#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning

Summary

Podcast Summary: Modern Wisdom #873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning

Introduction

In episode #873 of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson engages in a profound conversation with Lionel Page, a professor at the University of Queensland and acclaimed author. The episode delves into the intricate psychology underpinning happiness and meaning, exploring why persistent happiness is often elusive and how individuals can cultivate a healthier, more sustainable relationship with their well-being amidst modern distractions and societal pressures.

Evolutionary Perspective on Happiness

Lionel Page introduces an evolutionary lens to understanding happiness, emphasizing that our hedonic systems are hardwired not for maximum happiness but for optimal survival and success.

• Adaptive Design of Happiness: Lionel explains, “Our system of happiness is designed to make you as successful as possible.” This perspective suggests that happiness mechanisms are evolutionary tools to drive us toward success rather than goals of perpetual contentment ([05:06]).

• Hedonic Treadmill: The concept that humans constantly adapt to new achievements and thus require ever-increasing goals to maintain happiness is discussed. Lionel compares this to moving the carrot further ahead to keep motivation high ([33:40]).

Social Comparisons and Status

A significant portion of the discussion centers on how social comparisons, amplified by social media, impact our happiness.

• Reference Points: Lionel states, “We are the progeny of the most anxious, insecure overachievers across time,” highlighting how our reference points are often skewed by comparing ourselves to both those just above and far above us in status ([10:10]).

• Friendship Paradox: Lionel introduces the "friendship paradox," explaining that on social media, "your friends on average have more friends than you," leading to inflated comparison standards and diminished personal satisfaction ([23:51]).

• Status as a Zero-Sum Game: The discussion touches on how status increases can lead to relative decreases for others, creating a perpetual cycle of competition and anxiety. Lionel notes, “Status is a zero sum game, that if you rise in status, there...” ([68:40]).

Goals and the Hedonic Treadmill

The interplay between setting high goals and the pursuit of happiness is examined, revealing why achieving goals often leads to immediate satisfaction followed by a swift desire for the next objective.

• Momentum of Goals: Lionel explains, “If you think that it's very important to have this next promotion... once you have it, you start thinking about the next challenge,” illustrating how goals continuously shift our satisfaction thresholds ([35:43]).

• Focusing Illusion: Referencing Daniel Kahneman, Lionel discusses how intense focus on specific life aspects can distort our perception of what truly contributes to happiness. For example, people often overestimate the happiness a job in California would bring ([36:10]).

• Incrementalism vs. Sudden Changes: The conversation contrasts gradual progress with sudden life changes, suggesting that the latter can disrupt our hedonic balance and lead to long-term dissatisfaction ([60:13]).

Meaning vs. Happiness

The relationship between seeking happiness and pursuing meaning is dissected, revealing inherent tensions and evolutionary mismatches in modern society.

• Short-Term vs. Long-Term Satisfaction: Lionel articulates, “Much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches where short term hedonic signals conflict with long term ones,” highlighting the struggle between immediate pleasures and enduring fulfillment ([66:53]).

• Hedonic Adaptation: The concept that our happiness levels are set by our current circumstances rather than absolute achievements is explored. Lionel posits that true meaning arises from a sense of progress and alignment with long-term goals rather than transient pleasures ([72:24]).

• Existential Questions: Addressing the classic philosophical inquiry into life's meaning, Lionel suggests that under a naturalistic framework, meaning emerges from our evolved hedonic signals designed to steer us toward success and cooperation, rather than from any transcendent purpose ([85:28]).

Impact of Modern Society

Modern advancements and societal structures have created environments vastly different from those our evolutionary traits were designed to navigate, leading to unique challenges in achieving happiness and meaning.

• Social Media Influence: The expansion of social circles through digital platforms and the curated portrayals of success exacerbate social comparison stress, making genuine satisfaction harder to attain ([20:31]).

• Delayed Maturation and Modern Pressures: Lionel discusses how extended adolescence and delayed societal roles conflict with our evolutionary predispositions, contributing to decreased life satisfaction among younger generations ([89:23]).

• Institutional Time Horizons: Modern institutions have extended the timeline for success, creating a disconnect between our immediate hedonic responses and the long-term investments required for meaningful achievements ([80:59]).

Conclusion

The conversation between Chris Williamson and Lionel Page offers a nuanced exploration of the invisible psychological mechanisms governing happiness and meaning. By framing happiness through an evolutionary perspective and dissecting the roles of social comparison, goal-setting, and societal pressures, Lionel provides valuable insights into why happiness remains elusive and how one might navigate these challenges. The episode underscores the importance of understanding our hedonic systems and the evolutionary mismatches that modern life presents, ultimately guiding listeners toward a more informed approach to optimizing their well-being and finding genuine meaning.

Notable Quotes

• Lionel Page ([05:06]): “Happiness is a system of valuation, design... evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it's designing stuff designed by evolution to help you make decisions.”

• Lionel Page ([23:51]): “Friendship paradox... your friends on average have more friends than you.”

• Lionel Page ([36:10]): “Focusing illusion is a term proposed by Daniel Kahneman... when you focus on one aspect of life, you overestimate its impact on your overall happiness.”

• Lionel Page ([66:53]): “Much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches where short term hedonic signals conflict with long term ones.”

• Lionel Page ([85:28]): “Meaning of life... feelings that give sense to your life have to come from the view that you are going somewhere in your life.”

Further Resources

Listeners interested in exploring Lionel Page's insights further can check out his book Optimum Irrational and subscribe to his Substack, Ultimately Irrational, where he continues to delve into psychology from evolutionary, game theory, and economic perspectives.

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Note: This summary is based on the transcript provided and aims to encapsulate the key discussions and insights shared by Lionel Page and Chris Williamson during the episode.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Lionel Page.

[Lionel Page]

He's a professor at the University of.

[Chris Williamson]

Queensland and an author.

[Lionel Page]

Lionel is one of my favorite writers.

[Chris Williamson]

In the world, so I had to bring him on to uncover the invisible psychology which drives our happiness. How can we optimize for well being.

[Lionel Page]

In a world full of distractions and pressures?

[Chris Williamson]

Why does persistent happiness remain so elusive and what shifts can help us build.

[Lionel Page]

A healthier and more sustainable relationship with it? Expect to learn what everyone gets wrong when thinking about happiness, the most important.

[Chris Williamson]

Mechanisms that drive our well being, how the role of comparison on social media contributes to our overall happiness, why evolution.

[Lionel Page]

Didn'T design us with the ability to simply feel greater and greater levels of.

[Chris Williamson]

Satisfaction, the role of a meaningful life.

[Lionel Page]

Why we overestimate the importance of our future success, and much more this episode is so good. It is classic modern wisdom.

[Chris Williamson]

Human nature.

[Lionel Page]

Insightful stuff. I adore it. Lionel is fantastic. His substack is amazing and there is so much to take away from today. I really hope that you enjoy this.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Lionel Page]

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[Lionel Page]

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[Lionel Page]

But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lionel Pa. Dude, I am in love with your sub stack. I subscribe to a lot of different sub stacks and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year. You're absolutely destroying it. Dude. It's so great. It's evolutionary lens on things, big picture questions everybody's already asking. I think it's awesome. So when it comes to I guess what what are the problems about how happiness is Typically thought about or studied. What, what is missing from that look?

[C]

Excellent question. So in one of my posts I have this cheeky picture of, you know, the elephant and the blind. It's. I think it's comes from India. The story and the story, I'm sure lots of your listeners have heard about it, but you've got a bunch of blind people and they're put in front of an elephant and they're asked okay, what an elephant looks like. And so you know, one touch the trunk of the elephant and says well an elephant is kind of, you know, looks like a tube and it's wet at the end and everyone touch the tail says well you know, it's look as a string and it's very fluffy at the end. And another one touches the tusk and say well, it's very hard, you know, it's very, and it's very smooth. And so when you read the literature are sometimes in behalf sciences and social sciences and when they don't have an evolutionary perspective, you get the same kind of stuff. I talk about the books on self help books on psychology of happiness. And you will see, you get a book and this book will tell you to be happy you need social connections. The secret of happiness is to have friends, to have family. Okay, that's very interesting. You take another book and this other book will tell you the secret of happiness is to control your desires, you know, to learn not to want what you don't have. That's stoicism, that's Buddhism. And another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars, you know, to have very high goals and to work very hard to reach it. And then you look at these different things like okay, but what's, you know, what's the link between these different things? I mean, are we talking about the same things that we're talking about happiness? And there's one explanation. What's the connection between these different stories? And these books are like the blinds, you know, giving you a perspective of the elephant and the elephant about happiness is that you have to consider that happiness is a system of valuation, design. And I use the word design, you know, not designed by a designer. But evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it's designing stuff designed by evolution to help you make decisions. And so when you take this perspective, all these different kind of secrets of happiness make sense but in a big picture. So you ask me, you know, what kind of stuff it explains. Like for instance, as I say, we are social spaces so we will need connections, that's one fact. But on the other hand, sometimes you get all the books about happiness tells you, well, you need to know when to say no to other people. You need to say, people make claims about your time, says, can you help me, Chris, can you do this, etc. At some point you need to be able to. Well, every system you have of subjective feelings helping you to navigate the world has to handle that you have facing trade offs. So if you're always saying no to people, you know, maybe you won't have too many friends and that's not good for your success. But if you're always saying yes, you know, maybe you'll be a pushover, people will take advantage of you. So a right system needs you to balance these things. If you take another things like the goals you have in life, if you, if you have very low goals, like, you know, everything is fine. Whatever you achieve, you're very happy with it. You won't be very successful. And so a system of happiness which is designed to make you successful has to push you, to nudge you to try as hard as you can. So whenever you're going to be successful, you know that you are going to look forward to the next challenge. So now you may think, oh, what will make me very happy in the future is this big milestone. If I reach this milestone, that's it, you know, I won't need very much to do much better than that. And what happens is that let's say you work very hard and you reach the milestone and eventually say, okay, that was good, but what's next? You know, like you're going to start looking further ahead like, what's the next milestones? If you think that being millionaire is what will make you happy. Well, the sad story is that when you reach the million, the first million or 2 million, whatever, you'll feel good, but you'll start thinking about the next thing. So your system of happiness will keep pushing. And so when you have these books, they tell, you know, either you need to have, you don't need to care about what you don't have. On the contrary, you need to aim very high. They kind of, they just look at one side of this balance. The book tells you don't care about what you don't have. It says, yes, you shouldn't look too high. It's not worth it for me to think in the morning, oh, I'm not as rich as Elon Musk, so this is very disappointing. There's no point for me to think that that's not going to help me being successful to have a goal which is so high that I'm never, you know, there's no point. Whatever I do in the day is not going to change it. So I shouldn't care about things which are unachievable. But at the same point, at the same time, you know, if I wake up in the morning, as you know, I'm great, I'm healthy, everything is fine, you know, why do I stress, etc. Well, I'm not maybe going to do the right things, which is going to help me move forward. So our system of happiness is going to be this kind of stuff which kind of try to find the right level to push us to do our best. It's neither too high, neither too low.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah, there's that idea of a homeless man isn't jealous of a billionaire, but he is jealous of a slightly richer homeless man.

[C]

Exactly. You know, that's, that's something very important because we think that we always compare, right? One aspect of happiness is that we may think that happiness is just objective and that we are this kind of. We have this view about what we would really want and if we get it, we'd be happy. But in truth, we always compare to other people. One reason we compare is that we learn from other people. Let's say, you know, you, if you ask yourself, am I successful in life? Well, you can look at people like you. People maybe were in your high school when you were young, your mates, et cetera, and if they were much more successful than you, then, and I'm not saying that you're spiteful necessarily, it's not about that. But if you see that they were much more successful, you may think, wait a minute, like, you know, they didn't have anything more than me when we started, so why am I not doing like them? You know, you extract information from that, from these people were like you, who were like you. And so you would want to, you know, that's going to help you maybe to change tech. You say, okay, you know, I fooked. That was fine doing what I'm doing. But when I'm seeing what they are doing, maybe I should do something else. So these kind of comparisons, it's not useful when you compare to people who are very, very different. So if you're homeless, you know, and you wake up every morning thinking that you're not a millionaire, that's not going to help you move the next step ahead of where you are now. Right. And so you will care not about people who are much Poorer than you or people who are much less successful than you're much more successful than you. You typically care about people around you and you. And that's this interesting stuff that we care a lot about the people who are just like us being a step of ahead of us, and the people who are very far ahead, we don't even care too much about them.

[Lionel Page]

It's so fascinating. It's like a, like we're plants in an ecology and we sort of are able to grow toward the light that's nearest to us. And yeah, it's an uncomfortable realization that our feelings of well being depend less on, like, absolute achievements than they do on just the comparison to other people in the social circles that we belong with. And I guess, you know, that game of relative comparison and the way that social circles, the ones that we choose and the ones that we don't impact us is just. It's endlessly fascinating to me.

[C]

Yeah, well, I'm with you. Like, obviously, I'm super fascinated in it. I think what's interesting is like, what's fascinate me is how kind of key happiness and these questions we ask ourselves are central to our lives and in a way, how we are. We don't really know. You know, we don't have the intuitions. So evolution is this kind of programming process which has designed us to work well in the real world. But evolution didn't care about telling us. The rulebook tells, you know, they gave us evolution, gave us a design and. But doesn't explain why we're doing what we do. And so we're like following the path that our feelings lead us to. But why we have these feelings and why they have the shape they have, and you know, that we don't have the intuitions necessarily. So that's why when we start thinking about, oh, what's next, what will make me happy, why I'm not happy, et cetera. It's actually not trivial because evolution, in a way doesn't care, you know, to make us successful. We don't need to know why we have these feelings. We just need to have these feelings.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah, I think for, you know, the sorts of people that listen to this podcast, introspective, reflective, you know, curious people having a question, having a why that does not have a very well defined answer is kind of like some version of purgatory, meeting hell. And you're just, you know, you want to know and you're right that there isn't, there isn't this definitive sense just going back to that the Social comparison thing. I've been thinking about this for ages and I love that insight about how people with disadvantaged social origins might be more likely to be happy because they've got a lower reference point to judge life from. It's so paradoxical, but it makes complete sense.

[C]

Yeah, look, that's. And actually that goes back to my PhD. My PhD was on that topic in education. It sounds, you know, when you say that, it sounds like maybe some people on the left would say, well, you're saying that people were from a lower social background are privileged or that people, people from our social background are disadvantaged. So you know what, it's true.

[Lionel Page]

The advantage of disadvantage.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Well, there is, there is a kind of hedonic happiness advantage of being from a low social background and rising up. Because then what you have is that, you know, if you use your original social background as a comparison point and it's natural to do so because even as I said, you know, if you use your peers and you, you come from a low social background and you look at people who are your friends and maybe they'll see your friends. Now you think, well, you know, I did well. And so you have these comparisons which helps you have this outlook on life. You know, am I unsatisfied with my life? Well, I did very well relative to where I started from. And that makes you happy. On the contrary, if you're born from a very highly successful social background, well, the bar is super high. So, you know, if your father and mother, they are lawyers, well, you know, if you don't do a super high education achievement, let's say a very high educational achievement is just the normal standard that you need to achieve. It's not, you can't be super happy, it's just normal. And so that's a high pressure. And what you observe is that there is a kind of a, you know, that's what I'm saying. I don't want to say that because there's lots of question about privilege, et cetera. But people were born in a privileged background. You observe sometimes more risk taking. And also they want to do some different line of work because they want to escape the comparison. So if your parents, maybe they are lawyers, etc. Maybe you want to become an artist because, you know, you want to be in a dimension of social comparisons where you can escape the comparison of your.

[Lionel Page]

Oh, that's so interesting. Because if you went into law or you went into medicine, there would be a direct comparison between where your father was at that stage. In his life. I mean, look, the potential explanation for kids from highly affluent backgrounds having disparate outcomes in educational attainment because they are riven and driven by this terror that they can't keep up with what their parents expected is like, it's. I don't know of anyone that's factoring that into the base rate. And sure, the material constraints, the resources, the access, the networking, the legacy admissions into these higher institutes, like, yes, there's lots of structural things, right, that go on, but what about the drive for the kids? Why are they, you know, working themselves so hard to do this? And, you know, the fact that you have higher expectations placed on you and you are aware that anything short of Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge or King's or whatever is going to constitute failure, which is going to result in you being less happy. That I think, explains at least part of the disparate outcomes that we see.

[C]

Yeah, I'm totally with you with that. So when you, if you are, let's say you can take two kind of cases different, let's say you are from you, your parents moved from a poor country in the US they didn't have a high high school diploma. You know, they work hard to pay for your education and you end up in a community college in the US and you get a job. And for you, that's an achievement. You know, you, you made it. You, you're able to have a house, a mortgage, car, you know, standard US way of life. Now, if you consider from there, do you want to try harder, do you want, you know, to do, to go to university or higher, more prestigious university and get a master's degree, the benefits, the psychological benefits from you is not that important because the difference psychologically between where you are now and that additional stuff is not very large because your reference point, as you said, was, is low. And so the biggest difference is between where you started in your mind here and what you have achieved now. If your parents are lawyers and they did an Ivy League school, you know, I mean, there's no way you would consider going to community college as something like an achievement. You'd be like, maybe dreading it terribly. And so for you, this step of, you know, the difference between going there or reaching a prestigious university is going to matter extremely. And so as you say, the drive is going to be there and even I would say the risk taking something which is interesting when you look at the statistics that for the same grades in high school, kids from higher social backgrounds were average grades. They're more willing to take the risk to continue in standard university things than kids from lower social backgrounds. Kids from lower social backgrounds says, you know, I'm not sure I would be successful at university. I want a practical training which is going to give me a job. Well, the kids from higher social backgrounds are more likely to, even if it's uncertain they would be successful to try hard and to go in university.

[Lionel Page]

And that's also correlated with more sort of social risky behavior. Drug taking, alcohol, fast cars, et cetera, et cetera.

[C]

Yeah, so that's, you're right, because we often associate drug taking, etc. You know, to low social background, like neighborhoods which are risky, etc. But what we observe is that there is a lot of this kind of behavior also in kids who come from high social background. And one possible. So, you know, one conjecture is that this kind of risk taking is also associated to the pressure that you have.

[Lionel Page]

You know, I've been fascinated with intergenerational competition theory. I learned about it about a year ago. This sort of comparison we have between where were our parents when they were our age and where are we now? And, you know, I think it, it really explains maybe this is total bro science. Right. But I'm allowed to do this because I don't. I'm not held to the same standards of an academic like you.

[C]

That's fine.

[Lionel Page]

My theory, at least in part, is that, um, even though objectively, when you run the numbers, the current generation is better off, adjusted for inflation, than any generation before. There is this sense, this milieu that we are not. I think the comparison on social media contributes a massive amount here because we assume that everybody is doing better than they are. And also we have expanded our social circle to now be so much wider. You're no longer selecting your social circle from who you grew up around, but you're expanding it to the entire world. And by design, the people that you see on social media pretend that their lives are better than they are. So not only are they a wider social network than you've ever seen before and selecting for people that are more popular, but also on top of all of that, everybody's lying. So the ability for you to do accurate assessment. And then when we think about intergenerational competition theory, I think it's. We almost use that model, where are other people now? As that's where mom and dad must have been. And that, I think, is where a lot of this uncertainty comes up around. Well, you know, you look at the reasons that people say about why they haven't had Children yet. I'm just. I'm just not ready. Not financially, not in the position, which is odd because the poorest countries have the most children. And if you scale it over time, we are by and large on average richer, more affluent, more comfortable than we've ever been. But the sense is that we're not. And given that our social circle has been expanded to the entire world and we have the perspective everyone is doing way better than they actually are, it's just, it's social anxiety all the way down.

[C]

No, look, there's several things in what you say, but I mean, I'll start with the social media. I totally agree with you that social media is a very strange, you know, environment. Like we were not selected to be in this kind of thing. But as you say, it's expand our social circle. You have, as you say, people lie on social media. Lie. I mean, the sense that, you know, we take selfies all the time. I'll take maybe 100 selfies and I'll pick the best angle. You know, the one where the light is good, I have a twinkle in the eye, maybe I use a filter. And eventually I put that as my social media profile. And so. And you do that for everything that my, my videos of my holidays will be brilliant. You know, I mean, when I have a boring holiday, I won't necessarily talk about it, but when I have something, a nice cocktail on a, on a beach in Bali, I'll post about it. And so we're exposed to these beautiful lies, these beautiful pictures of all these people. And as, as we were talking before, we can't help compare, right? And if this is our comparison points and it's move us, you know, it moves this comparison point much higher. And then we're thinking, well, I'm not doing that well in comparison. And we have to learn to discount to learn. Okay, wait a minute. There are filters on these pictures. Maybe these people are not that young as they look in pictures. You know, I see all the nice things they do in the holidays. I don't see all the troubles they went to go these holidays, et cetera, et cetera. That's difficult. And there's. There's even another thing which is very interesting on social media. We have, I guess you have heard of it. Like the friendship paradox. Do you know this thing?

[Lionel Page]

No.

[C]

Friendship paradox.

[Lionel Page]

Tell me more.

[C]

Okay, the friendship paradox is something which happened in networks. When you're in a network, your friends on average have more friends than you. Okay. So if you're on Twitter, the people you follow have more followers than you have. If you're on YouTube, the stuff you follow on average have more subscribers than you have. So that sounds strange. How is it possible? Shouldn't be an average. On average we have the same. No, because the people you select to follow or to be your friends, they are selected and you have not selected the people with the least friends. You have selected people who tend to have more friends. And the fact that you selected them is an indication that they are selected. And so when you look into your secular friends on social media, you'll find, wow, why don't I have so many followers and these guys are super popular. Well, I'm not as popular as we. The funny thing is that whatever network you'll be, you will not be as popular as the average popularity of the people in your network. So that's another thing which is not intuitive, but it will make your reference point higher. And in comparison you won't look as good.

[Lionel Page]

Does this mean that people in high achieving groups kind of have a bit of a double edged sword here because they've got satisfaction from recognition in like outside of the group, but they've also got social anxiety from within their group.

[C]

Yes. So you know, that's a paradox of the fact that we always want to go higher like we have when we are in a peer group or in a club, we tend often to look for the next club, you know, the most prestigious club. If you academics, for instance, they want to be in prestigious universities. Well, the cost of it is that, you know, whenever you move to university to another one which is more prestigious, your colleagues, they are, they tend to be more successful than before. Right? That's, that's because of it. And so you join clubs of people more prestigious. And what you have, exactly what you say, you have this kind of, let's say, you know, if you join Harvard as an academic, well, for people outside your Harvard member of staff is very prestigious. But for you within Harvard, the comparison now are your colleagues, world supersedes. That's very stressful. And so in one of my substack I described there was Thomas Schilling. You know, it's, it's a story told by Glenn Laurie, Glenn Lowry, when he joined Harvard and he got very stressed by the pressure of success, of being successful in publishing, et cetera, et cetera. And he goes to his colleague Thomas Schilling, a very famous game theorist. And Thomas Schilling says, what do you think? Everybody here is extremely stressed. They are like, they all think that they are underachieving and that you know, when you ask, what are you doing? They think, oh my God, I'm being judged for not being performing enough. And so, you know, you have this double edged sword, as you say that from outside, we think all these people are very successful, but because they're in clubs of very successful people, they feel the pressure of not, you know, being up to scratch with their peers.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah. I love the term insecure overachiever. I think it captures this energy very well.

[C]

Yes. And you have this term like the imposter syndrome. Right. And I think the imposter syndrome is exactly that. So you work very hard to be successful in professional life, to be maybe promoted as a manager in a very important function in academia. You want to be promoted professor in a precious university. And then people once are there, I think, oh, maybe I shouldn't be here. Maybe people didn't see that actually I'm not good enough to be here. I'm here by accident. And so people have anxieties like that.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah, you don't get. Or at least as of yet on substack, I haven't seen you get super tactical around this. You're not coming out like the typical sort of personal development bro, and saying, and Here are my 10 steps for you to be able to overcome your imposter syndrome or whatever. But when it comes to the sort of social circle comparison thing, given that you're spending a lot of time researching this and you have a, a pet interest in it, you must relate this to your own life and you must have tried to apply some strategy or some tactics to try and negate this social comparison impact on your happiness. So what do you do as an attempt to try and mitigate this effect?

[C]

Yeah, look, that's a good point. I'm not sure if I, I'm not sure if I have used it, I've used it, you know, in practice to kind of not being stressed by, you know, not joining horror circles. So when I was actually, I was in a, when I worked for some time in London and I had the opportunities to choose between academia and to work in finance and I thought, you know, obviously the wages are much higher, you can imagine, in London in finance. And I thought, well, from what I know, from Be all science, I know that actually the wage looks much higher, but if I go there, you know, next thing you know, I'll think that I'm not paid as much as Warren Buffett. And that's actually very true. You know, I was talking to a trader and the guy must have been on something like £150,000, so something like 200, $250,000 a year. So clearly in the top of the distribution. And the guy, you know what I was having lunch with me, he says, he told me, I hope I was rich. I was like, well, I mean, you're not billionaire, but like, and you're a young guy and you're already on this kind of wages, like, super good. But from his point of view, you know, he's thinking of his manager who is on 2 or 5 million a year. And then the next thing is the success story is Warren Buffett. So I'm aware of this kind of thing and that I guess I'm not looking back and thinking, oh, I wish I'd done that, etc. Because I know that, I mean, I think I may have been very happy there as well. But. But I'm thinking that you need to be aware that, you know, if you were to move in such a circle, then your reference point would move with you. And so that's a reason not to stress too much and to appreciate what you have now.

[Lionel Page]

Okay, Another source of pain, probably, I think I've been doing these live shows. I was in Australia recently doing these live shows, and there's buckets that at the Q and A portion at the end of the talk, people ask, and one of the most common is something along the lines of, why do I set ever higher goals for myself? Why do I seem unable to be able to be satisfied with what I've achieved? Why every time that I score a goal, do I immediately move the goalposts even further away from me? Why do I overestimate the importance of my next success for my happiness? So talk to me about sort of the role of goals and how it impacts our happiness here.

[C]

Look, I think that's, obviously, that's a key part of my research and I have a paper, so several of my posts on substacks were on this topic recently. You know, maybe I'll use a metaphor. I'll start far and we can go back in more on the topic. But I'll use a metaphor. Let's say you can think of evolution. Evolution is an impersonal process, right? So, but it's as if it was designing you. And you can, you can use a metaphor if it was kind of a designer trying to nudge you to be as successful as possible. So now what kind of situation we can think of where somebody tries for you to be as successful as possible? Well, one situation is when you have a parent and a child and A truth that is going to be clear for every parent is that it's not necessarily always best to motivate a child to be truthful with the child to be to say all the truth. And so for the child to know exactly what are going to be the rewards is not necessarily optimal from the parent point of view. And here's what I mean. Let's say that you got your son or daughter and you register your son or daughter in a competition. It could be athletic competition, could be a chess competition. And you have no idea really how good they are and you want to motivate them and say if you do well, you know, you'll have an ice cream or what you give a schedule of kind of rewards. If you do well, I would bring you to the cinema. If you do very well at school, I'll give you a video consult, etc. Then now you. The prayer is that you don't know how good they can be. Suppose that you find out that are excellently talented, they clearly go be well beyond your expectations. So you told them that if they were going to do well, they will have all these rewards. So what do you do now? Do you just keep them giving them all these rewards all the time? They don't need to work very hard because they are very talented. So you keep giving them rewards. If you do that, it's not going to nudge them to do better because they don't need to work hard, they're super talented. If on the contrary you find out that your child has difficulties, challenge is struggling to be very good, you say, sorry, you know, you're not very good, so no reward for you, never. So that's not going to help the child as well. So what you'll do is that you will adapt your skidoffs. If you find out that your child is excessively good at chess, you say okay, but maybe I'm going to give you a tutor and I'm going to. And if you win tournaments, you know you'll have more rewards. Whatever depends. In Australia what we do is we have a lot of. It's very athletic as a country, very sporting. So you bring your kids to the swimming pool and you see whether they are good and if they are good, you, you enter them in competition. You may have seen in, in the Olympic games the stride does very well in swimming because pretty everybody swims in this country. So you know what you do as a parent here is that you won't tell your kid before, oh wait, I'm telling you that if you're successful, you get this reward. But if you're very successful, actually, I'm going to move the carrot further ahead.

[Chris Williamson]

You want to.

[C]

You don't say that because if the kid knows that, if they do very well, then you're going to move the carrot well ahead. They're, they'll be like, what's the point? And nature does exactly the same thing with us. That is for us to work very hard. We think, oh, you know, if I need to achieve these things, it's very important. And all the information tells you if you, if you can achieve it, we have this kind of urge. The paper I've written on it, the title is called if you can, you must. So if you feel that you can, you really get excited by the idea that you want to do it right. If you can't, if it's way far ahead of, you know, your, the realm of what you can achieve, you don't want to try, you won't be interested. But if you think, you know what I think I could run a marathon, you will try. You will want to try. If you think it's prestigious enough, if you think, well, I think I can run a marathon, but in four hours, then you'll start thinking about how can I achieve that, what kind of steps? And that feels good to think that I think could achieve this. Then the problem is, let's say you start thinking, maybe I could run a marathon. And running a marathon will be something which I think is an achievement. You start running and you think, actually, I'm pretty good. So now running a marathon is not enough. You'll have to do it maybe under fires or maybe more, or maybe, maybe a better time. So the card will keep moving forward. And your hedonic system kind of lied to you initially, because your hedonic system tell you initially, oh, if you reach this goal, you'll be happy, you know, but as you realize that you are able to reach this goal, maybe you can reach better. So if you can reach better now the card has to move ahead. And now it's, this initial goal is not enough anymore, and you want this additional goal further ahead. And the primer. I totally understand people in your shows. Who says, why do I do that? Well, it's by design. We're designed to be like that, and we're designed to be like that. And we're designed not to anticipate because if you were to anticipate that, if you achieve the next goal, you'll get used to it and you think about the another goal afterwards. Well, you'd be like, well, what the points, you know, I, I work hard. I may as well just, you know, enjoy life as it is now.

[Lionel Page]

Oh, so that's why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness. Because if we didn't think, well, once I achieve X, I'll be fine. If we didn't have that thought, if we assumed accurately that each different destination is just base camp before the next destination gets unlocked and gets appeared to us, we, we would be much less motivated to go and do it.

[C]

It's exactly that. If you, you know, if you think that it's very important to have this next promotion, that this promotion will give you status and prestige and income, that you think that's, that's what you know, I want in life, then you work very hard for it. But actually in reality, once you have it, you know, six months later says, okay, what next, you know, next challenge, actually, I could do better, et cetera. If you anticipate that initially, if you anticipate that the cart is always going to move forward beyond you, beyond your reach, then that's not motivating anymore to reach the next step because you know that the same process will repeat.

[Lionel Page]

What's the focusing illusion?

[C]

But that's exactly that. So the focusing illusion is a term proposed by Daniel Kahneman and his co authors. And so that you focus in life, you say, you tend to focus on some things and say, this is really what I need. And people may have different view about what they need to be happy. Maybe some people will say, you know, what I need is a romantic partner, which is attractive and faithful and friendly, etc. And if I get that, I'll be happy. Some other people say, well, what I really want to be rich. Other people may say, you know, what I want is just a group of friends, good social network, and so you really care. You say, this is what I need. And usually you say that when you don't have it and you think you would be really happy, you focus on that. This is the key for you to achieve happiness in your life. And then when, if and when you get it, eventually you come to realize that was not so important for your happiness. So the key example given by Kahneman are people in the US who think that, oh, if I only had a job in California, you know, I would have fantastic weather, brilliant lifestyle. And so, you know, maybe if you live in, let's say, Minnesota, where winter are very cold, you imagine that you'd be very happy if you moved to California now What Kahneman did is when you ask people who moved from Minnesota or something like that to California and says, are you more happy now? And basically after six months, a year, people say, yeah, I kind of, I'm, you know, I'm happy. But, you know, they didn't get the kind of change in life satisfaction that they were thinking they would when they were not there.

[Lionel Page]

So how come we set goals to the highest level of what we think that we can achieve instead of finding happiness in lower aspirations? Surely that would allow us more direct access to happiness.

[C]

Oh yeah, you're totally right. Like you, the goal, you can think of it, we use the word reference point before you can think as a reference point. So you judge where you are, how well you are doing with this goal as a reference. So if you have a very low goal, everything looks good. If my goal in life is just to have a nice job, a house somewhere, not necessarily in a luxury suburb, et cetera, well, it's much easier to achieve that if I say my goal is to be a top manager, to have a very high income level, etc. So having a high goal makes that for a given level, if I have a logo, this looks great. If I have a high goal, the same thing is not going to look great. So a very simple path to happiness is to have low aspirations. And if you look in history, you know, I talk about stoicism or Buddhism or epicurism as well. So a lot of the kind of historical path to happiness recommendations like is very simple. It's like, stop desiring what you do not have. Just be happy what you have. And that's the secret of happiness. And there's something very true in it, is that if you're able to stop, you know, try to get outside of this race where the goal keep moving forward says, you know what, I'm healthy, have a good meal every day, you know, got electricity, warm water. My ancestor didn't have that at all, at all. So that's a fairly good life, right? I don't need to chase further success and further success. So if you're able to do that, you can extract yourself from this pressure, you'll feel better. But then what? What you have is that your head earning system is not designed for you to feel good. As we said before, your heading system is designed for you to be as successful as possible. As successful as possible. And so your hedonic system, your brain should kind of pick all the information available to identify what you can do. And if you learn that you can do something Better. Well, your hedonic system should just go a notch above and says, you have to do it right. Your head. You're not designed to be happy and enjoy life. You're designed to really, to try as hard as possible.

[Lionel Page]

You're not designed. You're not designed to be happy in life. You're designed to try as hard as possible. What an absolute.

[C]

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because if you think about our ancestors, some ancestors may be born with psychological traits where they enjoyed being on the beach and, you know, there was enough, if there is enough food, have enough food and fish, one fish, et cetera. And some others were maybe a bit more neurotic, wanted to always work harder and harder. Well, unfortunately for us, you know, the people who are the most neurotic and keep trying harder and harder are more likely to be ancestors now than the people who just enjoyed life.

[Lionel Page]

We are the progeny of the most anxious, insecure overachievers across time.

[C]

So I would say, you know, there's. There's a balance. But our hedonic system should be designed to keep finding the best thing you can achieve. So, as I said before, you know, it's not worth you being depressed every day because you're not Elon Musk. That's. There's no point into it, but you should identify what is the best thing can achieve, really best thing, and then aim for it. And so our hedonic system does that. You know, we. We get a lot of information for what we have done before, what people like us have done, and then we integrate all this information. We think, okay, you know, what somebody like me can do. I have some psychological traits, which makes me better at some things. Maybe if I'm very good at talking to people, I shoot them to do a. To be a manager or maybe to be a public speaker. If I'm very good at math, I may be thinking, you know, what I should do is working in engineering or in finance. So you'll try to find, given who I am and the traits I have, what is the best thing you can do. And you don't need to think, you know, a lot, care consciously about it. You pick it up, you'll pick up that, wait a minute, this person is like me, and this person is very successful. Why am I not doing this? And the character will keep moving forward because it's designed just to push you not too far, but as far as possible.

[Lionel Page]

I've been thinking a lot about the difference between feeling happy when you succeed and just feeling relieved. It seems that there is a Regular framing that success is the only acceptable outcome and anything short of that is a failure. So the achievement of success isn't. It turns the achievement of success not from a cause for joy into just the abatement of fear. You know what I mean? Oh, I avoided disappointment. Congratulations. But that's such a, you know, for the, again, for the sort of high achieving, high expectation, low confidence people out there that you. It's a lose, lose scenario. I didn't achieve the goal. How miserable I feel about myself. I did achieve the goal. Well, that's the only acceptable outcome.

[C]

Yeah, look, that's fascinating. It's another. You can explain it for. From how happiness works. Happiness is going to work in your brain, always setting expectations and giving you feedback about whether you're doing better than expectations or lower than expectations. Now, when you aim for a goal, usually the resolution towards this goal is going to take place over time. So if you're working to get a promotion in a company, you know, you have progressive information whether you're doing well enough to be promoted. Okay. So your impression about whether things are going well or not, you know, and as things get better, you feel more and more happy. Similarly, let's say you run a marathon. As you're running the marathon, you get information whether you're likely to finish or not. And so the thing is that you will consume the benefit of success all throughout as you get closer from the goal. So, you know, if you look at games like in the US you have American football, for instance, the guy starts being happy before they touch the touchdown. They start being happy as they know that there is nobody you know in front of them and they are going to score the touchdown. And so they start consuming in a way, the happiness of the success before the success happens. Exactly. And then when you reach it, when you reach really the success, the only thing which could happen is that you, you may be 99% chance of being successful, but you could still mess up. So you're running toward the touchdown and you fumble within one meter, that will be a catastrophe. So you have a relief because you have already realized that you are going to be successful. You're super happy, but there's a risk that you could not. And that's this final stuff that you are happy not to be failing.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah, I love this line from you about how the attainment of a goal seems when the moment of triumph is over, almost like a letdown because so few people sit back and enjoy it. And most people just create another goal that they want to strive for. But the, in the sort of. The implication of that is presumably they prefer the process of striving toward a goal as opposed to the state of actually having achieved it, which seems completely backward, right? Because what you're not saying, why are you, why are you pursuing that goal for the pursuit of the goal? No, you're not pursuing the goal for the pursuit of the goal. You're pursuing the goal because you want to achieve the goal. But every single bit of evidence about the way that we behave suggests that we prefer the striving as opposed to the achieving.

[C]

So I think, I think there's two things. First, you, you will enjoy the striving because the striving is really going toward the goal, is like reduce, is increasing the chance that you're going to be successful. But obviously at the very end, the fact that you indeed are successful, there is still an important step. So if you look for sports matches and let's say your team is ahead in the game, right? You start being happy that you realize you are very likely to win before the end of the match. But nonetheless, when the whistle blows and you win the match, you are happy because that's the final outcome. The success is realized. Now what you have is that relative to expectations, relative to maybe the foot about how you would feel before if you were to be successful, then you have this focusing illusion. So you. I have this quote in one of my substack about Andre Agassi. It's in his book Open and Andre Agassi. You know, I'm not sure if people remember because it's a few decades ago, but there was a lot of pressure. He was a very talented platinum player, but there was a lot of pressure that he was a bit rowdy, you know, and people say maybe he's not this kind of guy who can actually win big titles. And then he won Wimbledon. And then he said, well, I felt let down because I was led to believe that winning a Grand Slam would be life changing. I wouldn't be the same person. I would acquire maybe another level of existence, big word. But you would grow into something else, having reached this very high level of achievement. And he said, well, I felt exactly the same person. And compare that to how depressed and sad I was when I was losing in the final of the Grand Slam. I was not that happy having won. And so that's the thing, because you focus, you would focus on thinking that the Grand Slam is what he needs to be happy. But once he gets a Grand Slam, surely he's very happy on the day, right? That's, that's one thing. On the day he's happy, he may cry, whatever, but a few days later, his hedonic system is going to kick in and says, wait a minute. If you want one, you can do more. You know, you can be number one. So the next is in three months. Yeah.

[Lionel Page]

Gold medalist syndrome, I think it's called.

[C]

Oh, yes, you have the gold medalist, you have the. I'm not sure if you are. You refrained because there's a, you know, you have this study about the gold, silver and bronze medal.

[Lionel Page]

Oh, no, I think gold medalists. So, yes, that being bronze is happier than being silver because bronze is two steps away from winning. But silver was very close. I think at least my. Again, bro. Signs of the gold medalist syndrome was that a lot of the time when people had finally achieved their championship that they want at the Olympics and they're left like Andre Agassi, feeling significantly less fulfilled than they'd hoped or anticipated, that they then tell themselves, well, ah, right. It's because I have to do it twice. It's because I have to prove that it wasn't fluke. That's, that's what the problem is.

[C]

That's right. Yeah. So I didn't know the term. It's interesting, right? I didn't know this term. But yes, that's exactly that. And I think, you know, but that's what we're, in a way doomed to experience. Because if you win one, well, that's a good, you know, there's good correlation. People win one slammed, often they win more than one. And so eventually you should be, you know, if people were like, I win one slam and I'm happy now, I'm going to enjoy cocktails at the hotel. Well, that's not, you know, conducive to further success.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah, it's, it's so funny. The, the sort of curse of continuing to succeed. If, if you are a competent person and you break new ground, each new achievement doesn't feel like a cause for celebration. It simply feels like the next minimum acceptable outcome that you can have the next time you do the thing.

[C]

Exactly, exactly. But the funny thing is that you have the fact that all people behind or below these very highly successful people think that the people who are very successful are very happy. So I can imagine that, let's say if you're on social media and if you start, you think, oh, if only I had 10 followers or not 10,000 followers. That's, that's the thing. I'll be very happy. People with 10,000 followers are think, wait a minute, you know, why don't I have 50,000 people with 50,000 says, why don't I have like, you know, 200? And we don't know that. So we think that these people are happy, but these people are just looking two steps ahead.

[Lionel Page]

Have you ever looked at the research around when you ask people what their ideal level of annual income would be?

[C]

So yes, sir, yeah, it looks, I remember, I don't remember the, the numbers, but I saw a study and maybe. Do you remember?

[Lionel Page]

So I remember what the outcome was, which is basically, it's almost always about three times what you earn right now. So people will say, well, I would be, you know, I'm at, I earn £50,000 a year. 150 would, you know, that would really. But the people at 150 say, yeah, I mean, 450 would really be. And then it just keeps on going and keeps on going and it's very reliable. It's all the way up. You know, the millionaires jealous of billionaires. The billionaires jealous of multi billionaires.

[C]

Oh yeah. So I can tell you a few things about these council. It's first, on a level, on a very basic level, you ask people, let's say when they're 20, what would be a good life? You know, what, what would be something where when you're 40, you have achieved and you're happy. And they say, I don't know, I've got a house in the suburb, car, I've got a big TV, you know. And then you ask them, they're 40, okay, you've got a car, you've got the house, you've got a big tv. Is it. Do you think you have a good life? Says, well, you know, not really because, you know, I don't have this thing, I don't have that, etc. So people move their goal poses. The kind of stuff that they said they would be happy with is not enough for them to be satisfied. So that's a first thing, interesting thing. And then in terms of people always looking ahead, there was, I remember I listened one to an interview of a psychologist with specialists of the psychology of millionaires. And he said, you know, when I'm saying that a psychologist of maybe not millionaires, but like super rich, maybe multi millionaires or billionaires, when I say that I'm a psychologist for these guys, people says, wait, wait a minute, they don't have any problem. And the problem is, is that he says, no, on the contrary, they're often, they are very miserable because you know, if you earn 50 or $100,000, your next comparison point is maybe the person who gets $150,000. But if you're a millionaire, the next comparison point is a guy who's like twice the size of your house. He's multimillion yachts with all these VIPs coming in. And so they're super frustrated that they are not competing well enough with the next guys ahead.

[Lionel Page]

Will Smith, in the memoir that Mark Manson wrote, said, when I was poor and miserable, I had hope. When I was rich and miserable, I was despondent.

[C]

That's a good one. That's a good one. I like it.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah, I just, you know, the, it very much is the case that happiness is not achieving a thing. It's not being rich, it's being a little bit richer than yesterday. Consistently, over and over again, you're right.

[C]

Yeah. So, but here again, here's a trick that is that we are, we experience positive feelings from doing better than expected. So when you go up, usually, you know, there's a part of uncertainty which uncertainty which is resolved. Usually, you know, if you're promoted, there was not 100% chance initially. So as you win and you are successful, there's an element of surprise, of positive surprise, and so you enjoy that. But if you were on a schedule where the growth of your income, for instance, or the promotion is totally scheduled, it's. There's no uncertainty. Maybe because, like, you know, your, your income is indexed on inflation and it's going to increase whatever, or maybe not on, on seniority. So as you get older and older, your income automatically increase. Then if you expect these increases, even if you're doing better, you will not feel better because all these increments are going to be factored in. You expect them. And if you expect them, you're not going to be more satisfied. That's a trick.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah. The relationship between happiness and expectation of surprise is. It feels so ruthless because by design, you can't design surprise. Like, if you knew that it was going to happen, it wouldn't be a fucking surprise.

[C]

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you may wonder why, why, why we design like that? Why can't we have something like happiness, which is something like a mountain, and you start from the bottom and as you more and more successful in life, you get more and more happiness. Why are we not designing that? And the quick answer is that designing a system which, instead of measuring big difference like that, only focus on measuring variations related to expectations, it's a more efficient system to treat information and to use whatever cognitive capacity you have in your brain to produce a signal which is going to help you. So it's a bit abstract, but I can say that something which we have learned in the last 30 years is there have been a very interesting convergence between AI research and reinforcement learning and cognitive neuroscience. And what some cognitive neuroscience found out is that the brain looks like when it. The brain rewards you as a difference, you know, relative to your expectations, it pretty much looks like it's implementing optimal algorithms used in machine learning. So you'd have people working in artificial intelligence trying to program how a program is going to learn the right thing to do. And the best, one simple thing for this program to learn is to say, well, form expectations about what different actions are going to lead to and then try out. And when you try the action, you just compare. Is this action? Is the outcome better than expected or worse than expected? And then you adjust your expectation. And if you try a lot, eventually you are going to learn to do the right thing. It's pretty much exactly what we do. And it's an efficient way of processing information. It would be much more difficult for your brain to have a very complete map about happiness from zero to the top. It's better to have a kind of a local stuff guiding you locally. Incremental expectations. Exactly. Incremental. Yeah.

[Lionel Page]

Yeah. How interesting. So talk to me. Let's expand this out a little bit more into habituation and sort of the adaptive explanation for habituation more broadly. Like why, why didn't evolution just design us with the ability to feel greater and greater happiness whenever we do better?

[C]

Well, it's exactly what I was saying before is that it's more efficient. I think a very good comparison is our visual system does exactly the same thing. So, you know, your visual system doesn't kind of recall the objective luminosity in a room. The objective luminous. Actually, it's not measuring it. From the time where the light hits your retina, what's recorded is actually a divergence relative to expectations. And what you see is that if you were to turn off the light somewhere, so now you see things, you turn off the light, everything is bleak, so you can't see anymore. But if you wait a bit, your eye is going to adapt. You're going to start seeing shades, et cetera. And so you're going to be able to perceive difference in contrast that you were not perceiving before. What has happened is that your eye does exactly the same thing, that you have a kind of an expectation and you observe, you Differences within this range. If suddenly I change the range of luminosity, your eye doesn't see anything anymore. And so you have to adapt to eventually perceive again the differences. And having this. Why is it useful? Because if you have a kind of range where you can perceive differences, you want to maximally use this range in the area you are. If I was to look at this range and say I have to stretch it to observe any kind of differences, then the problem is that a lot of things would look the same because you have a limited ability to perceive differences. So I want to use this ability to perceive differences the most in the area where there are variations that I need to observe. So my eyes are optimally adapting my ability to perceive difference in contrast in the range of contrast that I'm facing now. And if you turn the light off or put a bright light, I'm going to adapt to this new range. And your happiness is the same thing. So your perception of subjective values, they adapt to the range you're facing. So you know, if you are not very rich selling sandwiches on a, on a, on a cart, you know, you need to be careful about not losing $10. So you'll be mindful about making, not making mistakes such that you know, when you count the money you're handing in and getting back, you know that you're not losing money because this money is important. But let's say that you scratch a lotto card and you become a millionaire. Well, $10 doesn't matter anymore. So why would you care? Why would you allocate some of your perception of value to difference in $10 when this doesn't matter anymore?

[Lionel Page]

Is there an implication then if sort of incrementalism, this step by step nature of us slowly getting toward our goals, is there an implication that sudden huge leaps in improvement of life circumstances are actually very bad for us? In that if you win the lottery, how are you going to ever have a better day than the day that you won the lottery? Like it came out of nowhere, it sets this new unreasonable standard for you as opposed to the person who's maybe tormented by their daily grind to move toward their goals. But presumably if you're already on that sort of path and momentum, you were only half a step behind yesterday and you can be half a step ahead tomorrow. The difference between that and somebody that just has a windfall ant that dies with $50 million and gives it to them or something, where do you go from there? You don't even have any systems to be able to locate yourself.

[C]

So I Think you're right, that if you are very successful very quickly, one challenge you face is to reset. You know, because we're designed for that, we're designed to have goals and to move forward, etc. So one is, one challenge you face is to reset your goals in life. If you're not able to do that, if you're not challenged anymore, first you may become bored if you don't think that you have anything to achieve. But also you may make mistakes. So I think I've heard that people win the lottery and were not specifically rich before. Often they get counseling and you can imagine so, because if you used to have a lot of money, you want to have a professional investment strategy, right? To gain even more money. But if you move from not much to a lot of money, maybe you think, why I'm going to buy a luxury car, luxury boat, I'm going to. And you're going to spend things which maybe they value deteriorates, maybe organize luxury parties, etc. It doesn't last. And you may remember, I think that was a very famous footballer where I think it was best, I think George Best, who said most of my money I use it on women and drugs and the rest I squandered it. So, you know, if you have a lot of money very quickly, you may not do make the best use of it. So I think the challenge when you are very successful is to find, to get your step back on the ground says, where do I want to go from there?

[Lionel Page]

Do we habituate less to certain things? Are there any categories of accumulation that we have in our life that we seem to be a little bit more resilient to this adaptation?

[C]

So look, it's a very good question. So arbitration, once you reach a certain level of a comfortable life, which should be lower middle class in the US Anything better, what you observe is that people think they will give it, they will be much more happy or much happier if they get more. And actually you don't. So happiness doesn't increase much. It does increase within the country. And one likely reason is because within the country you're able to compare yourself to others. So what we observe is that it doesn't increase between countries. So you take Americans now overall, for instance, and you look at the number of people who say they are happy or moderately happy. It's the same number as 1949. Now think about all the things that happened since 1949. People have fridges, they have color TV, et cetera. They have Internet things that whenever it happens, people say it's amazing, it's fantastic. But when you ask now, they don't feel happier. And that's something you see in most countries that when you look at countries apart from the very poor countries which, you know, they get sanitation, they get water, etc. If you're more from a lower middle income country to a rich country, it's very flat. Happiness is very flat. So that is true nonetheless, at the bottom end, there are things which can, you know, improve life satisfaction. So if you move from being homeless to having a house that improves in the long term your life satisfaction, that.

[Lionel Page]

Kind of locks it. Locks it in in a more a permanent way.

[C]

Yeah. So one thing which is possible is that, you know, your hedonic signals. If you think about the modern life that we are living and when we have food on the table, when we have like, you know, sanitations, water, that's not, that's a good, that's a good life. I mean, ancestors didn't have that. So we are in the range of the good life, which in a way the basic signal that we can get, we can still learn that we can do better, but we're already doing very well relative to the kind of things that our ancestors were doing. But if you are in a life where your life is threatened because you don't have a home, your health is threatened because you don't have access to good food or protection, et cetera, that may still give you signals that's not good from an evolution point of view. So I think there's something where that's so interesting.

[Lionel Page]

So much of what we're doing with habituation in lower to like developed nations is chasing down better standards of living, but not removing ourselves from things that could be model threats to us. And maybe our brain is able to detect, okay, there is, you don't always have food on the table, you don't always have a safe place to sleep, you don't always have reliable water or whatever. And if you, if you get out from that, you lock in a particular, so the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I've always thought this about the, you know, issues that many of us face. Am I actualizing my logos forward? Is this really me reaching my eudaimonia and making the most of my brief time? It's like, hey dude, an existential crisis is a pretty fucking luxurious position to be in for all of human history. Until like 200 years ago, people were terrified of whether they'd make it to the next day. They thought that they were Going to get smited from above by a lightning bolt because they'd masturbated last night or whatever it might be. You know, like they're just on this permanent, fearful world. And it's odd that, yeah, if you're asking yourself these deep questions about meaning, about fulfillment, about flourishing, about eudaimonia, about reaching your goals, go. It suggests to me that much of the stuff that really matters and you would absolutely miss if it wasn't there has been sorted and that's why you're up here. It is no comfort. I'm aware it's no comfort because we habituate, but I do think it's an important thing.

[C]

No, no, exactly. I think. I think you're right and I have, nonetheless, so. So these. All these vision is a bit depressing. Because it can be depressing. I don't know. You know, Kahneman described himself, Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist, described himself as a cheerful optimist. A pessimist. A cheerful pessimist.

[Lionel Page]

Cheerful pessimist, yeah.

[C]

I like that. Because, you know, you don't tell yourself stories about how the world is, you know, you take it as it is. So it's a bit pessimistic, but actually you can still be cheerful in your life. So if, you know, I'm, as a person, tend to be cheerful and Daniel Kahneman was as well. So, anyway, the thing I wanted to say about the arbitration is that there's a positive aspect to it because I say it can be a bit depressing, but there's a positive aspect to it, is that the rest point of happiness, where we come back to, is not neutral and there's good reasons for it, which we can come to it if you want. But, you know, if you take a scale from 1 to 10 and you ask people how happy you are, people don't say, I'm kind of neutral. On average, they won't say five. They would say seven. So people on average tend to be fairly cheerful, fairly fine with it. And you know, it's true. You go to people who don't have a high income and they say, well, yes, life is relatively fine. You know, I could do better, but they will give you an answer around seven and you go higher levels, people will tell you. And so. So we arbitrate, but we don't arbitrate to misery. We arbitrate to a fairly fine level of happiness. So that's the positive news.

[Lionel Page]

I'd seen somewhere that status is a little less subject to habituation than some of the other elements in our life. You get any idea if that's true?

[C]

Look, I think it's, I think it's likely to be true for. And maybe this explains why your happiness still increases when you get richer within your country, because your status increase within your country. So when you, the whole gets richer, you know, you move with the cohort of your country. So you get the fridge, but everybody gets a fridge. So, so you have it at the fridge. But when you get the fridge and people don't have the fridge, you know, you're happy that you have the fridge and relative to others who don't have it. So I think status makes sense because status is, we are very social species and status, you know, how well you are regarded by others in your community is a key indication of success. So if you go to ancestors in particular for males, like status would have much, much more conducive to find mates and to have hairs, et cetera. So even if it's something not like food or sex or whatever status, it's likely that it is one thing when we, we feel what will primary wars that you, you feel good from experiencing status. And that's something that you know, collective neuroscientists also, maybe not necessarily all of them, but it's something which is accepted by some cognitive neuroscientists that status as such experiences an increase in status going to feel good and that is going to be status is super flexible like. And you can always keep increasing status all across your life. So when we were talking about food, et cetera, in a way, once you can eat. Well from an evolution point of view there is no a big difference between the food you get in a five star Michelin restaurant and the food you can buy from getting supermarket. And that may seem shocking to a lot of people, but the fact is that the food in the supermarket is super safe relative to where to come. Our ancestors were freaking out, et cetera. You don't have to fight for the food. There is no bacteria or parasites in your food, you know, it's warm, et cetera. So the food in the five star Michelin restaurant, the biggest difference is not the number of calories, whether it's safe, etc. You know, in terms of fitness effect, it's not going to be very different. The difference is the status is that it gives you status or to be able to you or because you have status, you can do that. It's a signal status to be able to eat in such a restaurant, etc. And so while you can't, you know, increase all this stuff about the comfort of your life. You have a roof over your head, you have food, you have water, et cetera. Status can keep increasing. You can keep relative to other being doing better and better. The sad thing about it though is that status is a zero sum game, that if you rise in status, there.

[Lionel Page]

Can only be one.

[C]

Exactly. So as you rise in status, others who are competing with you are relatively to you going down in status. And so it's. Well, I'm just going to say it's not something that you can, you know, you have utilitarianism. It's this philosophy that you want to maximize the happiness in the country. Unfortunately, if status is one of the key thing where you can increase happiness of individuals, well, you can't increase the happiness of the country because status is those we have and those who don't have it is a zero sum gap. So you can't increase the status of everybody.

[Lionel Page]

Okay? Another huge tension that a lot of people seem to have to deal with is this relationship between happiness and a meaningful life. Is it a tension? Is this a fake thing? What is there to know when it comes to useful definitions and differences between happiness and meaning?

[C]

Look, I find it fascinating and once again, I think it's fascinating because we have these big questions. What is the meaning of life? What I meant, what am I meant to do? I mean, some people don't care, but you know, some people care and some people think, what should I do? What would give sense to my life, etc. Some people make big life decisions, you know, they go to foreign countries and work and etc. To do in poor countries to dedicate their lives to some causes, etc. So why do we have these feelings and why, why don't we understand why are these kind of mysterious? And here again we are in the thing where evolution gives us the feelings that guides or decisions for us to navigate the world. But evolution didn't need to tell us why we have them. And so part of the mystery is that, because now we try to think about why we have this, but we have not been given the tools because these tools, understanding why we have these feelings is not in itself helpful. And actually I was saying before that you have a convergence between cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. And it's exactly the same thing. In artificial intelligence, if you design a computer program to do a task, you don't need the computer program to know why it's doing the task. So if you design a computer program to win at chess or to win at go, you know, the game of go, you don't need to tell the program, you know, everything which is happening now is for you to win. You just give this program the system of values, it expands these values to choose the next decision and it revises values depending on whether the outcome is above or below the expectations. And the program can be completely myopic. It ends up winning a chess. It has learned to win a chess, but it doesn't have a conscience saying, oh, my goal in life is to win a chess. But now imagine this program become self aware and start thinking, what am I doing? What is my goal in life? Well, you know, you would have to find this stuff by itself because the programmer didn't need to put in the program the answer. Oh, everything which is happening is because you have been designed to win a chess. And this is the same problem we have. We have been designed by evolution to be successful and we experience all these feelings for us to be successful, but we have not been given the awareness about why we experience these feelings. And so we are grasping these big questions because we don't have the tools to naturally think about why we're doing that. So the thing about the meaning of life, we have these big questions and I think there is a fairly simple answer is that the hedonic feelings we have, they have to answer several types of questions. One question is right now, you know, is my meal now good or is it not good? Should I stop it? You know, is it, it's too breezy, it makes me sick, etc. You know, is this person I'm talking to a friendly person I want to continue the interaction with or is it a boring person I'm wasting my time or somebody, somebody who doesn't like me and I shouldn't say anything private because this person is going to gossip about it, whatever. So you are asking all these questions and your hedonic feelings right now. Whether you feel that you are happy because the food you're eating is good, or you feel sympathy with somebody, all these feelings are helping you to guide you in the right now moment. Now this is good, but a lot of success is going to be determined by larger span of time. You know, are you in, in the right setting, in the stuff you're doing in your life overall, is it good? So if I ask you how satisfied are you with your life, you are going to think about what you are doing with your life in a bigger window, bigger time window. And you are not going just to think about, oh, is my meal good? Is his friend good? You are thinking of the Biggest scheme, you know, am I going somewhere in life which is in line with what would be successful, which is like a building, Maybe you are standing in the community, finding a romantic partner, maybe raising your kids and seeing your kids grow, etc. So if you can see that this kind of stuff happening, you are more likely to experience this kind of life satisfaction. And what you can have, you can have a disconnect between pleasure and achieving these goals because you can have a lot of pleasure in the short term, but they don't lead you to achieving these goals. Often achieving these long term goals need for you to do some things which are costly now. So, you know, if you spend your time playing video games from 6pm to 5am it may be very nice. But if I ask you six months later, are you happy with your life? You may say, you know what, I'm not sure I'm going anywhere. Right? I enjoy what I do every day, that's why I'm doing it. But I don't think I'm going anywhere. Something is missing. It's missing is that you're not doing what's right for you to feel that you are progressing toward a successful life. And so when you think about the meaning of life, I think what's kicking in, in your head is this kind of intuition about am I doing the, Am I in the right setting, am I in the right progress, this right dynamic toward being successful in life. Something which is meaningful is doing things where people are happy, what I'm doing. So my standing in the community is increasing. I'm perceived as somebody nice and contributing to my community. I have friends, I have my family, my partner loves me, etc. This gives meaning because we think I'm doing things right, I'm moving forward in the right direction. And so this gives us kind of feelings.

[Lionel Page]

It seems like time is a really important contributor here that sort of a good life versus a pleasurable life is a conflict across time, short term versus long term. And you've got this great, this gorgeous quote where you say much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches where short term hedonic signals conflict with long term ones. And it's just this tension, it's this tension between the two. I want to eat the cookie or smoke the cigarette or drink the beer today, but I don't want to deal with the fatness or the hangover tomorrow. And you know, you scale this up over time. The thing that's super interesting, uh, I have, I've had this intuition for ages that certain People are predisposed to take more pleasure from meaning and other people are more predisposed to take more pleasure from enjoyment. I think people find their way, they do in life, the thing that gives them the best hedonic signals. So for me, I actually suck quite a bit at pleasure, are really fucking good at meaning. Like I will, you know, bury myself for three months in the hopes that something will come out of that on the other side. Suck at pleasure, good at meaning. I have a lot of friends who are the opposite. And this was that famous. You may know this story better than me, but this famous conversation, debate, friendly debate between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman where Gilbert was saying that a good life could be one where you spend every hour for the remainder of your days laid on a lilo floaty in a pool with a cocktail. You said in retrospect, and you look back, would that have. Would you have considered a life well lived? Well, it doesn't matter because day to day your experience was just pleasure. I'm in a pool, this is nice. The cocktail tastes good. Kahneman said that. No, what you want is a true happiness or true meaning in life comes from a life which in retrospect you're glad that you lived, right? And I think that, at least to me, this is my again, another pet bro science theory which feel free to tear apart that. I think that the more ruminative of a thinker that you are, the more you need to optimize to be Kahneman, not to be Gilbert. Whereas I have friends who are able to just fucking be. They don't care about where they're going with this thing. They're not asking about whether it's this deeper contribution in the same way. And maybe they're going to have midlife crisis at 55 and they're going to come back to me and go, dude, should have buried myself for three months. You were. Or whatever. But not that I told them to change their ways or whatever. But I just get this, like to tie all of that together, this tension over time, short term hedonic signals conflicting with long term ones. But I think that our predisposition, the frame that we enter the world with and the way that we're rewarded individually based on genetics and experience is I think it disposes us to focus on one more than the other. And I think that this is why one size fits all solutions to this. Most people will lie somewhere in the middle, but there's some people that are.

[Chris Williamson]

Out on the tails.

[Lionel Page]

I have no idea what percentile I am I could be 99. I don't think I am. But I'm definitely toward the long term signals. Like they are more salient to me, they're more powerful to me compared with the short term ones. That make sense.

[C]

That makes totally sense. I like how you frame it as, you know, being focused on meaning of being focused on pleasure. And we have a ways to make these choices like pleasure right now versus later. And our ancestors had to do it as well. For instance, a lot of cooperation, like basic cooperation decision is being nice to other people. Sometimes you can take advantage of people now there's a benefit now, but what you lose is that you lose that goodwill tomorrow. And they won't help you when you need their help. So even our ancestors in very different settings had to these trade offs. But something which characterize our modern world is that these trade offs have become way outside of the kind of range of we were facing before because time horizon has increased massively. First our life expectancy has increased. You know, if you Compare to even 200 years ago, the life expectancy had doubled, that's one thing. But also the time horizon is increased because now we have a lot of institutions which give us the time to invest in the future. Now we have banks. So sometimes banks go bankrupt, but very often, most often they don't. So you have this crazy thing which you can put money in the bank at 20 and get money back at 60. When I say bank, it's all the financial system. Now you think about this. Our ancestors were not designed, you know, we're not facing these kind of decisions. So when you are 20, 60 is like way out. So thinking about making these decisions, we, we don't have the intuitions, we don't have the hedonic feelings to make these decisions. And when you think about now, you know, think about, I don't remember when, what was the age of Alexander when he conquered his big empire. But he was super young. I think he was less than 25 or something like this. And think about people who are 25 now. They're, they are like often considered still like kids, right? We have these things where we become in a way ready to enter the world much later. And it takes a lot of time to achieve leadership positions and high position, etc, so you need a lot of investment. You need to work hard at school when you're 15, you need to work hard in early position when you're 25, et cetera, to invest, to be successful. If you want to be successful. I say you need is if you want to be successful. And the thing is, this requires a lot of postponing of enjoyment, maybe less video games, less eating nice stuff and less holidays and more. And so I don't think we have necessarily. This is a big challenge we face. And a lot of unhappiness that we observe is, I think comes from this tension, is that the world offer us, offers us a lot of ways of being happy. Now, you know, you have, at the click of a button, you have, in fact, for young boys, like a lot of video girls, who takes a lot of their time, etc. And it's designed by, you know, designed by psychologists to be exactly tapping into the stuff, which is pretense status, which they like and they enjoy, et cetera. So you have all that. But then you ask people later, are you happy with your life? Well, the problem is that all these very nice things that you do in the short term and that you have been seduced to do in the short term, they have not led you to maybe go the steps where for you to progress in life. And so you have this mismatch between what you said, you know, this feeling for meaning and this feeling for pleasure. And in a way, the problem of the modern world is that it has designed so much appealing things which are pleasurable in the present and we want to buy them, but it has increased the time horizon that we face and increasing the importance of waiting further.

[Lionel Page]

That's so interesting. I love that. So what about the classic question, the meaning of life? What do you think that misses, given your evolutionary lens, given your insights into sort of neuroscience? Because it seems like what people are looking for is something outside of life, right? Why is life here? Give me something that transcends the thing that I'm asking the question about, right?

[C]

So I think you're right that a lot of times when we think what's the meaning of life? People wants to see that there's something objective out there which gives sense to your life beyond your subjective experience. So for instance, if I'm, you know, working in orphanage in a poor country, helping kids, you know, learn things, I feel I'm. I'm doing something good and that gives sense next to my life. Now, if you believe into meth some metaphysical reality, like for instance, religion, if you, if you're religious and you believe there is a God or civilization, spiritual entities out there, who gives you a mission to do in life, then I guess that can be the meaning of your life is to follow these goals that given by your religion. Personally, I don't. You Know, I don't think that my point of view is purely naturalistic. So I'm just going to look at naturalistic explanation. If you don't have any metaphysical explanation, the fact is these feelings that we want something objective to give sense, to give a meaning to our life is just a feeling because the only thing that we have is our subjective experience. And so I think that there is nothing out there. There's a Dennett, the evolutionary psychologist called skyhook to have an explanation, a hook which come from the sky and hold your theory. So if you don't have a skyhook like a religious explanation and the only explanation you can start with is that we have these feelings. They come from a brain. They have been designed to help us make good decisions. And the feelings of meaning have to come from the view that you are going somewhere in your life and it has to be connected with the kind of thing which help ancestor being successful. And it doesn't mean. So some of it often is linked with being very pro social. So I think people often experience meaning where you know, they are doing, they are doing good toward other people. And I think it makes sense because investing in the future, as I said before, often being cooperative is investing in the future. So it doesn't pay right now to do a lot of good things to other people, but you build goodwill and a good reputation and that helps you being successful in the future. And I think that we would have the edonic system helping us to take that into consideration. And you know, because it's far in the future in a way these feelings that we're doing something good, it is bringing the, the, the benefit from the future in the present. And so we feel, you know, we can, we can. I'm not saying, I'm not saying that we are consciously calculating think oh you know what, I'm going to help my neighbor today. I don't really care about my neighbor but by doing that when I will need my neighbor helps, you know, can. No, we don't do that. We, we help our neighbor and we feel good about it and we, and, and but what it does is that it also gives us goodwill so when we need it, we can get it. And so I think that lots of this feeling of goodwill, of sort of meaning that we experience when we are doing good things is because it would have helped our ancestors to actually be good cooperators and to care about being nice with other people, contributing to the community, rising standing as being perceived as a, as an altruist and positive person, a trustworthy person. So I think that's why we experience this kind of meanings. But if you don't have a sky hook, it all has to come from these feelings which are designed to help us being successful.

[Lionel Page]

I suppose, yeah, you're right. If. If all that happiness and meaning are signals produced by the brain to indicate if we're on a path that's aligned towards success, but the path gets calibrated by an ancestral past, there's huge opportunity for mismatch now in the modern world.

[C]

Yeah, exactly. No, no, and I think that's, you know, you see, for instance, a big topic now is the challenge faced by young boys in the modern world. Young boys, for evolutionary reasons, are less maturing later than girls. And so they are not necessarily ready for the kind of demanding pushback of pleasure that school is requiring. School is requiring to be systematic, to be not jumping around, listening to the teacher, doing your homework, et cetera, for years and years and years. And the rewards are very far in the future. And what happens that we see now with decreasing proportion of young men going to university, being successful, et cetera, because the world offered them all these quick reward, accessible online and has pushed back the schedule to become successful. As I say, Alexander must have been riding a horse with his father and fighting before he was 20. That doesn't happen anymore. Before you were 20, you were still a kid in modern world. So this is a clear mismatch. And the perspective I'm proposing is not a normative perspective. I'm not saying you should do that because there is no normative principles, philosophical principles. I'm just saying this is the way we work. But what it can say is that because there is a mismatch, it can give a warning that maybe if you don't think enough about the future, be careful because the modern society is kind of can entrap you with all these nice pleasures it's offering you now in particular when you're young. And it's not going necessarily to help you do the right step for you to be happy when you're 35.

[Lionel Page]

Lionel Page, ladies and gentlemen. Lionel. Let's bring this one home. Dude, you are awesome. I love your writing. I'm so glad that you're able to speak as well as you write. You are now officially on the rotation of guests. I'm going to hassle every. Every couple of months to bring on. I love it where people want to check out more of the stuff that you write. Where should they go?

[C]

Well, I've got a book which is here optimally irrational. Nicely placed. So it's about, you know, if you interested in psychology and behavior, I highly recommend that you check it out. And otherwise, as you said, I have my substack where I kind of continue same name, ultimately irrational. And I continue talking about psychology with an evolutionary perspective and game theory perspective, economic perspective. And yeah, the last posts were about happiness and the incoming ones are going to be about coalitional psychological theory, which I think is super interesting as well.

[Lionel Page]

Until next time, I appreciate you.

[C]

Thank you, Chris. See you.

[Lionel Page]

Get away.