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- [00:00]
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- [00:04]
TNT Sports Promoter
Tennis season is heating up and TNT has you covered for every point of Roland Garros. Tune in as the second major of the year serves up all the high flying, heart pumping action from those iconic clay courts in the middle of Paris. Keep up with the biggest stars of the tennis world, including Janik Sinner, Novak Djokovic, reigning champion Coco Gauff and so much more as they battle for the ultimate glory. Watch coverage of Roland Garros now through June 7th on TNT and streamed on HBO Max Times.
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Lulu Garcia-Navarro
From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Are you happy? It's a deceptively simple question, right? But for me at least, it's a really difficult one to answer. Another tough question, why is it so hard to be happy for so many people? Despite a culture of wellness influencers with their happiness hacks and mindset tricks, all of the indicators show that we Americans are less happy than ever. What is going on and what can we do about it? I put those questions to Dr. Laurie Santos. Santos is a cognitive scientist whose class on happiness quickly became the most popular in Yale's history. And through her podcast, the Happiness Lab, and her free online course called the Science of well Being, Santos reach has extended well beyond the classroom. I wanted to understand what the science says happiness really is, how our understanding of what it takes to be happy has changed over time and why. With the pandemic in our rearview mirror, it's still been so hard for me and many others to do the things that will actually make us happier. And what you told me was surprising. Here's my conversation with Dr. Lori Santos. Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad you could join me.
- [02:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
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Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I am going to start in a bit of a strange place because like so many people in the world, I was really obsessed with the story of Punch the monkey. That little monkey in Japan whose mother sort of rejected him and he had no one to socialize with so he adopted that Ikea monkey toy.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yes.
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Lulu Garcia-Navarro
And I have a theory about Punch that connects to happiness. And I wanted to put it to you because apart from being a happiness expert, you also study animal cognition and you started your work with monkeys.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Literally everyone that I know sent me information about Punch. I was like getting in real time what was happening with Punch.
- [02:43]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I was really thinking about why so many people around the world connected with Punch's inability to form relationships. And you've long said that the bonds with other people Are one of the building blocks of happiness. It's one of the most important things that we can do. But especially here in the US Those bonds are fraying. And I think we just saw some of ourselves in punch. Do you think I may be right?
- [03:06]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it was fascinating to see just how much emotion people showed about punch, which I think is funny, because sometimes we see news stories about the pain of other actual humans, and we don't show that much compassion. Right. But I think talking about the loneliness crisis through a monkey, like, through this poor little monkey that didn't do anything. It wasn't really his fault. I think that really allowed us a way to talk about the loneliness crisis and to feel it and admit it in ourselves in a way that wasn't as sh. Hmm.
- [03:34]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
You know, I spent a lot of time in advance of this conversation really thinking about the nature of happiness. And I want to start by digging into just what happiness is and maybe do some basic defining of terms, because I went down a few rabbit holes.
- [03:51]
Dr. Laurie Santos
You can. It's very easy to do with this term in particular. It is, yeah.
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Lulu Garcia-Navarro
And so, as I discovered, lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece. And there's two main types of happiness, according to. To ancient Greek philosophers, as far as I could tell. And one is hedonic, and the other one is eudaimonic. Can you explain what that is? What the difference is, what they were looking at back then?
- [04:15]
Dr. Laurie Santos
So hedonic happiness, I think, is what a lot of laypeople mean when they mean happiness. That's just like a sense of good feeling, right? That's your personal pleasure. That's like the difference between eating a hot fudge sundae or stubbing your toe.
- [04:27]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Right?
- [04:27]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Like, there's some. There's something that it feels like to feel like things are good. And often when we're thinking of a hedonic pleasure, we're thinking of the real basic stuff that evolution built in. You know, good food, good sex, a feeling of, like, accomplishment. Like, these are the things that matter for us. Eudaimonic happiness is bigger. It's really about living a good life. It's about happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people, from, like, actually building character. And if you look back at the ancients, folks like Aristotle and so on, they knew about both, but when push came to shove, they were like, go for the eudaimonic happiness. Right? That is really. It's really about. They thought of like happiness as really synonymous with building character, doing nice stuff for others, civic virtue, it was much more like happiness as virtue. And when you look at the modern science like this tension comes up, right? In a lot of the interventions I talk about with my students, and maybe we'll even talk about today, there's a real question about which type of happiness we're building up. And I think where the research falls is saying that if we want to do this well, we should probably be going more for the eudaimonic stuff. That's the stuff we don't get used to. That's the stuff where we get kind of more bang for our buck in terms of interventions and time and so on. Too often when you look on the Internet, if you look at social media influencers, when they're talking about happiness, they usually mean the hedonic stuff. And that's great. I mean, it's great to have, you know, great sex and hot fudge Sundays. But ultimately, you know, true happiness probably comes from what we do with others and building a broader good life.
- [05:58]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
In ancient Greece, the big philosophical debate was also if happiness is nature or nurture. What does the science say? Are certain people more predisposed to be happy? Is it biological?
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. So the way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins. And the reason scientists are so obsessed with twins is that you get two kinds of twins. You get identical twins who are genetic clones of one another, and you also have fraternal twins who are as related as regular siblings, but they were in the same womb, they probably grew up the same way, and so on. And so what scientists do is they say, well, if there's a genetic component to happiness, if something about the variance that we see in the population is controlled by our genes, then those identical twins should look more similar in terms of their happiness than the fraternal twins. And like, lots of studies have looked at this, and what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. In other words, that doesn't mean there's a gene for happiness or anything like that. That means that some of the variance that we see in the population is due to the fact that somebody has one set of genetics versus another set of genetics. The important thing to know about those heritability studies, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low. It's about the same rate as what you'd see for the heritability of something like religiosity or risk taking. Right. I mean, religiosity is probably you. If your parents were super Religious, maybe you're more likely to be super religious, but obviously it's not set in stone. Same thing with risk taking. And I think that's the message of happiness. Yeah, there's probably some component that's a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control
- [07:27]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
so we can learn to be happy.
- [07:29]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I think that's the premise of my work, honestly. It's that we have much more control over it. And interestingly, this was something that the ancient Greeks didn't totally realize. You know, if you look at Aristotle, he's like, we should cultivate virtue. You can do it, but it's gonna be hard. You know, Aristotle talked about the happ few. It's like, you know, you can go for it, but it's gonna take a lot of work, and probably a lot of folks aren't gonna be up for that level of work. I think we think it's a little bit more malleable scientifically today. But we still share with Aristotle this idea that, like, if you wanna be happy, you can do it. But, like, all good things in life, you gotta put some time in.
- [08:04]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
When we think about happiness or wellbeing, is there a goal or is it just in the way that Aristotle said, an endless pursuit? I mean, can we reach the mountaintop and we just sit there, or is it just always searching for that place?
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Dr. Laurie Santos
The pursuit of happiness is not like a destination. Like, if I hopped on a flight and I got to la. If I hopped on a flight to get to la, I'd just be in la and I'd be like, all right, la, I'm here. If I had the ability to stay, I could just stay there for a whole time. But happiness doesn't work like that. It's not really a destination. And I think that it's funny when we think about happiness, because I think we do kind of think of it as a destination, but we don't think of that with other good things in life. Take fitness. Like, say you're trying to get fit. I'm gonna go to the gym. It would be awesome if you took, like, one really hard hit class, and then you're just good. Like, you did that in your 20s. And then, you know, all through midlife, you're like, I took my HIIT class. I'm good. It was a. Fitness was a destination. No, we kind of get like, you gotta keep doing it over time, or those. Those kind of benefits don't stick. And I think that's the way to think about happiness. You can get There, but it's active, it takes work. Like so many good things.
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Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Can I ask you what exactly you mean when you say happy though? Because I was thinking about the nature of moments when I felt happy. I lived for two years in Rio de Janeiro and I would wake up every morning and I would look out the window. And you couldn't be unhappy there because it was just so beautiful. And I had my young daughter and she would go to the beach every day and I had good friends and you know, it's not even like looking back, I was happy. I knew at the time that I was experiencing sort of happiness. Is that different than just general well being?
- [09:47]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I think there's so many of these terms and it's so frustrating because we have so many of these terms. I also think that what laypeople mean by these terms is often a little different. Yes, there are actually studies on this of like, if you look at what laypeople mean, they tend to mean a particular kind of happiness. And it's kind of the one that you're getting at, which is sort of being happy in your life, which we might think of as like an affective part of happiness. You're just experiencing lots of positive emotions. Right. It's awesome to live in Rio de Janeiro. It's awesome to stick your feet in the sand. Like that just feels good. And that's half of, I think, what social scientists mean when they talk about happiness. They're talking about the feeling, how it feels to be in your life. It's kind of the ratio of your positive to negative emotions. Maybe we'll get into this, but happiness isn't about getting rid of your negative emotions. I think that's toxic positivity. That's not what social scientists mean. But it really is about having a decent ratio between the positive to negative emotions. That's kind of being happy in your life. But happiness, according to social scientists, has a second component too, which is this idea of being happy with your life that gets more towards these eudaimonic components. That's that you're satisfied with your life. You have a sense of meaning, you have a sense of purpose. It feels good to be you because of how you think it's going. So this is kind of the cognitive part of happiness. And I think the work of what we should be doing when we're trying to pursue happiness the right way is to, in theory, try to boost both of those.
- [11:09]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
You used the word toxic positivity. I mean, I think you're referring to this idea that we Always need to be feeling great and exuding optimism. Is that what you're pushing back against?
- [11:25]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's really summed up by the phrase that you see on social media all the time of good vibes only. Like, good vibes only. If there are any bad vibes, something's really off, right? And that just, like, doesn't make sense from the perspective of evolution. Like, when I talk to my students, the way I often talk about negative emotions is as a signal, just like other negative sensations, right? You put your hand on a really hot stove, it's gonna hurt, it's gonna burn. And the reason you have that feeling is it's a good signal. It's like, get your hand off that stove. So many of our negative emotions are doing that for us. We should be so grateful for them. Cause they're helping us, right? If I'm feeling lonely, that's a signal that I need to change my behavior. I need to seek out some social connection. If I'm feeling sad, that's a signal that something's. I might need more positive things in my life. A big one for me that I notice myself is if I'm feeling overwhelmed, that means I have way too much on my plate, right? I have to make some changes. And those are signals. Just like the signal we get from a hand on a hot stove, that to get back to equilibrium, we need to make some changes. And it would be sad to get rid of those. If you only had good vibes only. I feel like you couldn't live a positive life because you'd be missing out on these cues about where you're going off track and what you should change.
- [12:37]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Do you worry if this idea of pursuing happiness, always striving for more actually creates unhappiness?
- [12:44]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, definitely. Yeah. I think there's really lovely research on this from the researcher Iris Mouse at the University of California at Berkeley. She actually has a paper about the paradox of the pursuit of happiness. That the simple act of pursuing happiness often makes us feel unhappy. But that gets back to this fact that we just don't get happiness. Right? When we think about the pursuit of happiness, we think hedonic stuff. We think good vibes only. And whenever we're off track with that, we think something's gone wrong. And when things go wrong, we tend to have a different set of emotions. What nerdy psychologists like me call meta emotions. Those are emotions about emotions, right? You know, so, I don't know, you go on some really cool trip to Rio de Janeiro and you're like, oh, I'm annoyed with the sand, like, it's a little too sunny. I'm not feeling happy. That's emotion number one. But then the meta emotions come in. You're ashamed. How can I be in Rio de Janeiro and not feeling happy? You're disappointed, like, oh, I spent all this money on this stuff. You're judging yourself. What's wrong with me that I don't feel so good? Those emotions come up whenever we feel like we're off the path of pursuit of happiness. And the problem is, if we are really into pursuing it. This is what Iris's data show. The more you value happiness, the more you think you're supposed to get there, the more these negative meta emotions come up whenever you feel like you're off track. So, yeah, it really does seem empirically that it's a paradox, right, that the more we go after at least one kind of happiness, the kind of hedonic, in the moment, moment happiness, the more we think we're supposed to pursue that and something's really off if we haven't what. What's going on? Good vibes. Only the more we kind of don't ever get there. Key, though, is that the paradox doesn't come up as much if you're pursuing the healthier kind of happiness.
- [14:26]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
You know, when I was thinking about this initially, I was like, ugh, this is such a modern idea, this idea of happiness. You know, this pursuit of happiness is something that I'm sure they didn't care about in the Middle Ages when they were struggling to eat. They weren't worried about, you know, maximizing their sense of. Of joy and aspiration to live the good life. And then I was sort of struck by the fact that this has been something very human for a very long time.
- [14:50]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, I think we have cared about happiness for as long as we've been humans and could reflect on our own emotions and reflect on the state of being a human and what it means to be a human. But I think cultures really shift how we think about what we should be doing. Right. So I think if you look at most of human history. Sorry, I'm gonna nerd out and do, like a happiness history lesson. Okay, this is great. If you look at most of human, we just didn't think it was possible to pursue happiness. So the word happiness comes from the cogni of luck. It's hap. Right? Like happenstance. You know, I think even Shakespeare said hap. What hap, may. Or something like that. Right. It's like, it's just luck. You might get a boulder might fall on your head, or it might not, but you can't control that, right? That is, for most of human history, how we thought about happiness. Like, it's good if you get it, but like, you can't do anything about it. Then we get to the classic Greeks, right? Folks like Aristotle and others, and they had a slightly different view. They also thought, you know, it's got a lot to do with luck and so on, but you can actually go for it. If you try to build up your virtue, if you try to go for that Eudaimonic happiness, then you will get closer to it. You might not. You might not get there, right? The happy, other happy few, but you can try. And I think we had that classic notion for a long time until we get to more of the modern day, until we get to the 18th century. And that was where a few things started to change in these really interesting ways, right? One is that this is the first time where we're not having all the, like, Middle Ages stuff that you were just talking about, right? This is less 18th century, getting a little less pestilence, a little less terrible stuff going on. Life is starting to feel more controllable, like, even in really stupid ways, right? They could control the smoke that was coming out of their chimneys. They made bedding that was like a little bit softer. They had better lighting in their houses, right? Better food. Better food, right? It started to feel like, oh, I can. It's reasonable to think I might be able to control my hedonic happiness, because I've seen some evidence that my actions can do that. And at the same time, you get cultural changes that fit with this, right? This is around the sciencey time of, like, Isaac Newton and others where we're learning, like, objects just move in certain ways. You know, gravity pushes objects towards one another. Scientists are also starting to think, well, what does that mean for humans? Oh, we move towards pleasure and away from pain. These are like Jeremy Bentham type arguments about this stuff. So the idea is like, oh, we're built to seek out pleasure like this. This is a thing we should go for. So, yeah, so I think every generation has wanted to feel happy. I mean, I think, you know, Bentham was right. We are built to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. But the cultural context in which we think about that can be different over time. We are in the notion of, like, looks maxing and like, you know, like, get, like getting all your pleasure right now. And, you know, spa pedicures and this kind of stuff, I think we really just definitionally think of happiness as about me, me, me. And so much of the science and so much of this classic wisdom tells us, no, it's not. Like, that's the way you get off track. That's the way you pursue it in the wrong way.
- [17:49]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
All right, so that brings us to what we deal with today.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yes.
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Lulu Garcia-Navarro
And I really want to focus on social connection. Because the pandemic, I think, showed us that if you don't have it, you're really, really going to suffer in ways that were perhaps not clear. And I have been trying to figure out what happened to me during that period. Honestly, I became a lot more insular, and I had to sort of relearn how to make those social connections after that period. Am I typical?
- [18:28]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. No studies bear this out. Pretty much every survey I know of that asks people about COVID Like, was it smooth sailing? When you jump back into it, people are like. Like, no. Right. There was some friction to this. We kind of got out of practice from it. And that makes sense because even though we're built to be social. Right. Even though in some sense this should be easy, social connection's hard. Right. There's another mind there that you're trying to navigate and predict, and you don't often get direct access to it. So it is clunky, and it does have some friction. That friction is one of the reasons that, as a professor, whenever I go into the dining hall, I'm shocked at how few of my students are just talking to one another. This is something professors remark about. Now, when I walk into my classroom, say, a seminar room, where all my students are sitting around a table, they're not chatting with one another. They're all on a screen looking at it. And I think the problem for them is there's a little bit of friction. It's hard to get that going. And when you didn't do it for a year, a year and a half, however long it was, yeah, it got harder. You were simply out of practice from it. And I actually think that this is one of the reasons that our young people. I mentioned my students are so, so lonely right now is, I think, just like, over their developmental time, they just had less practice at it. Like, the modern world is taking away all these subtle ways that we talk to one another. One of my favorite articles that looked at this was by the Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. He wrote this article kind of presciently. I think this is back in the 2010s called eliminating the human. And his idea was like, if you look at what, what pretty much every technology has done, it's taken away the human from something as simple as like, we go to the ATM now, we don't have to talk to a teller, we don't go to a record store and talk with people about records to get our music. We just have an algorithm deliver it to us in all these subtle ways our technologies are making it so that we don't need to talk to regular people. And I think we forget the subtle ways that this keeps coming up.
- [20:23]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
What do you think AI is going to do? Because they really is trying to eliminate the human.
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Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, no, it's gonna get way worse because the friction of talking to an LLM, I mean, we're already seeing this, isn't there? The LLM is there whenever you want to talk. Right. If you're feeling up at 2 in the morning, you can say that the LLM is really not judgy. You know, if anything, the current iterations when you and I are having this conversation, we're learning are too sycophantic. Right. They can almost create cognitive delusions in people. But yet that is what our young people are turning. I just had Jean Twenge, the kind of technology specialist on our podcast who's talked a lot about phones, and she's really shifting to the dangers of AI. One of her data points is just how many young people, and we're talking like 12, 13 year olds, are having their first relationship with an LLM. Like their first boyfriend and girlfriend is a LLM. And so what's the friction going to look like when they have to ask a real human out on a date? Navigate like a sexual consent conversation with a real other human with preferences and so on? Yeah, I think AI is going to change this in ways that are likely to make it worse. It creates this cycle where it becomes harder and harder to overcome that little friction to talk to someone.
- [21:39]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Yeah, I mean, my daughter asked me recently, how do you start a conversation with strangers? How do you go up to someone that you don't know and just start to talk to them? And of course that's a function of their age and that's totally normal. I mean, they're learning how to interact in the world. But I also realize, like, how much harder it is totally to do that nowadays because you're not only interrupting maybe a social dynamic, you're also interrupting people's interaction with their devices, their phone. And I noticed that in my own family because she comes up to Me, and I'm on my phone and I feel annoyed sometimes. Like, ugh, I'm in the middle of reading. Can't you see?
- [22:19]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And so all these cues that it's appropriate to talk to someone. Right. That they're making eye contact with you, they're smiling with you. That doesn't happen when your eyes are glued to your phone. And there's such interesting research on this. Liz Dunn, who's a professor at the University of British Columbia, has a study. I love where she puts people in a waiting room, strangers in a waiting room, and just either has them have access to their phones or not. And she just measures a really creative dependent variable, which is how often they spontaneously smile at each other. You know, you're sitting there, you just look over and smile. 30% decrease in smiling.
- [22:48]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
No.
- [22:49]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yes. Multiply that by what's happening on the streets of New York. Right. What's happening in.
- [22:53]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Let's not use New York.
- [22:55]
Dr. Laurie Santos
New York.
- [22:55]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
People are never smiling in New York.
- [22:56]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, it's happening in Boston. It happens in Boston. I mean, what's happening at your own dinner table, Right. Where your daughter's about to tell you something about your day, but your eyes are glued to your phone. Right.
- [23:06]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
She talks about it all the time.
- [23:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And you just don't notice. Right. And, you know, we're not, like, harshing on people for their phones. Like, they're built to be interesting. They're built to have every interesting thing in the history of the universe, but the consequence of our eyeballs being glued to them is really dangerous. Dangerous for the social connections we care about most.
- [23:26]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I mean, this speaks to the wider situation in which we find ourselves. Because I was looking at some data from 2012 to now, and there was a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute that shows that across all age groups, people are now socializing with their neighbors less. And the authors blame a lot of things like technology, political polarization, post pandemic issues. But do you think we've just become sort of, as a nation, indoor cats instead of outdoor cats? Like, we just have lost the ability to roam in the wild?
- [24:01]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that. And this is something that scholars have been worried about for a while. Right. Rewind the late 90s, early 2000s, and you have Robert Putnam's, like, seminal book on bowling alone, where he argued, like. Like, back in the day, we'd go out to bowling alleys and we. People would bowl with their friends and bowl together and bowl in leagues nowadays or nowadays being, you know, early 2000s. Nowadays people just go and they bowl alone. Right. They're not part of a league, they're not talking to their neighbors. They just talk to their immediate friends. I talked with, with Robert Putnam for my podcast, you know, and he had this interesting idea of like, you know, I wrote that before, like the Internet was like in baby days. Like we didn't know that like, like viral TikTok videos were coming. Right. We didn't know that there was television, which he was worried about. Right. That was one of the factors he talked about. But we didn't know there was going to be like, you know, streaming services that picked algorithms to get you exactly the best documentary that only you, Lulu would love. Right. We're fighting against technology that makes stuff interesting and attractive. Like there are whole companies that are built to keep our eyeballs on that stuff. Of course, regular social connection with my friend at the bowling alley might suffer, like in the face of that kind of competition. Yeah.
- [25:15]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I also spoke to Robert Putnam and his prescription was to put it, you know, succinctly, join a club. Right. But I think a lot of people feel like they don't have time for that. In between work and caretaking, they don't feel like they've got time anymore for those kinds of labor intensive social connections.
- [25:36]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. And this is something that social scientists are also really clued into. I think one of the coolest, coolest bits of work coming out of modern day social science is on this concept of what's called time affluence. This is a lovely work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School. Time affluence is feeling wealthy in time. It's not how much objective time you have, but it's the subjective sense that you just have free time for yourself. It's the opposite of what so many people listening right now, I'm guessing, are experiencing, which is what's called time famine, where you're literally starving for time. And this term famine I think works physiologically because when we feel like we don't have enough time, it's almost like famine, it increases inflammation, it like does all these bad things to our body. But there's lots of work showing that it does bad things to our social connection. You just prime people to think about time. Psychologists do these in these cheesy ways where you unscramble words and all the words are about time. So you're kind of implicitly thinking about time and then you just look at like how many people folks talk to in a coffee shop and what you find is that they talk to less people when they're feeling like they don't have any time. And so I think this time crisis, that of course is worth saying is worse for marginalized people and people who are, you know, don't have enough income and are worried about putting food on the T. That crisis is linked to the loneliness crisis. That crisis is linked to the fact that we don't have a lot of social connection.
- [26:52]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Let me ask you though, is the time crisis real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time. And it's not in making the effort to go out and join a club. It's in watching a Netflix show sitting on my sofa or bedrotting, as it's called on social media as a way to quote, unquote, relax, relax when it's really not that relaxing at all. And I always feel much better when I actually make the effort to go out and make a connection. But is, is our time crisis real or is it manufactured just by our bad choices?
- [27:31]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, I'm gonna say yes and no on that one, right? Yes. In the sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence, I'm thinking of like the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up like very high on the happiness list in Scandinavia and so on, they, you know, have a 35 hour work week so people have time to do stuff with their friends. And what you find is that in those countries, Denmark in particular, club membership is huge. Right. People have like, you know, they're a racquetball club and I don't think they bowl that much in Denmark. I don't know about bowling in Denmark, but the idea is like they're joining, they're joiners, right? In part because they have time. Structurally, we've set it up so that they have time. I think that does matter. And I think if we say, set things up structurally to have more time in the US maybe with a four day workweek with people like Juliet Shore have shown us, like, you know, by all accounts is happiness inducing, good for companies and so on, I think we could get there. Right? So I think there's something about the time crisis that is real. There are structural factors that are stealing our time. But if you look at the data, what you find is that people today, interestingly, actually have more free time than they did 15, 20 years ago. This is again, Ashley Whelan's lovely work. Right. Doesn't feel like. It really does not. And there's a reason it doesn't feel like it. Which is that the amount of time we have, the kind of blocks of time have shifted. They've turned into what the journalist Bridget Schulte has called time confetti. He's five minutes when you're, you know, if our. If our conversation ends a little early or 10 minutes when your kid falls asleep a little unexpectedly quickly. You know, some work meeting ends. It's not a big chunk. It's little chunks. We have more time because we have more of those little chunks. Chunks. But those little chunks don't feel like a lot of time. And so what do we do with the little chunks? I know what I do before I knew about this research. I check my email. I scroll something quick on Instagram, right? Like, I look at something dumb on my phone, right? I don't do any of the things that would make me use those free 5 minutes, 10 minutes in, like, a positive way. And that gets to your point, right? Which is that in practice, we do actually have free time. It's just like, we're not using it that well.
- [29:37]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
The other thing I hear a lot of people say about why they don't interact more socially is that they enjoy being alone. You know, they interact with people all day for work, or they, you know, have to be in complicated social dynamics in other spaces. And so they just prefer their downtime to be more calm, more peaceful. I do sometimes wonder if people are just kidding themselves, though, and if that's not a real thing.
- [30:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. Well, there's actually some lovely new work on this topic by Michaela Rodriguez, who I'm excited to say is gonna be my new colleague at Yale. Her work focuses on this flip side of the loneliness crisis. You know, she's a little younger than I am, and she's like, you know, my whole generation has spent all this time hearing about how bad loneliness is. It's so terrible. It's, you know, it's as bad as 15 cigarettes a day. And she's like, you know, two things there. One is like, let's jump back to, you know, the classic, you know, Aristotle, Buddhist text and so on. Those folks were into contemplation, they solitude. They were into the benefits of, like, having the time and the bandwidth to notice what's going on with yourself, to think, to be bored, all these things. They knew that there were some benefits to being alone, to alone time. Second thing she worried is like, we know from so much literature in psychology that your perspective on things, what psychologists call your construal, but this is basically how you frame something that affects how you experience it. You know, if I'm a student who's like alone in the dining hall and I sit down and I think, oh my gosh, this is my me time. I can contemplate, I can think of what's going on, or I can kind of gather my thoughts before I go to class, that's great. But if you're seeped in everything that social scientists like me have been saying, it's like, this is the loneliness crisis. Look at you, you're sitting in the dining all by yourself. You're gonna feel crappy, right? You're gonna judge yourself. You're gonna have all those nasty meta emotions that we talked about before. And Michaela was like, there's something damaging about this narrative and we need to bring back the idea that contemplation might be helpful. And so she's been doing all these studies first showing that, yes, really hearing all this bad stuff, a negative construal about being alone makes it worse. But she also finds that if you have the right construal, lots of benefits to solitude, great time to emotionally regulate, right? If you've been having a really terrible week at work, you kind of need that that night alone. Maybe not to kind of Netflix, but just to get your bandwidth about you, just to have a tea, sit with your cat, process, right? Like that helps you get back on track when you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious or on. So I don't think we necessarily want to justify it fully, right. Pretty much every available study of happy people suggests that happy people have some strong relationships. But that doesn't mean be in social connection all the time. We can also enjoy and really positively use our alone time.
- [32:30]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
After the break, I asked Dr. Santos if the trouble that some young people have socializing has anything to do with their parents.
- [32:38]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I can't tell you how many parents, like, are proactively trying to prevent their kids from screwing up. Which, on the one hand, yeah, you don't want your kids to screw up, but oh my gosh, is screwing up such a wonderful teacher.
- [32:56]
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- [34:43]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I want to focus on young people because all the sort of happiness reports show that happiness for young people has really cratered. Is there something different going on with Gen Z? Are they sort of a different generation or are they just facing a more extreme version than perhaps other younger generations have felt?
- [35:04]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I think they're both different and not. I feel like I'm hedging too much on your tough questions, like yes and no, but no. Yes and no. Right. One of my upcoming episodes of my podcast has an interview with Alexis Redding, who's a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And she happened upon these very fascinating data data sets of mental health interviews with Harvard students from the 1970s that were never published. They're actually just lying around in some attic somewhere. And she found them and she went to these interesting interviews from the 1970s thinking the following thing. Oh my God, this is great. We have a treasure trove of direct evidence of how these kids from my parents parents generation are different than the kids of today. And she went through and she analyzed it and she found down there's absolutely no difference. What is no difference? If you look at the things they're saying, they could be my Yale students in my office. Like there was one clip from her research which was a student who said, oh my God, like I just haven't Studied for my Orgo test. I don't know what I'm gonna do. Like, I just haven't been in a class. And, like, the test is today. I'm just gonna sit in bed and listen to music. Cause I just. I, like, can't get out of bed. And I was like, that is literally bedrock. Another one was students saying, like, everyone in my generation just knows they're never gonna get a job because of technology. And I was like, oh, my God, this is like, you, like, many 50 years before LLMs. What's going on? And so what's the story there? I think the story is a kind of yes and no story. Right. It is the case that rates of depression, rates of anxiety, rates of suicidality, those things are higher now than they have been. The, like, true clinical track of student suffering that has gone up, and we need to address that. We're not addressing it well right now, but the garden variety. Feeling lonely, feeling scared about your future. Like, feeling worried about what's happening in class. College students have been doing that for as long as there have been college students. And I think we, as adults, forget that.
- [36:57]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I want to take a little culpability here, because I've seen you talk about something called lawnmower parents, and I'd never heard of this phrase before. Is my generation of parents also to blame for how kids are dealing with social interactions that are hard?
- [37:15]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Probably. Sorry. Yes. So. So lawnmower. So most of our listeners probably have heard of helicopter parents, which are sort of parents that, whenever there's trouble, swoop in to kind of help. You know, your kid forgets their backpack to their soccer game. You drive home and you go get it. You know, they're having trouble at school. You go in and talk to the teacher. Right. Lawnmower parenting is like a even worse step of that, where the idea, the metaphor, is that you're mowing the lawn to make everything flat so you kids don't trip. You're like getting rid of the weeds that could get in the way of anything. And I definitely see this with my Yale parents, right, who are checking, calling to make sure their kids are getting into the right classes, calling to complain about grades. I've had parents send me emails about a student's grade. Another one that I was shocked by, but is more common than you think is parents who are their college students. Alarm clock. So if they have a big test, the parent will call and make sure they got up. It's like, there's not like they missed it. We're just kind of, of making sure, just checking in to make sure. And those things are well intentioned, right? Like, parents have to care about how their kids are doing. I think parenting didn't used to be a verb, but like, now it is a verb, right? You really have to actively take steps. But some of those steps are removing the friction, the high grass that's there, that's an essential teacher for kids, developing social connection for kids, developing the ability to get through conflict for them. Screwing up, right. I can't tell you how many parents, like, are proactively trying to prevent their kids from screwing up, which on the one hand, yeah, you don't want your kids to screw up, but oh my gosh, is screwing up such a wonderful teacher? You know, if I had to think about the things that taught me how to do things differently in life, oh my gosh. Screwing up teaches me way more than somebody doing it for me.
- [39:06]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Let me ask you something that might be connected or might not. Is there anything about our happiness that you think is uniquely American?
- [39:16]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh, for sure. I mean, we're such weirdos when it comes to happiness. I mean, we are really into happiness, first of all, you know, we care a lot about it. And that means that we tend to have more of that paradox of pursuing happiness that we talked about before, this idea that when you go for happiness, the more you go for happiness, the more unlikely you are to get it. And this is one of the things I find most fascinating about Iris Maus's research. She's actually, she works at UC Berkeley, but she's German. And I think one of the things that drew her to this work is that she'll claim that Germans have just a different relationship with the pursuit of happiness than Americans do. And there's some data on this. There's studies that have analyzed, for example, condolences cards in Germany and other parts of Europe and the US and what they find is that all of them mention grief and something, but the German cards stop there. They're in deepest sadness or something. Whereas the American greeting cards are kind of like, but, you know, silver lining, they're in a better place or something. And she's like, the Germans just stop at what it is. Like somebody died and you're sad. Just like, be cool with it. So I think Americans are kind of weirdos when it comes with happiness. You know, it's also focused on, like optimizing. Right? And this feels like very, right now, this feels very TikTok. But, you know, this is something again, Americans were thinking about for a long Time, right? Like rewind to the early 19th century and you have scholars like Alexis de Tocqueville, right, who's this French scholar who came over to the US as like this anthropological experiment, like what's going on with the new country? And what he remarked about was that like, Americans weren't just constantly pursuing happiness, but they were like never satisfied with it. Right. He had this phrase or something like, Americans will like make a house and before they're even done making a house, they'll start making a new house because they really want to make sure it's even better than it was before. And I think it was just this kind of, kind of obsession with going after stuff and optimizing that was there even back then. And my guess is, you know, if de Tocqueville showed up today and took a look around, he'd be like, oh man, this is even worse.
- [41:15]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Now, it's funny you mentioned this because I've noticed that there's a lot of interest in your work from what I'd call productivity dudes.
- [41:20]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Oh yeah.
- [41:21]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
People who are obsessed with really practical tips and clear cut answers for how to always be improving, you know, like always be getting better. And I've heard you tell them things like the science backs up, that your employees will be more productive if they're happier. And do you have misgivings about productivity and this idea of optimization?
- [41:42]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah, no, I think a couple things there. Yes, I definitely have misgivings is the answer. But I think one of the things that we have to pay attention to is how we're optimizing again. We're trying to optimize in many cases for happiness. But another thing I worry about with the productivity culture is that we're just never gonna get there. I recently interviewed Oliver Berkman for my podcast, this Kind of Productivity Expert. He would review time performance, apps and so on, and he had this realization which is like, it's never going to be enough, right? I could get the perfect app and it's never going to be enough. I'm still a finite human. There's still too much stuff to do. Like this fantasy that I have about eventually optimizing my schedule is just going to be a fantasy. Like we're just never going to get there. And one of the ways you can productivity hack is, is to have a radical acceptance about that there's always gonna be too much stuff. You're never gonna be perfect. Like it's always gonna be hard. And we can just give ourselves some grace and just radically accept that it's not the usual move for the productivity hack, bros. Right. Like self compassion, realizing your limits, like recognizing your common humanity. But it's what the data suggests leads you to happiness. And perhaps given all those data on if you're happier, you produce more and so on, might actually lead you to more productivity.
- [43:05]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Let me ask you, though, because I can hear a productivity bro. I hate to use that term necessarily.
- [43:11]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I get a lot of productivity. They're not all bros. Nombros.
- [43:14]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Yes, Nombros.
- [43:15]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah.
- [43:15]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
But productivity people, or just people who are interested in economics and say, actually the foundation of the American experiment, the foundation of our uniqueness and our power economically comes from what de Tocqueville saw back then, which is this idea of. Of always being more perfect, a more perfect union, that we can improve ourselves and make ourselves better, and that in work we find joy and we can find this, you know, kind of miracle economic experiment. And that Europe is stagnant and. And that, you know, is maybe happier than us, but certainly not as productive.
- [44:02]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Yeah. I think there has to be a balance here. And I think the problem with American society is that we may have pushed ourselves into the point of being so burned out that we're no longer being productive. Right. And this might be the position that I sit. Right. I see a lot of my students who, you know, to get into an Ivy League school like Yale, have worked incredibly hard to get there, but they show up and they have incredibly high rates of depression, incredibly high rates of anxiety, incredibly high rates of burnout. A lot of students say that they're miserable, that they got there. I think we can shoot for a little bit more balance. And the reason I think that is that so many studies show prioritizing your social connection, prioritizing your sleep, giving yourself rest. Right. Those are things that make you more productive. Right. Even if all you care about is what the economist might care about, the capitalist bottom line. Right. We want, I don't know, higher GDP or get into the perfect school or whatever your bottom line is. Most of the time you get to that bottom line best, better if you give yourself a break, if you take some time off.
- [45:02]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Yeah. And, you know, we've been talking about sort of people who go to Yale, people who are in demanding, perhaps office jobs. But of course, there's the structural inequality that comes from American society where people are having to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, plus raising families, et cetera, et cetera.
- [45:22]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Totally.
- [45:23]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
And I guess that feeds into the lack of a social safety net and all the other Things that you see in other places, places where the same holds true no matter where you fall on the income scale. Right, yeah.
- [45:33]
Dr. Laurie Santos
No, I think, I mean, a couple things there. One is that one of the reasons that countries like Denmark and so on are happy is because they have those social safety nets, right? It's one of the reasons people can pick careers that they like. You're taxed so heavily that it doesn't pay you to be like a finance bro, because you're going to get taxed anyway. So you're like, well, I might as well, you know, be an artist if I want to be an artist, so I might as well be a teacher, right? There's the lack of, of income inequality means people have an excuse to follow their purpose of what they really care about, which can allow people to feel like their life is better. And so I think those structural things matter a lot. I get in trouble sometimes for talking about so many of these individual solutions of like, oh, you should engage in social connection or you should write in a gratitude journal or meditate. And people think that, well, don't we also have to have social safety net? And I'm like, yeah, of course. This is a yes and situation. Right. These individual things that I'm suggesting are supposed to complement, not substitute the stuff that we should really be doing. But another thing we know about individual action is that it just makes us more productive. It gives us emotional bandwidth. And that can mean the resilience we need to fight for stuff. I think people mistakenly think that these individual strategies sometimes build up the resilience. You need to just, like, put up with being in a bad society. But I think the real goal of them is to give you the resilience to fight the bad society. And there's data on this. Konstantin Kushlev, who's at Georgetown, has this lovely paper that he talks about the Pollyanna hypothesis, which is this idea that if we just make people happy, they're going to be this Delulu Pollyanna walking around like, everything's great, all these structures of inequality. I'm cool with that because. Fine. And his point in running the paper is like, well, that's a hypothesis about how human nature works. The hypothesis is like, if you make people happy, they're just going to ignore the structure. And what he finds is just the opposite. If you look at people who are taking action to fix structural problems, he does this in the domain of, like, climate concern. And also he's running this around the times of Black Lives Matter. And so who goes to a protest and so on. He finds that like it's the people who have the highest positive emotion, the people with the best mental health that are ones that are going and trying to fix stuff.
- [47:42]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
It goes back to where we started our conversation around the eudaimonic sense of like, how do you become happy? And how do you find meaning?
- [47:51]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Meaning, exactly. And getting back to the American experiment, right? Like this was what the forefathers meant, right? They had problems, right. The forefathers were filled with people who are not focused on everybody's eudaimonic happiness. Those unalienable rights are for landed white dudes, not for everybody. But in their idealistic sense, what they were trying to go for is that eudaimonic sense of happiness. It was about civic virtue. It was about making everybody happy and, and that was the happiness they thought we should all be pursuing.
- [48:20]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Lori Santos, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation.
- [48:24]
Dr. Laurie Santos
Thanks so much for having me on the show.
- [48:31]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
That's Dr. Lori Santos. Her podcast is called the Happiness Lab. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Paola Neudorf, mixing by Sophia Landman, original music by Dan Powell and Marian Lozano, photography by Philip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priya Matthew, Wyatt Orme Joe, Bill Munoz, Alejandro Soto Goyco, Kathleen o' Brien and Brooke Minters. Our executive producer is Alison Benedict. Next week David talks to Raphael Warnock, the junior senator from Georgia, about the Supreme Court's recent decision on voting rights.
- [49:07]
Dr. Laurie Santos
I think that the Supreme Court court has has committed violence against our whole the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system.
- [49:17]
Lulu Garcia-Navarro
I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro and this is the interview from the New York.
- [49:38]
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- [49:42]
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