49 the wine bottles are the really salient examples
0:14:51 ’cause it happens across decades.
0:14:54 But, you know, how often are we checking our email
0:14:56 or trying to squeeze one more work thing in
0:14:59 when we’re not taking time to like hang out with our kids
0:15:01 or talk with our spouse, right?
0:15:05 You know, if we sort of think back and our kid leaves home
0:15:08 and, you know, we think of those moments as precious
0:15:09 even though they don’t feel kind of precious now.
0:15:12 So I think in our kind of attempts to sort of,
0:15:13 well, I’ll get ahead for a future me,
0:15:16 we sometimes are screwing over present us
0:15:18 in a way that we forget,
0:15:19 but can really have a negative impact
0:15:22 on our overall happiness over time.
0:15:23 – Well, I guess in part it depends
0:15:27 just thinking about ambitious people
0:15:28 who want to succeed in their careers
0:15:31 or people who are in the gym and they want to get a,
0:15:32 you know, they want to build muscle
0:15:33 and they want to be better athletes
0:15:35 or whatever the case may be.
0:15:38 I don’t know that a lot of people experience happiness
0:15:40 when they’re on the weight machine, maybe they do
0:15:43 because they want to be happy in their life,
0:15:46 not just with their life to use your distinction.
0:15:50 And for some people, happiness in their life means
0:15:54 being able to win that competition in sports
0:15:59 or, you know, building muscle or being able to look better.
0:16:03 Or if you’re a professional, all that hard work and drudgery
0:16:04 and pulling the all nighter at the law firm
0:16:07 or whatever the case may be in your particular profession
0:16:09 in that dog eat dog world,
0:16:11 you might not be happy with your life at that moment,
0:16:13 but if it’s important to you
0:16:16 to achieve a particular thing in the future,
0:16:18 then how do you think about the unhappiness
0:16:20 with your life at that moment?
0:16:22 Is that actually the wrong way of looking at it
0:16:24 because you’re actually in that example
0:16:25 tending to your future self?
0:16:27 – Yeah, well, I think, you know,
0:16:29 there’s a real danger in putting our happiness
0:16:31 in this sort of one event that comes up in the future.
0:16:33 And I think this is something we all fall prey to, right?
0:16:36 I’ll be happy when, I’ll be happy when I make partner.
0:16:38 I’ll be happy when I get married.
0:16:40 For my Yale students, I’ll be happy
0:16:41 when I get into medical school
0:16:44 or get the perfect grade or something like that.
0:16:46 This has been christened by social scientists
0:16:48 as what’s called the arrival fallacy.
0:16:50 I’ll be happy when I get to this point.
0:16:52 But it turns out when social scientists
0:16:53 actually go out and study what happens
0:16:56 when you get that big accomplishment,
0:16:57 get into the perfect school.
0:16:59 And one famous case they studied,
0:17:01 academics, when they find out they got tenure,
0:17:02 which is a big thing for academics
0:17:04 when you find out you get tenure.
0:17:06 What you find is that the folks predicted
0:17:09 that that moment would make them feel super happy
0:17:10 and that the happiness they got
0:17:12 from achieving that sort of thing
0:17:14 would last for a really long time.
0:17:17 But what actually happens is that the happiness you get
0:17:19 from that big moment kind of isn’t as big as you thought.
0:17:21 It’s like a little bit of a let down.
0:17:25 And it doesn’t last for nearly as long.
0:17:27 I show my Yale students, you know,
0:17:30 a big moment for them that I think where they fall prey
0:17:32 to the arrival fallacy is when they find out
0:17:33 they get into Yale, right?
0:17:35 You know, so many of these students in high school
0:17:38 work so long and nowadays they put these little videos
0:17:41 on YouTube, you can find them where they click on the link
0:17:43 and find out they got into Yale and they scream
0:17:45 and their parents scream in these videos and so on.
0:17:48 And I show these little videos to my students in class
0:17:50 and they kind of let out a little sigh when they see them
0:17:52 because they remember that moment.
0:17:55 They remember the very next moment where they said,
0:17:57 yeah, now I’m just chasing the next carrier.
0:17:58 Okay, that now is Yale,
0:18:00 but now it’s like getting my Rhodes scholarship
0:18:01 or getting into medical school
0:18:03 or just the very next thing, right?
0:18:05 And so I think this can be a problem
0:18:07 when we’re chasing something, right?
0:18:09 If we’re getting no happiness out of the chase,
0:18:12 then it’s pretty miserable to be going after these things
0:18:14 that we predict are gonna feel great
0:18:16 and feel great for a really long time,
0:18:19 but they don’t wind up being as good as we expect.
0:18:23 – I wanna ask you about this question in a different way.
0:18:25 So I studied political theory in college
0:18:28 and we’re required to read Aristotle
0:18:31 ’cause I’m sure that you are at Yale,
0:18:34 who said it’s better to be a human being dissatisfied
0:18:36 than a pig satisfied,
0:18:38 which I think maybe goes to your point
0:18:42 about hedonic pleasures and happiness.
0:18:45 How do you, given what you study and what you teach,
0:18:47 think about that quote from Aristotle?
0:18:49 – Yeah, well, I think on the one hand,
0:18:51 it’s actually really hard to ask a pig how happy they are.
0:18:53 So I think it’s like, you know,
0:18:55 I wish we could do the same surveys
0:18:57 and kind of level the play for you.
0:19:01 The human analog of a pig with lower order sensibilities,
0:19:02 et cetera, et cetera.
0:19:03 – Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,
0:19:05 what Aristotle made a distinction
0:19:08 between what we’ve been calling these hedonic pleasures,
0:19:10 you know, kind of the experience of positive emotion
0:19:13 in your life with what he famously called eudaimonia,
0:19:15 which is, you know, his word for the good life,
0:19:17 by which I think he meant, you know,
0:19:19 a life filled with purpose, a life filled with meaning,
0:19:22 and sometimes a good moral life, right?
0:19:23 And I think for human beings,
0:19:26 we’re really not going to feel that good about our life
0:19:27 and be satisfied with it,
0:19:28 unless we have a sense of meaning,
0:19:30 unless we have a sense of purpose.
0:19:32 But again, it winds up being reciprocal.
0:19:33 I think we predict, you know,
0:19:35 that delicious bottle of wine
0:19:36 will be the pleasure in my life.
0:19:38 And, you know, it is,
0:19:40 but so is doing really good in the world.
0:19:43 So is volunteering for a cause that you care about.
0:19:44 So is kind of, you know,
0:19:46 achieving something that you worked hard for.
0:19:49 So is helping someone that really is in need, right?
0:19:52 These kinds of moral goods wind up boosting
0:19:53 our sense of satisfaction with life,
0:19:55 our sense of purpose, eudaimonia,
0:19:56 but at the same time,
0:19:58 they’re sort of filled with much more positive emotion
0:20:00 than I think we wind up predicting.
0:20:04 – So do you distinguish between someone
0:20:08 who has low aspirations and low ambition
0:20:10 and can be happier with less
0:20:12 as compared to somebody who’s always striving
0:20:13 for the next thing?
0:20:17 Who’s living, can you make a judgment?
0:20:17 I’m thinking not.
0:20:20 About who’s living the better and happier life?
0:20:22 – Well, I think this is a spot where, you know,
0:20:24 other ancient thinkers kind of weighed in, right?
0:20:26 And if you go back to the Buddha, you know,
0:20:27 he thought that, you know,
0:20:30 one of the biggest causes of human suffering
0:20:32 was wanting, was craving,
0:20:35 was sort of just striving for the next thing.
0:20:37 So it’s not to say that striving is bad.
0:20:40 It’s just to say that that striving works best
0:20:43 if we can in some sense enjoy the journey along the way.
0:20:45 But when it’s really just gonna feel good
0:20:47 when we get to that next thing,
0:20:48 you know, just as we saw in the examples
0:20:50 we were giving before, that next thing
0:20:53 immediately comes a new caret that you’re going after, right?
0:20:55 We just don’t get as much satisfaction
0:20:56 out of arriving as we think.
0:20:59 And so it’s not to say that we should all, you know,
0:21:01 sit on our couches and eat bonbons, you know,
0:21:03 for our whole lives because I think that’s not
0:21:05 the path to eudaimonia either.
0:21:07 But we need to balance our striving
0:21:09 with a healthy respect for the journey.
0:21:11 This is something that Stanford social psychologists
0:21:13 have called the journey mindset, right?
0:21:17 Which is like, we gotta find the joys along the way.
0:21:19 And that really does seem to be the path to new life.
0:21:21 Now you’re not falling prey to the arrival fallacy
0:21:23 because the journey to that arrival moment
0:21:25 is also feeling pretty good.
0:21:26 – We’ll come back to the journey,
0:21:30 but here’s another study or poll that I see
0:21:32 from time to time that is utterly fascinating to me.
0:21:36 And it’s about the difference in that level
0:21:41 of happiness reported by couples who have children
0:21:42 and couples who don’t have children.
0:21:43 So I have children.
0:21:48 I will say as almost every parent I’ve ever met says
0:21:50 that they are the greatest source of joy
0:21:52 and happiness in my life.
0:21:55 I also say, as parents say,
0:21:59 if you have an unhappy child, you cannot be happy fully.
0:22:02 And I can’t imagine, I’m speaking for me,
0:22:04 being as happy as I am in my life
0:22:09 or even with my life with the absence of those kids.
0:22:11 And yet it’s always the case, it seems,
0:22:15 in the studies that I see that as self-reported,
0:22:17 couples who don’t have children are happier.
0:22:20 – Can you explain that and tell us what that means?
0:22:21 – Yeah, this is what’s been referred to
0:22:24 as sort of the parenting paradox, right?
0:22:26 This idea that kids really kind of give us
0:22:28 a sense of meeting, you know, if I asked, you know,
0:22:29 hey, are you satisfied with your life?
0:22:31 What are some things that make you satisfied with your life?
0:22:34 If you’re a parent, you’re gonna say probably my kids.
0:22:36 – Even though they also drive you baddie.
0:22:39 – But kids mess with the moment-to-moment happiness, right?
0:22:41 So this kind of gets, I think, you think of,
0:22:43 not even just being a regular parent,
0:22:46 but rewind to the point when you had a newborn.
0:22:48 I think that’s the biggest association, right?
0:22:50 You and your partner have just had a baby.
0:22:53 You know, with your life, you are feeling amazing.
0:22:54 You have this sense of meaning,
0:22:56 this new person that you love, it’s great.
0:22:58 But in your life, there’s the dirty diapers,
0:23:00 there’s the now not sleeping, there’s the colic,
0:23:03 or whatever it is, it just doesn’t feel good, right?
0:23:06 And so I think that the parenting paradox really
0:23:07 allows us to kind of zoom in
0:23:10 on these different two aspects of happiness, right?
0:23:13 That sometimes we need to sacrifice our moment-to-moment
0:23:16 happiness to find kind of, you know, more meaning.
0:23:18 That said, I think with parenting,
0:23:21 especially with the kind of new stresses of parenting,
0:23:25 we might have swung a little too far in that direction.
0:23:27 The current, as you and I are having this conversation,
0:23:30 Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently just issued
0:23:34 a Surgeon General’s Public Health Advisory,
0:23:35 which is the kind of thing that Surgeon General’s
0:23:38 released about smoking or the opioid epidemic and so on.
0:23:41 And he released this about parental stress.
0:23:44 In other words, being a parent is in some sense
0:23:45 like a public health crisis
0:23:48 because parents are experiencing so much stress.
0:23:51 And so I think we need to kind of, as parents
0:23:54 and as like societies that support parents,
0:23:56 start thinking of, well, what can we do to help parents
0:23:59 get back to that moment-to-moment happiness?
0:24:01 Because again, there are methods we can use
0:24:03 to kind of do that a bit better.
0:24:05 Even though overall, parenting might be a little bit
0:24:07 of a hit on your hedonic pleasures
0:24:09 in your moment-to-moment happiness.
0:24:10 There are ways we can do it better.
0:24:11 There are ways, there are things we can do
0:24:13 to reduce parent stress.
0:24:21 – I’ll be right back with Dr. Laurie Santos after this.
0:24:31 – All signs seem to indicate that one week from today,
0:24:33 the United States will break from recent tradition
0:24:36 and have a peaceful transition of power.
0:24:39 Felt like a good time to assess Joe Biden’s presidency,
0:24:41 which his staff would have you believe
0:24:45 is one of the most consequential in American history, FDRS.
0:24:48 – I admire their loyalty to their boss,
0:24:53 but I think Biden is a pretty mid-tier mediocre president.
0:24:55 I don’t think he’s awful.
0:24:58 I don’t think he’s a horrible threat to freedom,
0:25:01 the way that you might hear on Truth Social.
0:25:03 The main way I would describe Joe Biden
0:25:05 is that he was an unusually weak president.
0:25:09 And he was, in many important moments,
0:25:13 loathe to decide when we really needed a president to decide.
0:25:16 And I think that that ultimately made him less effective
0:25:18 than he could have been in the moment.
0:25:21 – The good, the bad, and the Biden.
0:25:24 Vox’s Dylan Matthews is gonna help us assess
0:25:28 on Today Explained, Monday to Friday, wherever you listen.
0:25:32 – This week on Prof. G Markets,
0:25:33 we speak with Andrew Ross Sorkin,
0:25:36 editor-at-large of Dealbook at The New York Times
0:25:38 and co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawkbox.
0:25:40 We discuss the key economic trends
0:25:41 he’s watching for Trump’s second term,
0:25:43 the evolving landscape of the AI market,
0:25:45 and the rumors that China is considering
0:25:47 selling TikTok to Elon Musk.
0:25:50 – If China is prepared to sell to Elon Musk
0:25:54 and only to Elon Musk, what does that say
0:25:58 about the leverage and influence that China must think
0:26:00 that they have over Elon Musk
0:26:03 by dint of his factories and Tesla business
0:26:07 in the nation state that is China?
0:26:09 – You can find that conversation and many others
0:26:12 exclusively on the Prof. G Markets podcast.
0:26:21 – It seems to me that some amount of happiness
0:26:24 or satisfaction with your life
0:26:26 depends on your environment, right?
0:26:29 And if you get happiness from something
0:26:33 that’s within yourself or that relates to something
0:26:36 you can control, whether it’s your faith
0:26:39 or a hobby or a life of the mind
0:26:44 or a hedonic pleasure like a Hershey’s Bar
0:26:46 or a Cadbury Bar or whatever,
0:26:49 versus people who get satisfaction and enjoyment
0:26:51 and pleasure and happiness or whatever synonym
0:26:54 you want to use from their relationship
0:26:56 to other people or what other people think about them.
0:27:01 And I think from my own prior career of prosecuting people,
0:27:03 it always is astonishing to me,
0:27:04 and I talked about this a little bit
0:27:06 with Tina Brown on my last podcast,
0:27:09 that the people who seem to have everything in life,
0:27:13 good family, good education, good life,
0:27:15 riches beyond measure,
0:27:18 still are driven to commit crime,
0:27:21 to escalate themselves or elevate themselves
0:27:23 into the next tier in part
0:27:25 because they’re just not happy
0:27:28 having only $100 million and need to have a billion dollars.
0:27:30 And I’ve seen various examples of that.
0:27:32 Is that just the old fashioned
0:27:34 keeping up with the Joneses thing?
0:27:36 Is it something more significant than that?
0:27:38 Does science tell us anything about how to deal with it?
0:27:41 – Yeah, so one of the misconceptions we have
0:27:43 about happiness is that it’s a lot
0:27:45 due to our circumstances, right?
0:27:47 How rich you are, whether you’re a good family,
0:27:48 this kind of stuff.
0:27:50 And there’s something there, right?
0:27:52 If you’re listening to this podcast right now
0:27:55 and you don’t have enough money to put food on your table
0:27:56 or keep a roof over your head,
0:27:59 if you’re a refugee from your country, right?
0:28:01 Obviously changing your circumstances
0:28:04 is probably going to materially affect the degree
0:28:05 to which you experience positive emotion
0:28:09 and the satisfaction that you get with your life for sure.
0:28:10 But for most of the people listening to this podcast
0:28:14 right now who aren’t in a dire traumatic situation,
0:28:16 turns out that changing your circumstances
0:28:18 is not really gonna affect your happiness
0:28:19 as much as we think.
0:28:21 You’d be much better off, for example,
0:28:22 just changing your internal state,
0:28:25 changing your mindset and your behavior and so on.
0:28:28 That said, it is the case that our surroundings
0:28:30 can influence our happiness a little,
0:28:31 at least a little bit.
0:28:34 And we know this from these kind of classic studies
0:28:37 of from the so-called world happiness report.
0:28:39 So this is a group that works with the Gallup poll
0:28:41 organization that’s been doing long-term surveys
0:28:44 of people’s happiness from over 200 countries
0:28:45 from around the world.
0:28:48 And what it tends to find is that there are some countries
0:28:51 that tend to be a lot happier than others.
0:28:53 So the Scandinavian countries are often quite high.
0:28:56 Usually it’s a sort of race between whether Denmark
0:28:58 or Norway or one of those countries is gonna win.
0:29:00 – They’re so annoying those countries.
0:29:02 – Well, one of the reasons they’re so–
0:29:04 – Those countries make me unhappy
0:29:06 because they make me feel bad about our happiness level.
0:29:08 – Well, it should make the folks in the US feel bad, right?
0:29:11 Because we in the US are a very rich country
0:29:13 in theory of circumstances for many people,
0:29:16 at least when you compare us to across the world,
0:29:17 they’re doing pretty great.
0:29:21 That said, we’re a very unequally wealthy country.
0:29:23 And it turns out that wealth doesn’t matter
0:29:25 for our happiness almost as much
0:29:27 as the inequality of our wealth.
0:29:29 If you’re an unequal, wealthy country,
0:29:31 everybody just kind of feels crappy.
0:29:33 And that kind of gets back to the point you made
0:29:35 about keeping up with the Joneses.
0:29:37 Turns out we don’t tend to objectively evaluate
0:29:40 our circumstances, like what our actual salary is,
0:29:43 how nice our house is, how attractive we are.
0:29:45 We tend to compare against other individuals.
0:29:48 So we don’t think in terms of these objective points
0:29:49 of like how well we’re doing,
0:29:52 we sort of compare ourself to some salient reference point.
0:29:54 And our brains are insidious.
0:29:56 They’re very good at finding reference points
0:29:59 that make us feel totally bad.
0:30:01 So if I ask you, what’s a good reference point
0:30:02 for a really good salary,
0:30:04 you’re probably gonna think of somebody like,
0:30:06 Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk,
0:30:08 you’re not gonna think about the refugee up the street
0:30:09 that can very little–
0:30:11 – Well, it’s different in different times of my life.
0:30:14 When I was 25, I thought that one salary
0:30:16 seemed very high to me.
0:30:17 And now I’m 56.
0:30:20 And in my peer group, that number is different.
0:30:21 – Mm-hmm.
0:30:23 And I think this is something even more insidious,
0:30:26 which is that we can change our own reference points, right?
0:30:29 Because we get used to whatever level we wind up at.
0:30:31 When you’re, back when I was a graduate student,
0:30:34 the idea of earning what a first year professor earned
0:30:35 was like, oh my gosh,
0:30:38 I would be able to like get a reasonable apartment
0:30:39 and do this stuff.
0:30:41 But then you get there and then it just becomes your salary.
0:30:42 You get bored with it.
0:30:46 You wanna jump up to the next level and the next level.
0:30:48 And that’s frustrating for a couple of reasons.
0:30:49 One, it’s like we just don’t appreciate
0:30:51 the good stuff we have, right?
0:30:53 So we take it for granted.
0:30:55 But it’s worse, it’s like,
0:30:58 if you get objectively better circumstances in life,
0:31:01 you wind up expecting those objectively amazing things.
0:31:03 You talked about this delicious wine
0:31:04 that you bought in Italy,
0:31:07 like when you just have that wine,
0:31:09 any other crappier wine you’re gonna taste after that
0:31:10 is just like ruined, you know?
0:31:13 I often joke that the people who are most miserable on play
0:31:15 and they’re the people who get to fly first class
0:31:17 all the time because it’s like they can’t,
0:31:20 there’s no, there’s not much way to go up from that, right?
0:31:21 You’re kind of at the top of the top.
0:31:26 And so once we get to the kind of best possible circumstances,
0:31:28 we wind up just getting used to that.
0:31:29 – So you better not fall.
0:31:30 – You better not fall. – You run,
0:31:32 it’s up, you better not fall.
0:31:33 You said something a minute ago,
0:31:36 it’s sort of interesting to me as we think
0:31:39 about how to order society, not to be too heavy about it,
0:31:41 but– – No, no.
0:31:43 – So I have a series of intro related questions
0:31:45 that just came to mind.
0:31:47 I think that was John Stuart Mill
0:31:49 who said that about the pig satisfied.
0:31:50 We’ll look it up, maybe it wasn’t Aristotle,
0:31:53 it might have been John Stuart Mill.
0:31:58 As you think about what the goal of ordered society is,
0:32:00 is it to make society productive
0:32:02 in whatever way that that is defined?
0:32:05 Is it to increase individual
0:32:09 and an average and overall happiness of the citizenry?
0:32:11 And if you think it’s some version of that second one,
0:32:16 when you say income inequality causes an excess
0:32:20 or a surplus of a happiness, well, what’s the reverse of that?
0:32:22 Some version of redistribution of wealth,
0:32:26 socialism, perhaps communism.
0:32:29 Do people in societies that more resemble the latter
0:32:30 have more happiness?
0:32:32 ‘Cause that’s not what the Scandinavian countries are,
0:32:37 they’re capitalist countries that have huge safety nets.
0:32:39 So what does your research tell you about,
0:32:42 at least in respect to this dimension,
0:32:44 what works and what doesn’t work?
0:32:46 – Yeah, so I think to understand what works best,
0:32:51 it’s helpful to dig into specifically on wealth, say,
0:32:53 what’s going on in terms of people’s happiness.
0:32:55 I mentioned, if you’re listening to this podcast
0:32:57 and you don’t have enough money to put roof over your head
0:33:00 or food on the table, changing your circumstances,
0:33:01 and by that I meant getting more money
0:33:03 is gonna make you happy.
0:33:04 And there’s a famous paper
0:33:07 by the Nobel Prize winning economist, Danny Kahneman,
0:33:10 who sort of looked at this in around $2010,
0:33:13 he found that if you’re on the low end of the income spectrum,
0:33:15 then getting more money and getting higher salary
0:33:16 will make you happier.
0:33:17 But that kind of–
0:33:19 – And in fact, ’cause you mentioned it,
0:33:21 I don’t remember the figure off the top of my head.
0:33:23 At some salary level, I think,
0:33:27 didn’t he find that even tripling your salary
0:33:28 doesn’t increase your happiness?
0:33:31 – Exactly, and in $2010,
0:33:34 he found that this was around $75,000.
0:33:34 So you don’t take–
0:33:36 – Yeah, but not in Manhattan.
0:33:36 – Yeah, not in–
0:33:38 Well, it’s, you know, we can quibble every time
0:33:39 I bring up this number,
0:33:40 like one Manhattan that’s different
0:33:42 than like living in Iowa.
0:33:44 Like, what if you’re a single family called boy?
0:33:47 – In a standard, I don’t mean to fight the problems.
0:33:49 – But the point of Kahneman’s work is like,
0:33:51 there is some point at which it levels off.
0:33:54 And that point is probably not as high as we think.
0:33:57 You know, in 2020, ’24, 2025 dollars,
0:34:00 it’s probably around $110 maybe.
0:34:04 But the point is it’s not $100 million, right?
0:34:07 After, again, $2010, 75K,
0:34:09 which is what Danny originally studied,
0:34:11 doubling or tripling your income
0:34:14 doesn’t at all affect your stress levels.
0:34:16 It doesn’t reduce your stress levels or increase them.
0:34:18 It doesn’t make you experience more positive emotions.
0:34:20 Doesn’t have the effect we think, right?
0:34:22 But let’s get back to redistributing wealth.
0:34:23 What does that mean?
0:34:24 Well, that means, you know,
0:34:26 if I take some money away from the folks
0:34:28 who are earning 100 million, like,
0:34:29 they’re not gonna notice it.
0:34:31 It’s not gonna really negatively affect
0:34:33 their happiness at all.
0:34:35 But if you could get that money to somebody
0:34:39 who wasn’t, was earning less than $75,000 in $2010,
0:34:41 all of a sudden that would make them a lot happier.
0:34:44 And so I think we do get some hints
0:34:47 that redistribution of wealth might be really useful.
0:34:48 But another thing that we get,
0:34:49 and I think we learn this more
0:34:51 from the World Happiness Surveys
0:34:53 and like looking at Scandinavian countries,
0:34:55 is that what we really need out of wealth,
0:34:58 this sort of this support network, right?
0:35:00 This kind of safety, right?
0:35:02 So if we get sick, if we lose our job and so on,
0:35:05 we’ll kind of have something to take care of us.
0:35:06 One of the things that,
0:35:08 if you look at Scandinavian countries,
0:35:10 this is Denmark in particular,
0:35:11 many of them have these cultural sayings
0:35:14 about kind of not being better than somebody else.
0:35:17 The Danes have this idea of Jante’s law,
0:35:19 which I’m probably saying wrong ’cause I’m not Danish,
0:35:21 but Jante’s law is this idea that like,
0:35:22 you shouldn’t really like strive
0:35:23 to be better than somebody else.
0:35:25 You shouldn’t brag and say you’re better.
0:35:27 Like, we’re kind of just all equal.
0:35:29 And I think that that fits with kind of what’s happening
0:35:31 in terms of not just their wealth levels,
0:35:34 but their kind of status levels and so on, right?
0:35:36 Because everybody has a social safety net.
0:35:38 You know, if you, it doesn’t really pay to go off
0:35:40 and become like a super high powered lawyer,
0:35:42 ’cause like probably pay in taxes enough
0:35:44 that you’re not gonna sort of see that same boost in wealth
0:35:45 as you would maybe in the US.
0:35:48 And so the assumption is that that makes the folks
0:35:52 who could have had this super high salary worse off,
0:35:54 but the data really suggests it might not work that way.
0:35:57 It might be imperceptible to those individuals.
0:35:59 – That’s not great for the standing of your country
0:36:04 in other ways and for GDP and for lots of other things.
0:36:07 And how does this translate to sports?
0:36:11 Are athletes, are competitive athletes more or less happy
0:36:13 than the average person given what you just said?
0:36:15 – Yeah, I mean, I think they experience a lot of pressure.
0:36:18 You know, they’re less great surveys, you know,
0:36:21 comparing exactly competitive athletes versus lay people.
0:36:23 But a lot of the competitive athletes you talk to,
0:36:25 like unless they’re kind of finding ways
0:36:27 to seek out a journey mindset and so on,
0:36:30 you know, pretty miserable, like, you know,
0:36:32 I can’t name names, but I’ve been called out
0:36:34 to do a lot of consulting with, you know,
0:36:36 competitive sports teams, you know,
0:36:38 some of the best folks that, you know,
0:36:40 I tell my dad and my brother and folks who are sports fans,
0:36:43 it’s like, oh my God, you talk to this person about happiness.
0:36:46 And I’m like, yeah, I did because despite what they’re making,
0:36:47 despite how amazing they’re doing,
0:36:49 how many championships they won,
0:36:50 they’re still feeling pretty miserable.
0:36:52 You know, that last championship came in
0:36:53 and all of a sudden they’re like, okay,
0:36:56 now there’s even more pressure for the next one, right?
0:36:58 And so these great circumstances,
0:37:00 these amazing successes kind of don’t make us
0:37:02 as happy as we think.
0:37:03 – Can I tell you a small thing
0:37:05 that has made me happy in this moment?
0:37:06 – Please, yeah.
0:37:10 – So that quote I mentioned about the pig dissatisfied
0:37:12 or the pig satisfied, I thought was Aristotle
0:37:14 and then I self-corrected sometime later
0:37:15 in St. John Stuart Mill.
0:37:19 The team has informed me that it’s actually John Stuart Mill.
0:37:20 – Amazing.
0:37:22 – So we didn’t have the mistake, persist,
0:37:24 in perpetuity in the podcast.
0:37:26 And that makes me a little bit happy.
0:37:30 Let me ask about athletics again for a moment
0:37:35 because there are very few in the world elite athletes
0:37:38 for who most be a ridiculous existence, right?
0:37:41 You can be Tom Brady, you can be LeBron James
0:37:44 and you can be the best, literally the best athlete
0:37:47 in your position and in your sport in the world
0:37:48 or that the world has ever seen
0:37:51 and then you lose a game and you’re very unhappy.
0:37:53 So that’s a certain kind of existence.
0:37:55 But there are a lot of people who are listening
0:37:58 who have kids who are in sports
0:38:01 and there’s a lot of debate among parenting communities
0:38:04 about how we should handle sports
0:38:06 and how competitive it should be.
0:38:08 My boys played Little League
0:38:11 and I remember there’s sometimes there are signs
0:38:15 at the park reminding folks, this is supposed to be fun.
0:38:16 – This is a game, parents.
0:38:17 – This is a game.
0:38:18 – It’s supposed to be fun, yeah.
0:38:22 – Leave your weapon at home, please do not attack the UMP.
0:38:27 How should we be thinking about sports
0:38:29 that are supposed to be fun and make you happy?
0:38:30 – Yeah, well, I think this is another spot
0:38:33 where we need to kind of get back to this journey mindset.
0:38:35 I mean, one of my favorite interviews that I did
0:38:37 from my own podcast, “The Happiness Lab”
0:38:40 was with the Olympic skater, Michelle Kwan,
0:38:44 who like I grew up admiring and people have heard her name.
0:38:46 Turns out she never won gold medal.
0:38:47 And I kind of asked her–
0:38:49 – Could have sworn she did.
0:38:51 – Yeah, exactly, you kind of just like update and assume.
0:38:55 But what she would say was that like, you know, that’s fine.
0:38:57 Like I actually didn’t, you know, I wanted to medal,
0:38:58 that’s why you’re there.
0:39:01 But the thing I most enjoyed was just like
0:39:02 being at the Olympics.
0:39:04 Like she talked about the day that she got to first like
0:39:07 lace up her skates and skate over the ice
0:39:08 with the Olympic rings.
0:39:10 ‘Cause you know, those colored Olympic rings,
0:39:12 that symbol is like set in the ice.
0:39:14 And she just remembers what it looked like
0:39:16 sort of skating over the ice with those Olympic rings.
0:39:19 She remember what it felt like to be in this huge arena
0:39:21 and hear the cheers of fans and the kind of murmur
0:39:24 of just so many different languages and voices at once.
0:39:26 Like those are the things that she was enjoying.
0:39:29 And she got those, even though she didn’t get a chance
0:39:30 to get a medal, right?
0:39:32 And I think that’s what we need to get back to
0:39:34 for our kids in sports, right?
0:39:36 They’re learning, like, you know,
0:39:37 you’re having fun with your friends.
0:39:39 You’re just getting some exercise.
0:39:41 Moving our bodies is one of the easiest behaviors
0:39:43 we can engage in to feel a little bit better.
0:39:46 There’s evidence that a half hour of cardio exercise
0:39:48 is almost as effective as like a prescription
0:39:50 for anti-depression medication, right?
0:39:52 There’s like simply moving our bodies feels good.
0:39:54 – Wait a minute, how many milligrams is 15 minerals?
0:39:56 – I don’t know, I have to get down to it.
0:39:57 But no, like meta-analyses show
0:40:00 that like literally your psychiatrist could prescribe
0:40:04 moving your body to reduce depression, reduce anxiety.
0:40:05 It works just as well.
0:40:07 It’s just doesn’t make the pharmaceutical companies
0:40:09 as much money, but yeah.
0:40:12 Yeah, so these are all things that kids could be enjoying
0:40:15 in the moment as part of the journey playing sports.
0:40:16 But, you know, all too often,
0:40:19 I think we just get caught up in whatever that victory is,
0:40:22 whatever that arrival is at the end.
0:40:24 – Yeah, so talking about a little bit of an older set,
0:40:26 not kids, but people who are entering the job market
0:40:30 or changing jobs, it seems to me that the correct advice
0:40:35 is do a job that you like and that you love every day
0:40:36 as opposed to something that’s gonna get you
0:40:39 some future objective, right?
0:40:42 I mean, I think part of the reason that my friends
0:40:44 and colleagues at the U.S. Attorney’s Office
0:40:47 in the Southern District where I was for a lot of time,
0:40:50 I think now that I am thinking about these issues
0:40:52 in these terms, I never thought about these issues
0:40:53 in these terms before, right?
0:40:54 You’re doing your job and the job is
0:40:57 to make sure that you’re doing justice.
0:41:02 That the premium was not placed on getting the conviction,
0:41:05 although that’s gratifying and vindicating the rights
0:41:08 of a victim and getting, you know, proceeds back
0:41:10 to a victim who may have been, you know, robbed
0:41:13 of their money and their bank accounts, et cetera, et cetera.
0:41:16 But the joy and the satisfaction came from every day
0:41:19 doing the job and talking to witnesses
0:41:20 and appearing in court.
0:41:24 And so the level of, you know, as proof of this question,
0:41:26 I don’t know how many people appreciate this.
0:41:29 People who are in those prosecuting jobs,
0:41:32 particularly at really high performing offices
0:41:35 like my former office, are literally leaving
0:41:37 hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.
0:41:39 I was able to persuade people to come back
0:41:41 from private practice.
0:41:43 And in private practice in New York,
0:41:46 we’re talking about millions of dollars
0:41:48 coming back to work for, you know,
0:41:51 a very good wage still in America,
0:41:53 but like $150,000.
0:41:56 The only reason you would do that, I think,
0:41:59 is if the job brought you great satisfaction.
0:42:02 And that, for that community, which is one of the reasons
0:42:03 I thought it was special,
0:42:06 that was more important than making money.
0:42:08 Do we need more jobs like that?
0:42:10 – Oh, I think definitely, or we need to find ways
0:42:13 to kind of bring the parts of the process
0:42:16 that we really enjoy to those jobs, right.
0:42:17 You know, because, you know,
0:42:20 if you’re a high powered lawyer in private practice
0:42:21 in New York, you might have the option
0:42:22 to switch to be a prosecutor
0:42:24 or maybe you have enough money to retire
0:42:26 and you know, I don’t know, become a glass blower
0:42:29 or something, not everybody has that privilege.
0:42:30 And so there’s an open question
0:42:32 if your job isn’t so flexible,
0:42:35 what are some ways you can bring the sense of values
0:42:36 and purpose to this job.
0:42:38 And here’s a spot where I really love the work
0:42:39 of my former colleague at Yale
0:42:41 who’s now at the University of Pennsylvania,
0:42:42 Amy Rezninsky.
0:42:44 She does a lot of work on this process
0:42:46 that she calls job crafting.
0:42:48 And the idea is that with job crafting,
0:42:49 you kind of sit down and you think,
0:42:51 what are my strengths, what are my values?
0:42:54 Maybe for these prosecutors who join,
0:42:56 who kind of lose some money,
0:42:57 but kind of take this new job,
0:42:59 what’s really like working with people
0:43:00 or I care about justice, right.
0:43:02 Like I want to, I really care about fairness
0:43:03 and I want to fight.
0:43:04 Maybe it’s bravery, right.
0:43:06 Like I got to push myself all the time,
0:43:08 you know, kind of like fight these big fights,
0:43:09 whatever it is, right.
0:43:10 We can come up with all these different kind
0:43:12 of strengths and values.
0:43:14 The idea of job crafting is you take
0:43:15 your normal job description
0:43:18 and you figure out a way to bring those values in,
0:43:19 no matter what it is.
0:43:21 And the reason I love Amy’s work
0:43:22 is that she studies job crafting.
0:43:25 Again, not in attorneys, not in podcasters.
0:43:27 She studies job crafting
0:43:29 in hospital janitorial staff workers, right.
0:43:31 So these are people who are washing people’s linen
0:43:34 and cleaning the floors when people get sick.
0:43:37 And she finds that between a quarter to a third of them
0:43:39 really report that their job is a calling.
0:43:40 You know, they have to get paid,
0:43:42 but they love their job and they would show up
0:43:43 even if they weren’t getting paid.
0:43:45 And those individuals tend to be the ones
0:43:47 that spontaneously job craft.
0:43:49 They’re like bringing their values in.
0:43:50 She tells these lovely stories.
0:43:52 One was a story of a janitorial staff worker
0:43:55 who worked in a chemotherapy ward.
0:43:55 And if you’re listening now
0:43:58 and you’ve had the unfortunate to have to get chemotherapy,
0:43:59 you know, often makes people sick.
0:44:01 So a big part of the sky’s job
0:44:03 was actually cleaning up vomit in the room.
0:44:05 But he said, well, that wasn’t my job.
0:44:07 My values are kind of social intelligence
0:44:08 and humor and empathy, right.
0:44:10 I wanted to make these patients laugh.
0:44:12 And so every time he had to go up and clean some vomit,
0:44:13 he would joke.
0:44:14 He’s like, oh, this looks like a big spill.
0:44:17 I’m going to get overtime and you know, you’re laughing.
0:44:19 He was like, the people laughed and like that was my job.
0:44:21 That’s why I show up at work every day, right.
0:44:23 And so I love Amy’s work because it shows
0:44:27 if you can get creative about job crafting
0:44:29 as a guy who cleans up vomit in a hospital,
0:44:32 like for most of the people listening right now,
0:44:33 you can get creative about your own job too.
0:44:35 The key is like figure out, you know,
0:44:37 what things get me going?
0:44:38 What do I really like?
0:44:40 And then ask the question,
0:44:42 how can I infuse more of that into what I do every day?
0:44:46 – You know, I want to talk about acts of kindness
0:44:48 because you talk about that as being important.
0:44:50 And I remember as a freshman in college,
0:44:51 the freshman or sophomore in college,
0:44:56 I took psych one from a giant in the field named Jerome Kagan.
0:44:57 – Oh yeah.
0:45:01 – And I remember, and he would bust all these myths
0:45:03 that, you know, we thought were true,
0:45:06 but psychology teaches us or not.
0:45:09 And one of those was when he said,
0:45:14 “If you want someone to like you, don’t do them a favor.
0:45:16 Ask them to do you a favor.”
0:45:20 Because, which is counterintuitive to say the least,
0:45:23 because the person who has done you a favor
0:45:25 is now invested in you,
0:45:28 which is related to this idea that you get,
0:45:30 you know, gratification and happiness
0:45:33 from doing kind things for other people.
0:45:35 Can you talk about that and why that happens?
0:45:37 – Yeah, I think this is a huge misconception
0:45:40 that we all kind of get culturally right now, right?
0:45:44 If you look at any kind of not so evidence-based article
0:45:46 on happiness, they talk a lot about self-care
0:45:47 or treat yourself, right?
0:45:50 I think intuitively we think that the path to happiness
0:45:52 is doing something nice for ourselves.
0:45:54 But just as you said from your, you know,
0:45:55 the class you took with Jerome Kagan
0:45:58 and probably like decades of work since then,
0:46:00 pretty much every study shows
0:46:02 that we get a boost in happiness.
0:46:03 – It’s not that many decades.
0:46:05 – One, two decades, two decades.
0:46:08 – No, it’s like three, it’s like three decades, it’s okay.
0:46:10 – No, but the key is like we get happiness
0:46:13 from doing nice stuff for other people.
0:46:14 One of my favorite studies on this was done
0:46:16 by the University of British Columbia psychologist,
0:46:17 Elizabeth Dunn.
0:46:20 She does a study where she walks up to subjects
0:46:22 on the street and just hands them 20 bucks.
0:46:24 But the key is that she tells you how to spend that 20 bucks.
0:46:26 She either says, by the end of the day,
0:46:28 spend this $20 on yourself,
0:46:29 do something nice to treat yourself,
0:46:32 or by the end of the day, spend this money
0:46:33 to do something nice for somebody else.
0:46:36 You could donate it to an unhoused person,
0:46:38 you could buy your friend a latte, whatever it is,
0:46:41 but just gotta be for somebody else.
0:46:43 And then she has people rate their happiness,
0:46:45 and then she has people rate their happiness again
0:46:47 at the end of the day once they’ve spent the money.
0:46:49 And she finds that, by and large,
0:46:52 people self-report being happier
0:46:53 when they’ve spent the money on other people.
0:46:55 That’s not what we predict,
0:46:57 but it’s sort of what the data show.
0:46:58 And that means that, as you’ve said,
0:47:01 we can do something nice for others,
0:47:04 merely by asking people for help.
0:47:06 I think this, you and I are having this conversation
0:47:07 kind of at the end of the year,
0:47:09 where a lot of us are thinking about charity and so on.
0:47:11 I think for some people, donating some money
0:47:12 is the thing to do,
0:47:14 but some people are feeling financially
0:47:17 kind of strapped right now and aren’t able to do that.
0:47:19 And I think the key is to remember
0:47:22 that sometimes by asking the people around you for help,
0:47:24 by being a little bit vulnerable,
0:47:26 you can give a gift to someone else too.
0:47:29 And so, something that I think we often forget
0:47:30 we can do for others,
0:47:33 but it’s really a way to let them feel competent,
0:47:35 let them feel like they’re doing something
0:47:37 to give them a little bit of a happiness boost.
0:47:40 – Why is it so counterintuitive though?
0:47:45 What do we not understand about human psychology
0:47:47 that that’s such a revelation to us?
0:47:49 – I mean, there’s so much that we get wrong about happiness.
0:47:51 I feel like this is one piece.
0:47:54 I mean, I think that this bias is part of a larger thing
0:47:58 we get wrong that folks like the University of Chicago’s Nick
0:48:00 Epley have christened under sociality.
0:48:04 We just like all over the place misunderstand
0:48:07 the big benefits that we get from other people.
0:48:09 Like we don’t realize that doing something nice
0:48:10 for others will feel good.
0:48:12 We don’t realize that chatting with a stranger
0:48:14 will boost our mood.
0:48:15 We don’t realize that, you know,
0:48:17 giving a simple compliment to a stranger,
0:48:20 expressing our gratitude, asking for help.
0:48:23 All of these things are like evidence-based
0:48:26 happiness boosters that make us feel really great
0:48:28 and make us feel more satisfied with our lives.
0:48:30 And so many of us are just leaving opportunities
0:48:33 to do that, you know, on the table all the time.
0:48:35 – It seems like such a win-win proposition
0:48:37 not to be corny about it like here’s the thing.
0:48:38 – It builds the pie.
0:48:39 It builds the happiness pie.
0:48:40 – That will make you happy.
0:48:43 And also it helps another person.
0:48:45 Why don’t we have more charity?
0:48:46 It makes you wonder, right?
0:48:47 – Yeah, why don’t we have more charity?
0:48:50 Why don’t we have just more conversations?
0:48:51 – It’s not a sacrifice.
0:48:51 – Exactly.
0:48:52 – The charity’s not a sacrifice.
0:48:57 And I think this is why I really love teaching students
0:48:58 about the science of this stuff
0:49:00 because it is true, our mind just has these
0:49:01 mistaken intuitions, right?
0:49:03 Like I’m the professor who teaches this stuff.
0:49:06 And I’ve seen the studies, I could quote the stats,
0:49:08 but like, you know, when push comes to shove
0:49:10 and I’m having a tough day and I’m gonna about to spend,
0:49:13 you know, five bucks on a nice latte for myself,
0:49:14 I’m not thinking, well, let me, you know,
0:49:16 gift the person behind me and line this latte.
0:49:19 That’s what will really boost my happiness, right?
0:49:21 I know the data and I still don’t have that intuition.
0:49:23 I can put it into practice, right?
0:49:24 Rationally knowing this stuff,
0:49:26 I’ve changed some of my behaviors around,
0:49:29 but my intuitions haven’t changed and that’s frustrating.
0:49:31 It’d be nice if the mind were more cooperative
0:49:33 and we could update all our intuitions,
0:49:34 but it doesn’t work out.
0:49:38 – By the way, the other intuition that he exploded,
0:49:42 which is relevant as I age is that you are more likely
0:49:45 to remember the name of your second grade teacher
0:49:49 than maybe professor you had in a prior year,
0:49:53 which to me as I talk about professor Kagan
0:49:55 is also true ’cause I remember his name
0:49:59 and now that I’ve done the math is like 35 years ago
0:50:04 and I can’t remember the names of people I met on Monday.
0:50:05 So that’s another one.
0:50:09 Can you talk about the importance of gratitude
0:50:12 and what that means?
0:50:14 Is it a muscle you exercise?
0:50:16 Is it a sentiment you have?
0:50:17 Is it passive?
0:50:18 Is it active?
0:50:19 And why does it matter?
0:50:20 – Yeah, yeah.
0:50:23 Well, I think one reason gratitude matters a lot
0:50:25 gets back to what we were talking about before
0:50:27 this idea that we just kind of get used to stuff, right?
0:50:30 That the good things in life just stop feeling as good
0:50:32 if you keep getting them over time.
0:50:35 Gratitude is powerful because it’s a way to hack that, right?
0:50:37 When you think like, you know,
0:50:38 I don’t know how to use the first class example,
0:50:40 like I’m sitting in first class,
0:50:41 I might not have sat in first class.
0:50:44 Look at these cool like little socks I get
0:50:45 or this extra room in my chair,
0:50:49 like I’m noticing that this feels really good, right?
0:50:50 That’s the power of gratitude.
0:50:53 Kind of shine this little attention spotlight
0:50:55 on what we have and we notice
0:50:57 that it didn’t have to be that way, right?
0:50:59 We don’t want to take this for granted
0:51:01 because it might not always be this way.
0:51:04 And that can really allow us to recognize
0:51:06 the good things in life and to notice sort of the blessings.
0:51:09 And really study after study just shows
0:51:10 the benefits of this stuff.
0:51:12 Not just for our happiness,
0:51:13 but for other things too.
0:51:14 – But what does that mean?
0:51:16 Does that mean that you,
0:51:19 so I’ll give you an example of my life.
0:51:23 So I have to actively practice gratitude
0:51:24 and I have a really good life
0:51:27 and I’ve had a really good life for a long time.
0:51:30 But I was annoyed by some things at work,
0:51:31 something didn’t go the right way,
0:51:35 or I was not as prepared as I might have been, whatever.
0:51:38 I was grumpy and cranky in my whole life, says to me,
0:51:40 what did you do again yesterday?
0:51:41 I said, what do you mean?
0:51:42 Like what did you do in the middle of the day yesterday
0:51:43 for work?
0:51:45 I said, I did a podcast interview.
0:51:46 I said, who did you interview again?
0:51:50 I said, Steven Van Zand,
0:51:54 a little Steven from the East Street Band,
0:51:56 who I love, along with Bruce Springsteen.
0:52:00 And they paid you to do that interview.
0:52:04 I said, yeah, okay, I’m gonna stop complaining now.
0:52:06 Is that what you have to do from time to time?
0:52:09 – Yeah, I mean, really one of the easiest interventions
0:52:13 is just to commit to scribbling down three to five things
0:52:15 that you notice that you’re grateful for every day, right?
0:52:17 So that can be something really cool.
0:52:19 Like I get to interview someone
0:52:20 from my favorite music band ever,
0:52:22 which maybe doesn’t apply to everyone.
0:52:24 But it can be simple things like my morning coffee,
0:52:27 my kid’s smile, you know, the way the tail wagged,
0:52:29 you know, there’s like a little bit sunny, right?
0:52:31 Like sometimes my gratitude,
0:52:32 things are just silly things like, you know,
0:52:34 I was in the shower and the light in my shower
0:52:36 sometimes creates this little prism and I noticed it.
0:52:39 And it’s just really colorful and it’s great, right?
0:52:41 I think sometimes gratitude feels like,
0:52:42 has to be this big thing.
0:52:45 Like I’m grateful for this really important thing in life.
0:52:47 But sometimes you can kind of reduce it
0:52:50 just to the like little positives, the delights.
0:52:53 I sometimes like to replace a gratitude practice
0:52:54 with what I like to call a delight practice
0:52:56 where you just notice, you know,
0:52:58 the cute, funny, beautiful,
0:52:59 awe-inspiring things in the world
0:53:02 and just make a note of like, that was delightful.
0:53:03 Sometimes that can feel a little bit lighter
0:53:05 than kind of going for gratitude.
0:53:07 But the key of a practice like this
0:53:08 where you notice it over time
0:53:11 is that you’re training your brain to focus on this stuff.
0:53:13 Another dumb feature of brains is that we tend to have
0:53:15 what’s called a negativity bias.
0:53:17 Those hassles in life, the fact that you had a bad day,
0:53:20 the grumpy stuff we notice all the time.
0:53:22 We don’t have to put any effort into it.
0:53:24 It’s not, doesn’t need to be intentional at all.
0:53:25 It just comes for free.
0:53:29 But the delights, the delights in life we gotta seek out.
0:53:31 And the key about making it a practice is, you know,
0:53:33 just like that exercise practices
0:53:35 we were talking about earlier,
0:53:36 you can kind of build up your reps
0:53:39 and train your attention muscle to notice the good stuff.
0:53:41 But it takes some intention and some energy.
0:53:44 – But sunrises and sunsets are free too.
0:53:45 – Yeah, for sure.
0:53:46 I mean, there’s all this stuff that’s free.
0:53:49 I recently just had COVID.
0:53:51 And I guess these new variants of COVID
0:53:53 are kind of like back to the like OG COVID
0:53:56 where a lot of folks are losing their sense of taste
0:53:57 and smell and that happened to me.
0:53:59 I completely lost my sense of taste and smell
0:54:00 for about six weeks.
0:54:01 – Oh goodness.
0:54:05 – And I hadn’t noticed how awesome having smell was like
0:54:08 at all, but as soon as I lost it, I was like, oh my God,
0:54:12 you know, once it started coming back, I’m like coffee,
0:54:15 like, you know, my partner, like my bed sheets,
0:54:17 my favorite soap, like just simple things.
0:54:18 – But how long does that last?
0:54:23 – You know, it lasts long if you go back to it, right?
0:54:24 I’ve started to actually make a practice
0:54:26 and ’cause I do my own little delight
0:54:27 and sort of gratitude practice,
0:54:29 I just kind of scribble in a note zap on my phone
0:54:32 and I have in big letters smell at the top.
0:54:33 And so every time I see that,
0:54:35 I sometimes go back to noticing of like,
0:54:37 oh, it’s actually cool that like,
0:54:40 I can smell the coffee right now or I’m kind of out.
0:54:41 And it was like a really rainy day today
0:54:43 where I am in New England and it was like,
0:54:45 just had that kind of crisp wet smell.
0:54:48 And I was like, this is a sensation I get, that’s cool.
0:54:51 And so the beauty of gratitude is it totally will go away
0:54:53 if you don’t intentionally practice it,
0:54:57 but gratitude can be something that kind of brings you back.
0:55:01 – How important are friendships to maintaining,
0:55:03 not just sanity, but happiness?
0:55:06 I think they’re very important, but you tell us.
0:55:07 – Yeah, they’re huge.
0:55:09 I mean, if I had to pick one thing you could do
0:55:12 to be happier, it would be to improve
0:55:13 and engage in social connection,
0:55:16 whether that’s with a really good friend, with a stranger.
0:55:18 And this is the kind of stuff that matters
0:55:22 not just for things like happiness, but for longevity too.
0:55:24 There’s some lovely work coming out of
0:55:25 Walderman’s lab at Harvard,
0:55:28 that’s been part of this sort of Harvard adult study
0:55:29 of development, right?
0:55:31 So they follow individual Harvard students
0:55:33 from way back in the day through their 80s.
0:55:35 And now they’re kind of continuing this longitudinal study,
0:55:38 studying, you know, not just those individuals,
0:55:39 but the kids of those individuals
0:55:41 and the grandkids of those individuals.
0:55:43 And one of the things that this really long-running,
0:55:46 huge study has found is that if you want the best predictor
0:55:50 of happiness in life, but also health later in life,
0:55:52 it really just seems to boil down
0:55:54 to your social connections.
0:55:55 They just matter much more than we think.
0:55:56 – In both ways, right?
0:55:59 So if you have a lot of connections
0:56:01 and a lot of friendships, you’re healthy.
0:56:03 And I guess it follows that the opposite is true,
0:56:04 but not always.
0:56:06 And people who don’t have friends
0:56:09 or connections to loved ones
0:56:14 are at the worst peril of depression and disease, right?
0:56:15 – Yeah, that’s right.
0:56:17 I mean, the Surgeon General likes to quote
0:56:19 that self-reported loneliness.
0:56:21 If you self-report on surveys, you feel very lonely.
0:56:25 That’s as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
0:56:28 It’s twice as bad as being obese for all kinds of things
0:56:31 like your existence of heart disease and inflammation
0:56:33 and just like chronic health problems,
0:56:36 like just not having social connection is that bad.
0:56:42 – Which age groups in America today are the happiest
0:56:44 and which are the least happy?
0:56:47 And I know it’s gonna be a disconcerting answer from you.
0:56:49 – No, no, it’s actually pretty good, I think for you.
0:56:54 So yeah, so historically, we thought of happiness
0:56:56 as sort of a U-shape function.
0:57:00 So the young folks tend to be really high in happiness.
0:57:02 Then you get to college, things go down,
0:57:03 your 30s things go down,
0:57:06 they hit a kind of nadir around 48, 49.
0:57:09 So I’m actually just turned 49.
0:57:12 So I’m starting to go back up on the curve.
0:57:15 And then things get better and better into old age,
0:57:17 which is again, not what we expect.
0:57:19 I think we expect the young side that kind of makes sense
0:57:20 that young people should be happier.
0:57:22 But we don’t see the kind of upswing
0:57:23 towards the end of life.
0:57:26 But the closer you get to death,
0:57:28 despite the health problems, despite the grief,
0:57:30 despite the kind of objectively bad stuff
0:57:33 that we know can happen later in life,
0:57:35 you actually wind up being happier.
0:57:36 I think the only caveat to that though
0:57:41 is that that U-shaped pattern has been flattened over time.
0:57:44 Older individuals have become less happy
0:57:46 than they were, say, 20 years ago.
0:57:48 And much more profoundly,
0:57:51 young people have become much, much more unhappy
0:57:52 than they were before.
0:57:53 – Right, no, well, that’s the thing that gives me pause.
0:57:56 That’s why I was making the remark that I made
0:57:59 because that’s sort of sad and upsetting.
0:58:00 – Super sad.
0:58:03 The time of life that you’re most supposed to be happy
0:58:04 are current young people who are experiencing.
0:58:05 – Oh my gosh, I think about my kids
0:58:08 who are happy and well-adjusted.
0:58:10 But they don’t know how happy they should be.
0:58:11 – Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:58:13 – They have very good lives.
0:58:15 – And even if they’re feeling okay,
0:58:16 like their generation is not.
0:58:18 So right now, among college students,
0:58:22 over a 40% report being too depressed to function most days,
0:58:25 over 60% say that they feel very lonely most of the time.
0:58:29 Another over 60% report feeling very anxious,
0:58:31 one in 10 current college students
0:58:33 has seriously considered suicide in the last year, right?
0:58:35 Like it’s really an epidemic.
0:58:37 – So what do we do about that, Professor?
0:58:39 – Well, I think we try to teach people,
0:58:41 how to overcome their misconceptions
0:58:44 when it comes to what matters for happiness.
0:58:46 I think a lot of the misconceptions we’ve talked about,
0:58:50 pursuing money, pursuing these accolades at all costs, right?
0:58:52 Not investing in your social connection,
0:58:55 not investing in other positive emotions like gratitude,
0:58:57 or you’re sort of striving for everything,
0:58:58 not noticing what you have.
0:59:01 I think these are easy behavioral and mindset hacks
0:59:04 that we can all engage in to feel a little bit better.
0:59:06 I think our culture, especially for young people,
0:59:07 has pushed people away from that,
0:59:08 but I think there are things we can do
0:59:10 to get back towards that.
0:59:12 – Is there any correlation?
0:59:13 I’m not a particularly religious person,
0:59:17 but is there any correlation between the shrinkage
0:59:22 of the church in all the various religions
0:59:24 and the increase in unhappiness?
0:59:25 – For sure, yeah, I mean,
0:59:27 so the data on religion and happiness are interesting.
0:59:31 So individuals who engage in more religious practices
0:59:33 tend to be happier,
0:59:35 but it’s not the case that individuals
0:59:38 who have strong religious beliefs are necessarily happier.
0:59:39 What do I mean by that?
0:59:41 – Well, that’s super interesting.
0:59:44 – Yeah, so I think why it is is that
0:59:47 it’s not the beliefs that matter for your happiness,
0:59:48 it’s your behaviors, right?
0:59:50 So take an individual who’s really engaged
0:59:51 in religious practices.
0:59:54 They’re probably doing things like going to services
0:59:56 where they engage in social connection.
0:59:58 They might be participating in charity.
0:59:59 Maybe they’re saying prayers
1:00:01 where they experience a sense of mindfulness
1:00:04 and presence and gratitude.
1:00:06 Religious practices often involve
1:00:09 a lot of the same behaviors and mindsets
1:00:10 that we’ve just talked about
1:00:12 that seem to matter for happiness.
1:00:13 And that’s what seems to give you a boost.
1:00:15 And you have that not just kind of doing
1:00:17 those kind of practices on your own,
1:00:20 it’s sort of part of a really rich set of traditions
1:00:22 and beliefs that allow you to realize
1:00:24 the importance of that stuff.
1:00:26 And the key is that that’s true no matter,
1:00:28 pretty much no matter what religious practice
1:00:29 you’re engaged in.
1:00:31 All of them have these kind of features
1:00:34 that tend to improve social connection,
1:00:36 improve a sense of gratitude,
1:00:38 sort of talk really strongly about doing nice things
1:00:40 for others, make that a value.
1:00:43 All of these things are kind of true in religion.
1:00:45 And therefore I think engaging in religious practices
1:00:47 winds up making us happier.
1:00:49 – We may have sort of incidentally covered this.
1:00:50 You’ve talked a lot about the things
1:00:52 that make you happy in the act you can engage in.
1:00:54 They’ll increase your happiness.
1:00:55 What’s the opposite?
1:00:59 What are the things that you do or that happen
1:01:01 that make people the most unhappy?
1:01:05 – Well, I think it’s kind of investing in things
1:01:07 that are sort of the opposite of that.
1:01:10 So we’ve talked about the importance of engaging
1:01:12 in gratitude, kind of not falling prey
1:01:14 to these sort of comparison biases.
1:01:15 What’s the thing that you can do
1:01:18 that really brings up those comparison biases
1:01:20 and make you feel like you don’t have enough,
1:01:23 I think, hopping on social media for a lot of us, right?
1:01:26 Kind of seeing these negative comparisons writ large
1:01:28 kind of makes us feel terrible.
1:01:30 I think engaging with our technology
1:01:33 can also be an opportunity cost on social connection,
1:01:35 which is ironic, right?
1:01:37 I think these portable phones that are in all of our pockets
1:01:40 were initially designed at least in part to be used
1:01:43 as a phone to like literally connect with somebody else.
1:01:45 But how often have you not talked to someone in real life
1:01:47 because you’re staring at your phone
1:01:50 and noticing what’s going on on the other side of Reddit
1:01:52 or the other side of some political blog
1:01:54 and just like not talking to your spouse.
1:01:58 And so I think the things that cause an opportunity cost
1:02:01 of stuff like social connection, engaging in gratitude
1:02:04 and so on, those things wind up being a real hit
1:02:07 on our happiness that we often can’t see directly.
1:02:09 – Am I correct that listening to podcasts
1:02:11 dramatically increases happiness?
1:02:14 – For sure, and especially some podcasts.
1:02:16 – I can think of two.
1:02:20 I think of two in particular before I let you go.
1:02:24 And any advice for people entering the holiday season
1:02:28 who have reason to be sad and not happy?
1:02:30 – Yeah, well, I think, you know,
1:02:32 this gets to something we haven’t talked about yet,
1:02:33 which is negative emotions, right?
1:02:36 I think sometimes we think if you’re experiencing those,
1:02:38 it’s just bad, it’s just bad for happiness.
1:02:42 But, you know, as Aristotle and other great thinkers
1:02:43 would have said– – Are you sure it was Aristotle?
1:02:44 – I think it was Aristotle for sure.
1:02:46 – Or was it John Stuart Mill?
1:02:48 But as many, many thinkers have said,
1:02:49 your negative emotions are important.
1:02:50 Part of the equation, right?
1:02:53 You know, I think the correct way to think
1:02:55 about negative emotions is almost like
1:02:56 the alert signal on your car.
1:02:57 You know, if you’re driving down the street
1:03:00 and your engine light comes on or your tire light comes on,
1:03:02 that’s inconvenient, it might not be awesome.
1:03:06 But if you ignore that, you kind of do so at your peril.
1:03:08 I think if you’re, you know,
1:03:09 going through this holiday season
1:03:11 and you’re experiencing some grief,
1:03:13 that’s kind of like a tire light, right?
1:03:15 Like, there’s something you need to take some time
1:03:16 to feel sad about.
1:03:17 You might miss someone.
1:03:18 You might need to take some time
1:03:19 to think about those memories
1:03:21 and kind of engage with that.
1:03:23 If you’re going through this holiday season
1:03:24 and you’re feeling a little bit lonely,
1:03:26 that’s probably a really honest signal
1:03:28 that you need to reach out to somebody,
1:03:30 make a connection, call a friend, and so on.
1:03:33 A really big one, if you’re going through this holiday season
1:03:35 and you’re feeling overwhelmed, like you can’t even,
1:03:37 like there’s way too much on your plate,
1:03:41 that’s probably a really honest kind of engine light signal
1:03:42 that you need to take something off your plate,
1:03:43 that you need to give yourself a break,
1:03:46 that you need to find some space in your schedule.
1:03:49 And so I think if you’re experiencing negative emotions,
1:03:52 the right response is like, awesome.
1:03:54 Thank God I have that alert to tell me, you know,
1:03:57 what I need to do to make changes so I can feel better.
1:03:58 You know, it’s like if you’re,
1:04:01 the only worst thing than having your tire go out
1:04:02 is not having your tire light work
1:04:04 ’cause then you just wouldn’t know
1:04:05 and then you find out on the highway somewhere.
1:04:08 And so thank your negative emotion system.
1:04:10 It’s really giving you useful information
1:04:11 that you can act on.
1:04:14 – Also very sound automotive advice.
1:04:15 – Also very sound automotive advice.
1:04:18 – So final question, I wanna go back to the definition.
1:04:22 This may be a dumb and too clever by half question,
1:04:25 but you know, we have been taught
1:04:27 that the opposite of love is not hate, right?
1:04:30 They say the opposite of love is indifference.
1:04:33 So my question is, what’s the opposite of happiness?
1:04:35 Is it actually sadness?
1:04:38 Or is it the absence of feeling or something else?
1:04:40 – Yeah, I think it’s not negative emotions, right?
1:04:41 Like I think happiness,
1:04:44 I always go back to sort of Aristotle’s definition
1:04:45 and really Aristotle’s definition.
1:04:48 – Okay, I’m gonna look up John Stuart Mill.
1:04:50 – His word, Eudaimaniia, right?
1:04:53 Like happiness is about living a good life.
1:04:55 And I think the opposite of Eudaimaniia
1:04:57 is feeling like something is off.
1:04:58 You’re feeling overwhelmed.
1:05:00 You’re not feeling like you have a sense of purpose.
1:05:01 You’re feeling kind of meh.
1:05:03 Like those kinds of signals
1:05:05 that you’re really not living up
1:05:06 to the good life that you could be.
1:05:09 And so by making some changes that research really shows
1:05:11 that you can get back to.
1:05:13 Aristotle’s definition of Eudaimaniia
1:05:15 and a kind of way of pursuing happiness
1:05:16 that’ll feel a lot better.
1:05:19 – Dr. Laurie Santos, thank you.
1:05:22 I made a list of simple things just to summarize.
1:05:24 Have gratitude for simple things,
1:05:27 engage in acts of kindness and get more friends.
1:05:28 We can all do that.
1:05:29 – That sounds pretty good.
1:05:30 – We can all do that, right?
1:05:31 – That sounds pretty good.
1:05:32 – Okay, thanks so much for your insight.
1:05:35 You should come back a lot because I feel better already.
1:05:36 – Amazing.
1:05:38 Thanks so much for having me on the show.
1:05:41 (upbeat music)
1:05:45 My conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos
1:05:48 continues for members of the Cafe Insider community.
1:05:49 In the bonus for insiders,
1:05:52 we discuss what we call the Keanu Reeves Doctrine
1:05:55 and mastering the art of letting things go.
1:05:58 – I think what he’s onto is something important, right?
1:06:01 Which is that all of us mess up every once in a while, right?
1:06:05 And it’s important to kind of give people some compassion.
1:06:07 – To try out the membership for just $1 for a month,
1:06:11 head to cafe.com/insider.
1:06:15 Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.
1:06:17 (upbeat music)
1:06:24 To end the show this week,
1:06:26 I’d like to reflect a little further
1:06:29 on the interview you just heard with Laurie Santos.
1:06:31 Dr. Santos described during our interview
1:06:33 something called the arrival of fallacy,
1:06:36 the mistaken belief that happiness waits for us
1:06:39 at some distant destination, a promotion,
1:06:41 a bigger house, a certain milestone.
1:06:42 But time and again,
1:06:45 research and life experience remind us
1:06:47 that happiness isn’t a place we arrive at,
1:06:49 it’s the journey itself.
1:06:50 Now that may sound corny,
1:06:52 it may sound like a cliche,
1:06:53 but that’s because it’s true.
1:06:56 She also spoke about the power of gratitude,
1:06:58 that when we stop to notice what we have,
1:06:59 we shine a light on the things
1:07:00 we might otherwise take for granted.
1:07:04 Again, cliche, sure, but that’s because it’s true
1:07:06 and we still don’t do it enough.
1:07:07 So as the year winds down,
1:07:09 maybe we can make time to savor the moments
1:07:12 that truly matter, the time spent with family,
1:07:14 the laughs shared with friends,
1:07:18 and the quiet ongoing journey of discovering ourselves.
1:07:19 This holiday season,
1:07:22 let’s try to give ourselves the gift of presence,
1:07:26 of slowing down long enough to appreciate the path.
1:07:30 And finally, from my conversation with Laurie Santos,
1:07:31 I think that surprised me the most
1:07:33 and has stuck with me the most
1:07:36 was the revelation supported by science
1:07:37 that helping other people
1:07:40 not only makes the person you’re helping happier,
1:07:43 but in fact, the person doing the helping happier.
1:07:46 Acts of kindness, even small ones,
1:07:48 are a path to your own happiness.
1:07:49 As Laurie pointed out,
1:07:52 there’s all this discussion in the happiness sector
1:07:55 about self-care and taking care of yourself
1:07:56 and worrying about your own body
1:07:59 and your own health and your own prosperity.
1:08:00 And that’s all good and important,
1:08:03 but the path to happiness also comes
1:08:05 from helping other people out.
1:08:07 Be good to yourself always,
1:08:09 but also be good to other people.
1:08:12 Science says that it’ll make you happier.
1:08:14 From all of us here at Stay Tuned with Preet,
1:08:18 we wish you peace, gratitude, good health,
1:08:21 and a renewed appreciation for the journey.
1:08:22 Happy holidays.
1:08:25 (gentle music)
1:08:27 (gentle music)
1:08:37 Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned.
1:08:40 Thanks again to my guest, Dr. Laurie Santos.
1:08:47 If you like what we do, rate and review the show
1:08:50 on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen.
1:08:54 Every positive review helps new listeners find the show.
1:08:57 Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice.
1:09:00 Tweet them to me @preetbarar with the hashtag #AskPreet.
1:09:02 You can also now reach me on threads,
1:09:07 or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338.
1:09:11 That’s 669-24preet.
1:09:14 Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.
1:09:16 Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE
1:09:19 and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
1:09:21 The executive producer is Tamara Sepper.
1:09:24 The technical director is David Tadishor.
1:09:27 The deputy editor is Celine Rohrer.
1:09:31 The editorial producers are Noah Azalai and Jake Kaplan.
1:09:34 The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez.
1:09:37 And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner,
1:09:39 and Leanna Greenway.
1:09:42 Our music is by Andrew Dost.
1:09:44 I’m your host, Preet Bharara.
1:09:46 As always, Stay Tuned.
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