How to be happy

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing — "How to be happy"

Episode Date: January 20, 2025
Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University
Host: Preet Bharara (from Stay Tuned, presented by Vox)
Duration: Approx. 63 min

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the complex question of what it means to be happy. Dr. Laurie Santos, renowned for her science-based approach to well-being and happiness (and for teaching Yale’s most popular class ever), shares research findings, actionable strategies, and philosophical reflections on the realities and misconceptions surrounding happiness. The conversation covers definitions of happiness, why we chase the wrong goals, how to rebalance daily life for greater satisfaction, and how acts of kindness, gratitude, and strong social connections can meaningfully boost happiness—for ourselves and those around us.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Happiness

• Two Elements: Happiness is both the emotions you experience in your life (positive/negative ratio) and your satisfaction with your life as a whole.
  • "The happiness you experience in your life is the set of positive emotions you have. Being happy doesn't necessarily mean you get rid of all those negative emotions ... but it means ideally, that ratio... is pretty decent."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [05:40]
  • “Being happy with your life is how you think your life is going… All things considered, am I satisfied with my life?”
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [05:51]
• Overlap & Dissociation: It's possible to have hedonic pleasures (momentary joys) and still lack overall satisfaction or meaning—these are not always aligned.

2. Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Happiness

• Hedonic pleasure: Immediate, sensory joy (e.g., enjoying a chocolate bar).
• Eudaimonia: Meaningful, purposeful, and moral living, as per Aristotle—deeper, longer-lasting fulfillment.
  • "For human beings, we're really not going to feel that good about our life... unless we have a sense of meaning, unless we have a sense of purpose."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [16:42]

3. Temporal Focus & the "Arrival Fallacy"

• Present Self vs. Future Self: People often chase achievements (“I’ll be happy when…”) mistakenly believing such milestones will deliver lasting happiness.
  • "This has been christened by social scientists as what's called the arrival fallacy...The happiness you get from that big moment kind of isn't as big as you thought. It's like a little bit of a letdown, and it doesn't last for nearly as long."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [14:06]
• Delayed Gratification & Hyperopia: Saving pleasures for “the perfect moment” often results in them being missed entirely.

4. Striving and the Journey Mindset

• Striving isn’t bad, but... True well-being comes from enjoying the journey, not just racing to the next achievement.
  • "We need to balance our striving with a healthy respect for the journey. This is something that Stanford social psychologists have called the journey mindset."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [18:00]

5. The Parenting Paradox

• Having Children: Parents report lower moment-to-moment happiness, but higher life satisfaction and meaning.
  • "Kids mess with the moment to moment happiness... But in your life, there's the dirty diapers, the now not sleeping… It just doesn't feel good. Right. And so I think that the parenting paradox really allows us to kind of zoom in on these different two aspects of happiness."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [20:15]

6. Comparison, Wealth, and Environment

• Relative Income & Inequality: Our happiness is influenced more by comparisons than absolute wealth; inequality is deeply corrosive.
  • "We don't tend to objectively evaluate our circumstances... We tend to compare against other individuals. Our brains are insidious. They're very good at finding reference points that make us feel totally bad."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [26:29]
• Redistribution: Redistribution increases happiness, especially for those on the lower end of the income scale, while taking nothing away from the already wealthy in terms of well-being [31:00].

7. Job Satisfaction and "Job Crafting"

• Purpose in Work: People are happier when they connect their daily work to their values and strengths—called “job crafting.” Even janitorial staff who see their work as meaningful report higher happiness.
  • "If you can get creative about job crafting as a guy who cleans up vomit in a hospital, for most of the people listening, you can get creative about your own job, too."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [39:32]

8. Acts of Kindness and Social Connection

• Happiness Boosters: Helping others, social interactions, expressing gratitude, and even small friendly gestures are scientifically shown to increase happiness.
  • “We get happiness from doing nice stuff for other people ... people self-report being happier when they've spent the money on other people. That's not what we predict, but it's sort of what the data show.”
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [43:33–44:00]

9. Gratitude Practices

• Regularly noting things we're thankful for or delighted by strengthens our ability to notice and appreciate the good in life.
  • "One of the easiest interventions is just to commit to scribbling down three to five things that you notice that you're grateful for every day... you can kind of build up your reps and train your attention muscle to notice the good stuff."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [49:31–51:06]

10. Social Connection & Longevity

• Friendship and Well-Being: The single best predictor of lifelong happiness and health is the strength of social relationships.
  • "If I had to pick one thing you could do to be happier, [it] would be to improve and engage in social connection. Whether that's with a really good friend, with a stranger ... it really just seems to boil down to your social connections."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [52:30–53:20]
• Loneliness: Self-reported loneliness as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes/day [53:38].

11. Age and Trends in Happiness

• U-shaped Curve: Happiness dips in middle age, then rises into old age. However, young people today are reporting much higher rates of loneliness, depression, and unhappiness than previous generations.
  • "Young people have become much, much more unhappy than they were."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [55:16]

12. Technology, Social Media, and Unhappiness

• Comparison Trap: Social media amplifies negative comparisons and decreases happiness. Technology often distracts from real-life connections [58:27].

13. Religion and Happiness

• Religious Practice vs. Belief: It’s the community and behaviors associated with religion (not beliefs alone) that correlate with happiness [56:48].

14. Negative Emotions Are Part of the Equation

• Function of Negative Emotions: Negative feelings are “alert signals,” indicating areas of life that deserve attention or change.
  • "If you're experiencing negative emotions, the right response is like, awesome, thank God I have that alert to tell me what I need to do to make changes so I can feel better."
    — Dr. Laurie Santos [61:36]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "We all fall prey to ‘I’ll be happy when…’. But when you get that big accomplishment ... the happiness you get from that big moment isn't as much as you thought and doesn't last for nearly as long."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos [14:06]
• "The path to happiness also comes from helping other people out. Science says that'll make you happier." — Preet Bharara (Summary Reflection) [63:20]
• "Social connection. If I had to pick one thing you could do to be happier, it would be to improve and engage in social connection."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos [52:30]
• "The only reason you would do [a lower-paid but high-impact prosecution job] is if the job brought you great satisfaction. ... Do we need more jobs like that?"
  — Preet Bharara [39:32]
• "Gratitude is powerful because it's a way to hack [hedonic adaptation] ... you notice that it didn't have to be that way, right? We don't want to take this for granted because it might not always be this way."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos [47:44]
• "Negative emotions are an important part of the equation… Like the alert signal on your car… thank your negative emotion system, it's really giving you useful information that you can act on."
  — Dr. Laurie Santos [61:36]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |--------------------------------------------|-----------------| | Definition of Happiness (Santos) | 05:32–06:53 | | Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Happiness | 16:00–17:42 | | Arrival Fallacy & Striving | 14:06–16:00 | | Parenting Paradox | 20:00–21:58 | | Comparison & Wealth | 25:03–28:52 | | Redistribution & Happiness | 30:08–33:22 | | Job Crafting & Satisfaction | 39:32–42:08 | | Acts of Kindness & Social Ties | 43:00–46:59 | | Gratitude & Delight Practice | 47:44–51:06 | | Power of Friendship/Social Connection | 52:22–54:02 | | Happiness by Age Trends | 54:02–56:00 | | Religion & Happiness | 56:48–58:12 | | Technology, Social Media & Unhappiness | 58:27–59:32 | | Embracing Negative Emotions | 59:53–61:36 |

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Actionable Takeaways

• Practice gratitude daily, even for small pleasures.
• Engage in acts of kindness—helping others increases your own happiness.
• Strengthen social connections—friendships are key predictors of well-being.
• Beware the “arrival fallacy”—focus on enjoying the process, not just future achievements.
• Limit comparison and exposure to social media-driven aspirations.
• Recraft your job (job crafting) to align with your values, if changing roles isn’t an option.
• See negative emotions as signals—respond, don’t suppress.

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Final Words

Happiness isn’t about the relentless pursuit of pleasure or future victories. It’s a combination of finding meaning, building relationships, savoring the small wins, and staying attuned to your own needs—positive and negative. As Dr. Santos puts it: “Have gratitude for simple things, engage in acts of kindness, and get more friends. We can all do that.” [62:42]

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For more science-backed strategies, check out Dr. Santos’s own podcast, The Happiness Lab, or her online course, The Science of Well-Being.

Transcript

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[A]

I think we as laypeople kind of get happiness wrong and I think that leads to lots of misconceptions. I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time, right? Often very high arousal, positive emotion. But that's not really what we're talking about.

[B]

That's Dr. Laurie Santos. She's the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon professor of Psychology and head of Silliman College at Yale University. She teaches Psychology and the Good Life, a course on finding happiness and fulfillment that quickly became the most popular class at Yale in over 300 years. Dr. Santos also hosts the podcast the Happiness Lab and offers an online version of her Yale course titled the Science of well Being. We discuss what happiness really means and how to achieve it, why negative emotions are crucial to the equation, how job crafting can bring purpose to any career, the parenting paradox, and so much more. That's coming up. Stay tuned.

[A]

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[B]

What does it take to be happy? Happiness scientist Dr. Laurie Santos joins me to discuss. Professor Lori Santos, welcome to the show.

[A]

Thanks so much for having me on.

[B]

I'm very happy to have you on.

[A]

I know.

[B]

Do you see what I did there?

[A]

Yeah. It's fun.

[B]

So I have a lot of questions. As I told you before, we hit the record button, we're coming to the end of the year. Lots of people have issues that they care about politically, socially or otherwise. The holidays are a tough time for a lot of folks because people have experienced loss. We've had that in my family and a lot of families. So there are things to deal with and the future is uncertain and there seems to be a greater amount of worry and concern and depression and loneliness. So you are a perfect guest to have as our last episode of the year that was 2024. Could we start with an understanding of what we mean or at least what you mean when you teach your class, when you write about these issues, what do you mean by happiness?

[A]

Yeah, I'm glad we started there, I think, because I think we as laypeople kind of get happiness wrong. And I think that leads to Lots of misconceptions.

[B]

Unhappiness.

[A]

Yeah, lots of unhappiness. I mean, I think we assume happiness is about, you know, positive emotion on all the time. Right. Often very high arousal, positive emotion. But that's not really what we're talking about. I mean, the social scientist definition of happiness is really kind of thinking about the happiness that you experience in your life and with your life. This is the sort of definition I like. So the happiness you experience in your life is the set of positive emotions you have. Right. So it's, you know, your sense of joy, your sense of laughter, and the ratio of those positive emotions to negative emotions. Things like anger, frustration, sadness. Being happy doesn't necessarily mean you get rid of all those negative emotions, but it means ideally, that ratio between the positive ones and the not so positive ones is pretty decent. So that's kind of being happy in your life, but being happy with your life is how you think your life is going. It's your answer to the question, all things considered, am I satisfied with my life? And social scientists use this definition because it kind of encompasses this, what they often call the affective and the cognitive parts of happiness. So the kind of emotional parts of happiness, how you feel in your life, but also the cognitive parts, how you think your life is going. And the best case scenario is that we find strategies, behaviors, mindset shifts, and so on that can boost both of those at the same time.

[B]

I guess my question is how do they interact with each other and don't they overlap?

[A]

They overlap a bunch. But I think it's worth noting that there are times in our life, and maybe people that we know where we see those two parts of happiness dissociating. Right? I mean, I think maybe on the show you've interacted with folks who have every hedonic pleasure in their life, kind of getting positive emotion all the time. But maybe they're experiencing a lack of meaning or don't know what their life is about. I think I'm often called upon to these events with very rich people where I sometimes see they're kind of going through that, like lots of hedonic pleasure, but kind of a lack of meaning.

[B]

So can you just for the record define and then give examples of hedonic pleasure?

[A]

Yes.

[B]

We don't say hedonic a lot on this podcast.

[A]

Yeah, no, it's true. So hedonic pleasure is just kind of like, you know, the hedonism kinds of things that you experience in life. You know, so drinking the best wine, you know, sleeping.

[B]

How about Hershey's Boy.

[A]

Hershey's bar, I think, is a strong. I think people would quibble about whether that's the best hedonic pleasure chocolate.

[B]

You know, it was what was available in the cafeteria.

[A]

Yeah, so. But that's. But yeah, exactly like, you know, popping into a Hershey's bar is kind of experiencing that moment of hedonic pleasure. Probably it will give you a little mini boost of positive emotion. But, you know, if that was it, without a sense of it did.

[B]

It worked for me prior to the show. So explain something else so that we understand what we're measuring. So if you asked me the question, and I'm very lucky, and I think I'm a generally happy person, am I happy in my life? I am. Am I happy with my life? I sure am. There are moments that I'm unhappy. So catch me on a day that things are not going well or there's something wrong with my kids, not happy. But that's not what you mean. So when the question is asked, are you or are you not unhappy over what time period is it that day? Like, what's the snapshot value versus overall or how you felt last week? How do you think about that?

[A]

Yeah, researchers use different time horizons on that. You know, how are you feeling in your life right now? That could be literally right now. You know, we're having this conversation. You just had that chocolate bar. How are you feeling right now? Often it's done in the last week, you know, self report these positive emotions. Right. But the idea is that what we're trying to get at is a kind of, on average, how are you feeling? And I think that first one, how you're feeling in your life, that one tends reasonably, I think, to move around a little bit more with the circumstances. Now, you just had the chocolate bar. You might be feeling a little happier in your life, but hopefully the chocolate bar isn't necessarily changing. All things considered, how satisfied are you with your life? That one tends to be.

[B]

I mean, the problem is, so let's say I get on the scale tomorrow and I really didn't need, or in my higher order brain function, didn't need the 26 grams of carbs. And let's say I'm not happy with the scale the next day. How should I think about the fact that I had the chocolate bar the day before? How do we think about delayed gratification and its relationship to happiness?

[A]

Yeah. This is an important philosophical question. Right. And when we talk about maximizing happiness, we have to ask the question in some Ways, whose happiness are we maximizing? Right? And I think we often think about the case that you're bringing up, right, which is, you know, you today is eating this high carb chocolate bar that might make you tomorrow kind of sad, right? This is cases of what's often called sort of temporal discounting, right? We discount us in the future and we kind of give in to temptation.

[B]

Now and kind of, that's a different guy. Tomorrow's diet is a totally different guy.

[A]

Tomorrow, Larry, is totally different. But interestingly, happiness researchers also talk about the other problem, which is if it's myopic to kind of screw over your future self, you can think of cases of what you might call hyperopia. And by that I mean many of us have, you know, that really nice bottle of wine that's been sitting on the shelf for that. That perfect day, or, you know, those frequent flyer miles that are adding up for the perfect time to take a vacation, you know, or me, I think women have this. There's like. Like these spa products. I buy this nice bath bomb or this candle that I'm going to use on the perfect night when I have time. And then the bottle of wine, the frequent flyer mas, all these things kind of expire over time because we haven't gotten around to them. And so I think for happiness, we also have to worry about these cases of hyperopia, too. Are we really kind of, you know, kind of messing up our. The happiness that we could be experiencing now because we're so worried about the future that we wind up not maximizing overall?

[B]

Well, so that's very important question. And I have a personal anecdote in which what you just said resonates a lot. I got married 25 years ago and we went to Italy and we bought. Could barely afford, but we bought these nice bottles of red wine in Tuscany. Brunello di Montalcino, one of the great wines on planet Earth. And we had a bunch left over, and they sat in the wine fridge or in the cellar for years and years. And then I happened to be in Italy this year, and I overheard someone at a wine tasting say, these Brunellos, they're wonderful wines. They're the great wines. They last about 30 years. And the wines that we had bought 25 years ago were themselves about 5 years old. So I realized we had these bottles of wine that we kept saving for some special day in the future. So at the first opportunity, we took a couple of bottles to good friends of ours and opened them. And one of the bottles was Ruined. So lesson learned, right?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, that's classic case of hyperpia, but I think it happens in these. The wine bottles are the really salient examples because it happens across decades. But you know, how often are we checking our emailers, trying to squeeze one more work thing in when we're not taking time to like hang out with our kids or talk with our spouse. Right. You know, if we, when we sort of think back and our kid leaves home and you know, we might think of those moments as precious, even though they don't feel kind of precious now. So I think in our kind of attempt to sort of, well, get ahead for a future me, we sometimes are screwing over present us in a way that we forget but can really have a negative impact on our overall happiness over time.

[B]

Well, I guess in part it depends. Just thinking about ambitious people who want to succeed in their careers or people who are in the gym and they want to get a, you know, they want to build muscle and they want to be better athletes or whatever the case may be. I don't know that a lot of people experience happiness when they're on the weight machine. Maybe they do because they want to be happy in their life, not just with their life, to use your distinction. And for some people, happiness in their life means being able to win that competition in sports or building muscle or being able to look better, or if you're a professional, all that hard work and drudgery and pulling the all nighter at the law firm or whatever the case may be in your particular profession. In that dog eat dog world, you might not be happy with your life at that moment, but if it's important to you to achieve a particular thing in the future, then how do you think about the unhappiness with your life at that moment? Is that actually the wrong way of looking at it because you're actually in that example, tending to your future self?

[A]

Yeah, well, I think there's a real danger in putting our happiness in this sort of one event that comes up in the future. And I think this is something we all fall prey to. I'll be happy when. I'll be happy when I make partner. I'll be happy when I get married for my Yale students. I'll be happy when I get into medical school or get the perfect grade or something like that. This has been christened by social scientists as what's called the arrival fallacy. I'll be happy when I get to this point. But it turns out when social scientists actually go out and study what Happens when you get that big accomplishment, get into the perfect school. In one famous case, they studied academics. When they find out they got tenure, which is a big thing for academics, when you find out you get tenure, what you find is that the folks predicted that that moment would make them feel super happy and that the happiness they got from achieving that sort of thing would last for a really long time. But what actually happens is that the happiness you get from that big moment kind of isn't as big as you thought. It's like a little bit of a letdown, and it doesn't last for nearly as long. I show my Yale students, you know, a big moment for them that I think where they fall prey to the arrival fallacy is when they find out they get into Yale. Right. You know, some of these students in high school work so long, and nowadays they put these Little videos on YouTube. You can find them where they, you know, click on the link and find out they got into Yale and they scream and their parents scream and these videos and so on. And I show these little videos to my students in class and they kind of let out a little sigh when they see them because they remember that moment, but they remember the very next moment. Yeah, now I'm just chasing the next carrot. Okay, that now is Yale. But now it's like getting my Rhodes scholarship or getting into medical school or just the very next thing, right? And so I think this is. This can be a problem when we're chasing something, right. If we're getting no happiness out of the chase, then it's pretty miserable to be going after these things that we predict are going to feel great and feel great for a really long time, but they don't wind up being as good as we expect.

[B]

I want to ask you about this question in a different way. So I studied political theory in college and were required to read Aristotle, as I'm sure that you are at Yale, who said it's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Which I think maybe goes to your point about hedonic pleasures and happiness. How do you, given what you study and what you teach, think about that quote from Aristotle?

[A]

Yeah, Well, I think on the one hand, it's actually really hard to ask a pig how happy they are. So I think it's like, I wish we could same surveys and kind of.

[B]

Like the human analog of a pig with lower order sensibilities, et cetera, et cetera.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think Aristotle made a distinction between what we've been calling these hedonic pleasures, you know, kind of the experience of positive emotion in your life with what he famously called eudaimonia, which is, you know, his word for the good life, by which I think he meant, you know, a life filled with purpose, a life filled with meaning, in some sense, a good moral life. Right. And I think for human beings, we're really not going to feel that good about our life or be satisfied with it unless we have a sense of meaning, unless we have a sense of purpose. But again, it winds up being reciprocal. I think we predict, you know, that delicious bottle of wine will. Will be the pleasure in my life. And, you know, it is. But so is doing really good in the world. So is volunteering for a cause that you care about. So is kind of, you know, achieving something that you worked hard for. So is helping someone that really is in need. Right. These kinds of moral goods wind up boosting our sense of satisfaction with life, our sense of purpose. Are you daimonia. But at the same time, they're sort of filled with much more positive emotion than I think we wind up predicting.

[B]

So do you distinguish between someone who has low aspirations and low ambition and can be happier with less as compared to somebody who's always striving for the next thing, who's living? Can you make a judgment? I'm thinking not about who's living the better and happier life.

[A]

Well, I think this is a spot where other ancient thinkers kind of weighed in. If you go back to the Buddha, he thought that one of the biggest causes of human suffering was wanting, was craving, was sort of just striving for the next thing. So it's not to say that striving is bad. It's just to say that that striving works best if we can, in some sense, enjoy the journey along the way, but when it's really just going to feel good when we get to that next thing, just as we saw in the examples we were giving before, that next thing immediately comes a new carrot that you're going after. Right. We just don't get as much satisfaction out of arriving as we think. And so that's not to say that we should all, you know, sit on our couches and eat bonbons, you know, for our whole lives, because I think that's not the path to Eudaimonia either. But we need to balance our striving with a healthy respect for the journey. This is something that Stanford social psychologists have called the journey mindset, Right? Which is like, we gotta find the joys along the way, and that really does seem to be the path to new life. Now you're not falling prey to the arrival fallacy because the journey to that arrival moment is also feeling pretty good.

[B]

Come back to the journey. But here's another study or poll that I see from time to time that is utterly fascinating to me. And it's about the difference in that level of happiness reported by couples who have children and couples who don't have children. So I have children. I will say, as almost every parent I've ever met says, that they are the greatest source of joy and happiness in my life. I also say, as parents say, if you have an unhappy child, you cannot be happy fully. And I can't imagine I'm speaking for me being as happy as I am in my life or even with my life, with the absence of those kids. And yet it's always the case, it seems in the studies that I see that as self reported, couples who don't have children are happier. Can you explain that and tell us what that means?

[A]

Yeah. This is what's been referred to as sort of the parenting paradox, right? This idea that kids really kind of give us a sense of meaning. You know, if I asked, you know, hey, are you satisfied with your life? What are some things that make you satisfied with your life? If you're a parent, you're going to say, probably my kids, even though they.

[B]

Also drive you batty.

[A]

But kids mess with the moment to moment happiness, right? So this kind of gets, I think, you know, think of not even just being a regular parent, but you know, rewind to the point when you had a newborn. I think that's the biggest dissociation, right? You and your partner have just had a baby. You know, with your life, you are feeling amazing. You have this sense of meaning, this new person that you love. It's great. But in your life, there's the dirty diapers, there's the now not sleeping, there's the colic or whatever it is. It just doesn't feel good. Right. And so I think that the parenting paradox really allows us to kind of zoom in on these different two aspects of happiness, right? That sometimes we need to sacrifice our moment to moment happiness to find kind of, you know, more meaning. That said, I think with parenting, especially with the kind of new stresses of parenting, we might have swung a little too far in that direction. The current, as you and I are having this conversation, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently just issued a Surgeon General's Public health advisory, which is the kind of thing that Surgeon Generals release about smoking or the opioid epidemic and so on. And he released this about parental stress. In other words, being a parent is in some sense like a public health crisis because parents are experiencing so much stress. And so I think we need to kind of as parents and as like societies that support parents, start thinking of, well, what can we do to help parents get back to that moment to moment happiness? Because again, there are methods we can use to kind of do that a bit better. Even though overall parenting might be a little bit of a hit on your hedonic pleasures and your moment to moment happiness, there are ways we can do it better. There are ways there are things we can do to reduce parent stress.

[B]

I'll be right back with Dr. Laurie Santos after this. Limu Emu and Doug.

[A]

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[B]

Only pay for what you [e-mail] Liberty Liberty.

[A]

Liberty.

[B]

Liberty Savings Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. Affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

[A]

Oh, come on.

[B]

They called it truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

[A]

Whatever.

[B]

You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel Tron. Ares has arrived. I would like you to meet Ares.

[A]

The ultimate AI soldier. He is biblically strong and supremely intelligent. You think you're in control of this? You're not.

[B]

On October 10th, what are you? My world is coming to destroy yours. But I can help you. The war for our world begins in IMAX. Tron Ares. Rated PG13. May be inappropriate for children under 13. Only in theaters October 10th. Get tickets now. It seems to me that some amount of happiness or satisfaction with your life depends on your environment, right? And if you get happiness from something that's within yourself or that relates to something you can control, whether it's your faith or a hobby or a life of the mind or hedonic pleasure like, you know, a Hershey's bar or Cadbury Bar or whatever, versus people who get satisfaction and enjoyment and pleasure and happiness or whatever synonym you want to use from their relationship to other people, what other people think about them. And I think from my own prior career prosecuting people, it always is astonishing to me, and I talked about this a little bit with Tina Brown on my last podcast, that people who seem to have everything in life, good family, good education, good life, riches beyond measure, still are driven to commit crime, to escalate themselves or elevate themselves into the next tier, in part because they're just not happy having only $100 million. They need to have a billion dollars. And I've seen various examples of that. Is that just the old fashioned keeping up with the Joneses thing? Is it something more significant than that? Does science tell us anything about how to deal with it?

[A]

Yeah. So, I mean, one of the misconceptions we have about happiness is that it, it's a lot due to our circumstances, right. You know, how rich you are, you know, whether you have a good family, this kind of stuff. And there's something there, right. You know, if you're listening to this podcast right now and you don't have enough money to like put food on your table or keep a roof over your head if you're a refugee from your country, right. Obviously changing your circumstances is probably going to materially affect the degree to which you experience positive emotion and the satisfaction that you get with your life, for sure. But for most of the people listening to this podcast right now who aren't in a dire traumatic situation, turns out out that changing your circumstances is not really going to affect your happiness as much as we think you'd be much better off, for example, just changing your internal state, changing your mindset and your behavior and so on. That said, it is the case that our surroundings can influence our happiness a little, at least a little bit. And we know this from these kind of classic studies from the so called World Happiness Report. So this is a group that works with the Gallup Poll organization that's been doing long term surveys of people's happiness from over 200 countries from around the world. And what it tends to find is that there are some countries that tend to be a lot happier than others. So the Scandinavian countries are often quite high. Usually it's a sort of race between whether Denmark or Norway or one of those countries is going to be.

[B]

They're so annoying, those countries.

[A]

Well, one of the reasons they're so.

[B]

Those countries make me unhappy because they make me feel bad.

[A]

They make us feel bad. Well, it should make the folks in the US feel bad, right? Because we in the US are A very rich country. In theory, our circumstances, for many people at least, when you compare us to across the world, are doing pretty great. That said, we're a very unequally wealthy country, and it turns out that wealth doesn't matter for our happiness almost as much as the inequality of our wealth. If you're an unequal, wealthy country, everybody just kind of feels crappy. And that kind of gets back to the point you made about keeping up with the Joneses. Turns out we don't tend to objectively evaluate our circumstances. Circumstances like, you know, what our actual salary is, how nice our house is, how attractive we are. We tend to compare against other individuals. So we don't think in terms of these objective points of, like, how well we're doing. We sort of compare ourselves to some salient reference point. And our brains are insidious. They're very good at finding reference points that make us feel totally bad, you know? So if I ask you, you know, what's a good reference point for a really good salary? You're probably going to think of somebody like, you know, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You're not going to think about, you know, the refugee up the street that can barely.

[B]

It's different. Different times of my life. When I was 25, I thought that one salary seemed very high to me, and now I'm 56, and in my peer group, that number is different.

[A]

And I think this is something even more insidious, which is that we can change our own reference points, right? Because we get used to whatever level we wind up at. Back when I was a graduate student, the idea of earning what a first year professor earned was like, oh, my gosh, I would be able to get a reasonable apartment and do this stuff. But then you get there and then it just becomes your salary. You get bored with it, you want to jump up to the next level and the next level. And that's frustrating for a couple reasons. One, it's like we just don't appreciate the good stuff we have, right? So we take it for granted. What's worse, it's that if you get objectively better circumstances in life, you wind up expecting those objectively amazing things you talked about this delicious wine that you bought in Italy. When you just have that wine, any other crappier wine you're gonna taste after that is just, like, ruined. You know, I often joke that the people who are most miserable on planes are the people who get to fly first class all the time because it's like, they can't. There's no, there's not much way to go up from that. Right. You're kind of at the top of the top. And so once we get to the kind of best possible circumstances, we wind up just getting used to that.

[B]

And so you better not fall.

[A]

You better not fall.

[B]

You better not fall. Yeah, you said something a minute ago, sort of interesting to me as we think about how to order society. Not to be too heavy about it, but. So I have a series of intro related questions that just came to mind. I think that was John Stuart Mill who said that about the pig. Satisfied? We'll look it up. Maybe it wasn't Aristotle. It might have been John Stuart Mill. As you think about what the goal of ordered society is, is it to make society productive in whatever way that that is defined? Is it to increase individual and average and overall happiness of the citizenry? And if you think it's some version of that second one, when you say income inequality causes an excess or a surplus of unhappiness, well, what's the reverse of that? Some version of redistribution of wealth, socialism, perhaps communism? Do people in societies that more resemble the latter have more happiness? Because that's not what the Scandinavian countries are. They're capitalist countries that have huge safety nets. So what does your research tell you about, at least in respect to this dimension? What works and what doesn't work.

[A]

Yeah. So I think to understand what works best, it's helpful to dig into specifically on wealth, say, what's going on in terms of people's happiness. I mentioned, if you're listening to this podcast and you don't have enough money to put roof over your head or food on the table, changing your circumstances. And by that I meant getting more money is going to make you happy. And there's a famous paper by the Nobel Prize winning economist Danny Kahneman that sort of looked at this in around $2010. He found that if you're on the low end of the income spectrum, then getting more money and getting a higher salary will make you happier. But that kind of.

[B]

In fact, because you mentioned it, I don't remember the figure off the top of my head at some salary level, I think, didn't he find that even tripling your salary doesn't increase your happiness?

[A]

Exactly. And in $2010 he found that this was around at $75,000. So, you know, take you and I.

[B]

But not in Manhattan.

[A]

Yeah, not in, well, it's, you know, we can quibble every time I bring up this number. Like, well, in Manhattan it's different than like living in Iowa and like what if you're a single family couple in the standard.

[B]

I don't mean to fight, I don't mean to fight the.

[A]

But the point, the point of Kahneman's work is like there is some point at which it levels off and that point is probably not as high as we think. You know, it's a lot 20, 20, 24, $2025. It's probably around 110 maybe. But the point is it's not 100 million. Right after again, $2010 75k, which is what Danny originally studied. Doubling or tripling your income doesn't at all affect your stress levels, doesn't reduce your stress levels or increase them. It doesn't make you experience more positive emotions. Doesn't have the effect we think. Right, but let's get back to redistributing wealth. What does that mean? Well, that means if I take some money away from the folks who are earning 100 million, they're not going to notice it. It's not going to really negatively affect their happiness at all. But if you could get that money to somebody who was earning less than $75,000 in $2010, all of a sudden, that would make them a lot happier. And so I think we do get some hints that redistribution of wealth might be really useful. But another thing that we get, and I think we learn this more from the world happiness surve looking at Scandinavian countries is that what we really need out of wealth is sort of this support network, right? This kind of safety, right. So that if we get sick, if we lose our job and so on, we'll kind of have something to take care of us. One of the things that if you look at Scandinavian countries, this is Denmark in particular, many of them have these cultural sayings about kind of not being better than somebody else. The Danes have this idea of Jante's Law, which I'm probably saying wrong because I'm not Danish. But Jante's law is this idea that like you shouldn't really like strive to be better than somebody else. You shouldn't brag and say you're better. Like we're kind of just all equal. And I think that that fits with kind of what's happening in terms of not just their wealth levels but their kind of status levels and so on. Right. Because everybody has a social safety net, you know, if you, it doesn't really pay to go off and become like a super high powered lawyer because like probably paying taxes enough that you're not going to sort of see that same boost in wealth as you would maybe in the US and so the assumption is that that makes the folks who could have had this super high salary worse off. But the data really suggests it might not work that way. It might be imperceptible to those individuals.

[B]

Yeah, that's not great for the standing of your country in other ways and for GDP and for lots of other things. And how does this translate to sports are athletes. Are competitive athletes more or less happy than the average person, given what you just said?

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I think they experience a lot of pressure. There are less great surveys comparing exactly competitive athletes versus laypers people. But a lot of the competitive athletes you talk to, like, unless they're kind of finding ways to seek out a journey mindset and so on, are, you know, pretty miserable. Like, you know, I can't name names, but I've been called out to do a lot of consulting with, you know, competitive sports teams. You know, some of the best folks that, you know, I tell my dad and my brother and folks who are sports fans like, oh my God, you talked to this person about happiness? And I'm like, yeah, I did. Because despite what they're making, despite how amazing they're doing, how many championships they won't, they're still feeling pretty miserable. You know, that last championship came in and all of a sudden they're like, okay, now there's even more pressure for the next one. Right. And so these great circumstances, these amazing successes kind of don't make us as happy as we think.

[B]

Can I tell you a small thing that has made me happy in this moment?

[A]

Please? Yeah.

[B]

So that quote I mentioned about the pig dissatisfied or the pig satisfied, I thought was Aristotle. And then I self corrected sometime later and said John Stuart Mill, the team has informed me that it's actually John Stuart Mill amazing. So we didn't have the mistake persist in perpetuity in the podcast. And that makes me a little bit happy.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Let me ask about athletics again for a moment because there are very few in the world elite athletes for whom most of me a ridiculous existence. Right. You can be Tom Brady, you can be LeBron James, and you can be the best, literally the best athlete in your position and in your sport, in the world, or that the world has ever seen. And then you lose a game and you're very unhappy. So that's a certain kind of existence. But there are a lot of people who are listening, who have kids, who are in sports, and there's a lot of debate among Parenting communities about how we should handle sports and how competitive should be. My boys played Little League, and I remember there's sometimes there are signs at the park reminding folks, this is supposed to be fun.

[A]

This is a game. Parent.

[B]

This is a game.

[A]

This is supposed to be fun. Yes.

[B]

Leave your weapon at home. Please do not attack the ump. How should we be thinking about sports that are supposed to be fun and make you happy?

[A]

Yeah. Well, I think this is another spot where we need to kind of get back to this journey mindset. I mean, one of my favorite interviews that I did for my own podcast, the Happiness Lab, was with the Olympic skater Michelle Kwan, who I grew up admiring, and people have heard her name. Turns out she never won gold medal. And I kind of asked her, you.

[B]

Know, could have sworn she did.

[A]

Yeah, exactly. You kind of just like, update and assume. But what she would say was that, like, you know, that's fine. Like, I actually didn't, you know, I wanted to medal. That's why you're there. But the thing I most enjoyed was just, like, being at the Olympics. Like, she talked about the day that she got to first, like, lace up her skates and skate over the ice with the Olympic rings, because, you know, those colored Olympic rings, that symbol is, like, set in the ice, and she just remembers what it looked like sort of skating over the ice with those Olympic rings. She remembered what it felt like to be in this huge arena and hear the cheers of fans and the kind of murmur of just so many different languages and voices at once. Like, those are the things that she was enjoying, and she got those even though she didn't get a chance to get a medal. Right. And I think that's what we need to get back to for our kids in sports. Right. They're learning. Like, you know, you're having fun with your friends. You're just getting some exercise. Moving our bodies is one of the things, the easiest behaviors we can engage in to feel a little bit better. There's evidence that a half hour of cardio exercise is almost as effective as, like, a prescription for antidepressant medication. Right. Just like simply moving our body.

[B]

Wait a minute. How many milligrams is 15 minutes?

[A]

I don't know. I have to get down to it. But no, meta analyses show that literally, your psychiatrist could prescribe moving your body to reduce depression, reduce anxiety. It works just as well. It just doesn't make the pharmaceutical companies as much money. But, yeah, yeah. So these are all things that kids could be enjoying in the moment as part of the journey playing sports. But, you know, all too often, I think we just get caught up in whatever that victory is, whatever that arrival is at the end.

[B]

Yeah. So talking about a little bit of an older set, not kids, but people who are entering the job market or changing jobs, it seems to me that the correct advice is do a job that you, that you like and that you love every day as opposed to something that's going to get you some future objective. Right. I mean, I think part of the reason that my friends and colleagues at the U.S. attorney's office in the Southern District, where I was for a lot of time, I think now that I am thinking about these issues in these terms. I never thought about these issues in these terms before. Right. You're doing your job, and the job is to make sure you're doing justice, that the premium was not placed on getting the conviction, although that's gratifying and vindicating the rights of a victim and getting, you know, proceeds back to a victim who may have been, you know, robbed of their money in their bank accounts, et cetera, et cetera, but the joy and the satisfaction came from every day doing the job and talking to witnesses and appearing in court. And so the level of, you know, as proof of this question, I don't know how many people appreciate this. People who are in those prosecuting jobs, particularly at really high performing offices like my former office, are literally leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. I was able to persuade people to come back from private practice. And in private practice in New York, we're talking about millions of dollars coming back to work for a very good wage still in America, but like $150,000. The only reason you would do that, I think, is if the job brought you great satisfaction. And for that community, which is one of the reasons I thought it was special, that was more important than making money. Do we need more jobs like that?

[A]

Oh, I think definitely. Or we need to find ways to kind of bring the parts of the process that we really enjoy to those jobs. Right. Because if you're a high powered lawyer and private practice in New York, you might have the option to switch to be a prosecutor. Maybe you have enough money to retire and, you know, I don't know, become a glassblower or something. Not everybody has that privilege. And so there's an open question, if your job isn't so flexible, what are some ways you can bring the sense of values and purpose to this job? And here's a spot where I really love the work of My former colleague at Yale who's now at the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Rezninski, she does a lot of work on this process that she calls job crafting. And the idea is that with job crafting, you kind of sit down and you think, what are my strengths? What are my values? Maybe for these prosecutors who join, who kind of lose some money but kind of take this new job, well, it's really like working with people. Or I care about justice, right? Like, I want to. I really care about fairness, and I want to fight. Maybe it's bravery, right? Like, I got to push myself all the time, you know, kind of like fight these big fights, whatever it is, right? We could come up with all these different kind of strengths and values. The idea of job crafting is you take your normal job description and you figure out a way to bring those values in, no matter what it is. And the reason I love Amy's work is that she studies job crafting. Again, not in attorneys, not in podcasters. She studies job crafting in hospital janitorial staff workers, right? So these are people who are washing people's linen and cleaning the floors when people get sick. And she finds that between a quarter to a third of them really report that their job is a calling. You know, they have to get paid, but they. They love their job, and they would show up even if they weren't getting paid. And those individuals tend to be the ones that spontaneously job craft. They're, like, bringing their values in. She tells these lovely stories. One was a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked in a chemotherapy ward. And if you're listening now and you've had the unfortunate to have to get chemotherapy, you know, often makes people sick. So a big part of this guy's job was actually cleaning up vomit in the room. But he said, well, that wasn't my job. My values are kind of social intelligence and humor and empathy, right? I wanted to make these patients laugh. And so every time he had to go go up and clean some vomit, he would joke. He's like, oh, this looks like a big spill. I'm going to get overtime. And you're laughing. He was like, the people laughed. And that was my job. That's why I show up at work every day. And so I love Amy's work because it shows if you can get creative about job crafting. As a guy who cleans up vomit in a hospital, for most of the people listening right now, you can get creative about your own job, too. The key is figure out what things get me going, what do I really like? And ask the question, how can I infuse more of that into what I do every day?

[B]

You know, I want to talk about acts of kindness because you talk about that as being important. And I remember as a freshman in college, the freshman or sophomore in college, I took psych one from a giant in the field named Jerome Kagan. Oh yeah, and I remember and he, and he would, he would bust all these myths that, you know, we thought were true, but psychology teaches us are not. And one of those was when he said, if you want someone to like you, don't do them a favor, ask them to do you a favor. Because. Which is counterintuitive to say the least. Because the person who has done you a favor is now invested in you, which is related to this, this idea that you get, you know, gratification and happiness from doing kind things for other people. Can you talk about that and why that happens?

[A]

Yeah, I think this is a huge misconception that we all kind of get culturally right now. Right. If you look at any kind of not so evidence based article on happiness, they talk a lot about self care, treat yourself right. I think intuitively we think that the path to happiness is doing something nice for ourselves. But just as you said from the class you took with Jerome Kagan and probably decades of work since then, pretty much every study shows that we get a boost in happiness.

[B]

Not, it's not that many decades, one.

[A]

Two decades, two decades. One decade, two decades.

[B]

No, it's like three. It's like three decades. It's okay.

[A]

No, but the key is like, we get happiness from doing nice stuff for other people. One of my favorite studies on this was done by the University of British Columbia psychologist Elizabeth Dutton. She does this study where she walks up to subjects on the street and just hands them 20 bucks. But the key is that she tells you how to spend that 20 bucks. She either says, by the end of the day, spend this $20 on yourself, do something nice to treat yourself, or by the end of the day, spend this money to do something nice for somebody else. You have to, you know, donate it to an unhoused person. You could, you know, buy your friend a latte, whatever it is, but just like, gotta be for somebody else. And then she has people rate their happiness, and then she has people rate their happiness again at the end of the day once they've spent the money. And she finds that by and large people self report being happier when they've spent the money on other people. That's not what we predict, but it's sort of what the data show. And that means that as you've said, we can do something nice for others merely by asking people for help. I think this, you and I are having this conversation kind of at the end of the year where a lot of us are thinking about charity and so on. I think for some people, you know, donating some money is the thing to do, but some people are feeling financially kind of strapped right now and aren't able to do that. And I think the key is to remember that sometimes by asking the people around you for help, by being a little bit vulnerable, you can give a gift to someone else too. And so something that I think we often forget we can do for others, but it's really a way to let them feel competent, let them feel like they're doing something to give them a little bit of a happiness boost.

[B]

Why is it so counterintuitive though? What do we not understand about human psychology that that's such a revelation to us?

[A]

You know, I mean, there's so much that we get wrong about happiness. I feel like this is one piece. I mean, I think. But this bias is part of a larger thing we get wrong that folks like the University of Chicago's Nick Epley have christened under sociality. We just like all over the place misunderstand the big benefits that we get from other people. Like, we don't realize that doing something nice for others will feel good. We don't realize that chatting with a stranger will boost our mood. We don't realize that giving a simple compliment to a stranger, expressing our gratitude, asking for help, all of these things are like evidence based happiness boosters that make us feel really great and make us feel more satisfied with our lives. And so many of us are just leaving opportunities to do that, you know, on the table all the time.

[B]

It seems like such a win win proposition. Not to be corny about it, like.

[A]

Here'S the thing, it builds the pie. It builds the pie that will make you happy.

[B]

And also it helps another person. Yeah, why don't we have more charity? It makes you wonder, right?

[A]

Yeah, why don't we have more charity? Why don't we have just more.

[B]

It's not a sacrifice.

[A]

More kindness. Exactly.

[B]

Charity is not a sacrifice.

[A]

Yeah. And I think this is why I really love teaching students about the science of this stuff. Because it is true. Our mind just has these mistaken intuitions, right? Like I'm the professor who teaches this stuff and I've seen the studies I could Quote the stats. But, like, you know, when push comes to shove and I'm having a tough day and I'm gonna about to spend, you know, five bucks on a nice latte for myself, I'm not thinking, well, let me, you know, gift the person behind me in line this latte. That's what will really boost my happiness, right? I know the data, and I still don't have that intuition. I can put it into practice, right? Rationally, knowing this stuff, I've changed some of my behaviors around, but my intuitions haven't changed, and that's frustrating. It'd be nice if the mind were more cooperative and we could update all our intuitions, but it doesn't work.

[B]

By the way, the other intuition that he exploded, which is relevant as I age, is that you are more likely to remember the name of your second grade teacher than maybe a professor you had in a prior year. Which to me, as I talk about Professor Kagan, is also true because I remember his name. And now that I've done the math, it was like 35 years ago, and I can't remember the names of people I met on Monday. So that's another one. Can you talk about the importance of gratitude and what that means? Is it a muscle you exercise? Is it a sentiment you have? Is it passive? Is it active? And why does it matter?

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think one reason gratitude matters a lot. Gets back to what we were talking about before. This idea that we just kind of get used to stuff, right? That the good things in life just stop feeling as good if you keep getting them over time. Gratitude is powerful because it's a way to hack that, right? When you think, like, you know, I don't know, we took used the first class example, like, I'm sitting in first class. I might not have sat in first class. Look at these cool, like, little socks I get. Or this extra room in my chair. Like, I'm noticing that this feels really good, right? That's the power of gratitude. Kind of shine this little attention spotlight on what we have, and we notice that it didn't have to be that way, Right? We don't want to take this for granted because it might not always be this way. And that can really allow us to recognize the good things in life and to notice sort of the blessings. And really study after study just shows the benefits of this stuff, not just for our happiness, but for other things, too.

[B]

But what does that mean? Does that mean that you. So I'll give you an example in my own life, so I Have to actively practice gratitude. And I have a really good life. And I've had a really good life for a long time. But I was annoyed by some things at work. Something didn't go the right way or I was not as prepared as I might have been. Whatever. I was grumpy and cranky and my wife says to me, what did you do again yesterday? I said, what do you mean? What'd you do in the middle of the day yesterday for work? I said, I did a podcast interview. Who did you interview again? I said, steven Van Zandt. Little Steven from the E Street Band, who I love along with Bruce Springsteen. And they paid you to do that interview? I said, yeah, okay, I'm gonna stop complaining now. Is that what you have to do from time to time?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, really, one of the easiest interventions is just to commit to scribbling down three to five things that you notice that you're grateful for every day. Right? So that can be something really cool. Like I got to interview someone from my favorite music band ever, which maybe doesn't apply to everyone, but it can be simple things like, like my morning coffee, my kids smile, you know, the way the tail wagged, you know, there's like a little bit sunny, right? Like sometimes my gratitude things are just silly things. Like, you know, I was in the shower and the light in my shower sometimes creates this little prism and I notice it and it's just really colorful and it's great. Right? I think sometimes gratitude feels like has to be this big thing. Like I'm grateful for this really important thing in life, but sometimes you can kind of reduce it just to the like, little positives, the delights. I sometimes like to replace a gratitude practice with what I like to call a delight practice, where you just notice the cute, funny, beautiful, awe inspiring things in the world and just make a note of like, that was delightful. Sometimes that can feel a little bit lighter than kind of going for gratitude. But the key of a practice like this, where you notice it over time, is that you're training your brain to focus on this stuff. Another dumb feature of brains is that we tend to have what's called a negativity bias. Those hassles in life, the fact that you had a bad day, the grumpy stuff we notice all the time, we don't have to put any effort into it. It doesn't need to be intentional at all. It just comes for free. But the delights in life we gotta seek out. And the key about making it a practice is just like the exercise practices we were talking about earlier, you can kind of build up your reps and train your attention muscle to notice the good stuff. But it takes some intention and some energy. Energy.

[B]

But sunrises and sunsets are free, too.

[A]

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's all this stuff that's free. I recently just had Covid, and I guess these new variants of COVID are kind of like, back to the, like, OG Covid, where a lot of folks are losing their sense of taste and smell. And that happened to me. I completely lost my sense of taste and smell for about six weeks.

[B]

Oh, goodness.

[A]

And I hadn't noticed how awesome having smell was, like, at all. But as soon as I lost it, I was like, oh, my God. You know, once it started coming back, I'm like, like coffee, like, you know, my partner, like my bed sheets, my favorite soap, like, just.

[B]

But how long does that last?

[A]

You know, it's. It. It lasts long if you go back to it. Right. I've started to actually make a practice, and because I do my own little delight and sort of gratitude practice, I just kind of scribble in a notes app on my phone, and I have in big letters smell at the top. And so every time I see that, I sometimes go back to noticing of, like, oh, oh. It's actually cool that, like, I can smell the coffee right now, or I'm kind of out. It was like a really rainy day today where I am in New England. And it was like, just had that kind of crisp, wet smell. And I was like, this is a sensation I get. That's cool. And so the beauty of gratitude is it totally will go away if you don't intentionally practice it. But gratitude can be something that kind of brings you back.

[B]

How important are friendships to maintaining not just sanity, but happiness? I think they're very important. But you tell us.

[A]

Yeah, they're huge. I mean, if I had to pick one thing you could do to be happier, we'd be to improve and engage in social connection. Whether that's with a really good friend, with a stranger. And this is the kind of stuff that matters not just for things like happiness, but for longevity, too. There's some lovely work coming out of Bob Walderman's lab at Harvard that's been part of this sort of Harvard adult study of development. Right. So they follow individual Harvard Harvard students from way back in the day through their 80s. And now they're kind of continuing this longitudinal study studying, you know, not just the. Those individuals, but the kids of those individuals and the grandkids of those individuals. And one of the things that this really long running, huge study has found is that if you want the best predictor of happiness in life, but also health later in life, it really just seems to boil down to your social connections. They just matter much more than we.

[B]

Think in both ways. Right. So if you have a lot of connections and a lot of friendships, you're healthy. And I guess it follows that the opposite is true, but not always. And people who don't have friends or connections to loved ones are at the worst peril of depression and disease, right?

[A]

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the Surgeon General likes to quote that self reported loneliness. If you self report on surveys, you feel very lonely. That's as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It's twice as bad as being obese for all kinds of things like your existence of heart disease and inflammation and just like chronic health problems like just not having social connection. Is that bad?

[B]

Which age groups in America today are the happiest and which are the least happy? And I know it's going to be a disconcerting answer from you.

[A]

No, no, it's actually, it's actually pretty good, I think, for you. So, yeah. So historically we thought of happiness as sort of a U shaped function. So the young folks tend to be really high in happiness. Then you get to college, things go down. Your 30s, things go down. They hit a kind of Nadir around 48, 49. So I'm actually just turned 49, so I'm starting to go back up on the curve. Yep. And then things get better and better into old age, which is again, not what we expect. I think we expect the young side. That kind of makes sense that young people should be happier. But we don't see the kind of upswing towards the end of life. But the closer you get to death, despite the health problems, despite the grief, despite the kind of objectively bad stuff that we know happen can happen later in life, you actually wind up being happier. I think the only caveat to that though is that that U shaped pattern has been flattened over time. Older individuals have become less happy than they were, say 20 years ago. And much more profoundly, young people have become much, much more unhappy than they were.

[B]

Right.

[A]

No.

[B]

Well, that's the thing that gives me pause. That's why I was making the remark that I made. Because that's sort of sad and upsetting.

[A]

Super sad. Yeah. The time of life that you're most supposed to be happy are current young people.

[B]

Oh my gosh. I think about my kids who are. Who are happy and well adjusted, but they don't know how happy they should be.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

They have very good lives.

[A]

And even. And even if they're feeling okay, like their generation is not so right now. Among college students, over 40% report being too depressed to function most days. Over 60% say that they feel very lonely most of the time. Another over 60% report feeling very anxious. One in ten Conrad College students has seriously considered suicide in the last year. Right. Like, it's. It's really inevitable.

[B]

So what do we do about that, Professor?

[A]

Well, I think we try to teach people, you know, how to overcome their misconceptions when it comes to what matters for happiness. I think, you know, a lot of the misconceptions we've talked about pursuing money, pursuing these accolades, you know, at all costs. Right. Not investing in your social connection, not investing in other positive emotions like gratitude, you know, where you're sort of striving for everything, not noticing what you have. I think these are easy behavioral and mindset hacks that we can all engage in to feel a little bit better. I think our culture, especially for young people, has pushed people away from that, But I think there are things we can do to get back towards that.

[B]

Is there any correlation? I'm not a particularly religious person, but is there any correlation between the shrinkage of the church in all the various religions and the increase in unhappiness?

[A]

For sure, yeah. I mean, so the data on religion and happiness are interesting. So individuals who engage in more religious practices tend to be happier, but it's not the case that individuals who have strong religious beliefs are necessarily happier. What do I mean by that?

[B]

Well, that's super interesting.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Why is that?

[A]

I think it is, is that it's not the beliefs that matter for your happiness, it's your behaviors. Right. So take an individual who's really engaged in religious practices. They're probably doing things like going to services where they engage in social connection. They might be participating in charity, maybe they're saying prayers, where they experience a sense of mindfulness and presence and gratitude. Religious practices often involve a lot of the same behaviors and mindsets that we've just talked about that seem to matter for happiness. And that's what seems to give you a boost. And you have that. Not just kind of doing those kind of practices on your own. It's sort of part of a really rich set of traditions and beliefs that allow you to realize the importance of that stuff. And the key is that that's true Pretty much no matter what religious practice you're engaged in, all of them have these kind of features that tend to improve social connection, improve a sense of gratitude, sort of talk really strongly about doing nice things for others, make that a value. All of these things are kind of true in religion. And therefore, I think engaging in religious practices winds up making us happier.

[B]

We may have sort of incidentally covered this. You've talked a lot about the things that make you happy and the acts you can engage in. They'll increase your happiness. What's the opposite? What are the things that you do or that happen that make people the most unhappy?

[A]

Well, I think it's kind of investing in things that are sort of the opposite of that. Right. So we've talked about the importance of. Of engaging in gratitude, you know, kind of not falling prey to these sort of comparison biases. What's the thing that you can do that really brings up those comparison biases and make you feel like you don't have enough? I think hopping on social media for a lot of us, right. You know, kind of seeing these negative comparisons writ large kind of makes us feel terrible. I think engaging with our technology can also be an opportunity cost on social connection, which is ironic. Right. I think the portable phones that are in all of our pockets were initially designed, at least in part, to be used as a phone to, like, literally connect with somebody else. But how often have you not talked to someone in real life because you're staring at your phone and noticing what's going on on the other side of Reddit or the other side of some political blog and just, like, not talking to your spouse? And so I think the things that cause an opportunity cost of stuff like social connection, engaging in gratitude and so on, those things wind up being a real hit on our happiness that we often can't see directly.

[B]

Am I correct that listening to podcasts dramatically increases happiness?

[A]

For sure. And especially some podcasts.

[B]

I can think of two. I think of two in particular. Before I let you go, any advice for people entering the holiday season who have reason to be sad and not happy?

[A]

Yeah, Well, I think, you know, this gets to something we haven't talked about yet, which is negative emotions. Right. I think sometimes we think if you're experiencing those, it's just bad. It's just bad for happiness. But, you know, as Aristotle and other great thinkers would have said.

[B]

Are you sure it was Aristotle?

[A]

I think it was Aristotle.

[B]

It was a John Stuart Mill.

[A]

But as many. Many thinkers have said, you know, negative emotions are important part of the equation. Right. You know, I think what the way, the correct way to think about negative emotions is almost like the alert signal on your car. You know, if you're driving down the street and your engine light comes on or your tire light comes on, that's inconvenient. It might not be awesome. But if you ignore that, you kind of do so at your peril. I think if you're, you know, going through this holiday season and you're experiencing some grief, that's kind of like a tire light. Right. Like there's something you need to take some time to feel sad about. You might miss someone. You might need to take some time to think about those memories and kind of engage with that. If you're going through this holiday season and you're feeling a little bit lonely, that's probably a really honest signal that you need to reach out to somebody, make a connection, call a friend, and so on a really big one. If you're going through this holiday season, you're feeling overwhelmed, like you can't even. Like there's way too much on your plate. That's probably a really honest kind of engine light signal that you need to take something off your plate, that you need to give yourself a break, that you need to find some space in your schedule. And so I think if you're experiencing negative emotions, the right response is like, awesome, thank God I have that alert to tell me what I need to do to make changes so I can feel better. It's like if you're the only worse thing than having your tire go out is not having your tire light work. Because then you just wouldn't know. And then you find out on the highway somewhere. And so thank your negative emotion system. It's really giving you useful information that you can act on.

[B]

Also very sound automotive advice.

[A]

Also very sound automotive advice.

[B]

So final question. I want to go back to the definition. This may be a dumb and too clever by half question, but we have been taught that the opposite of love is not hate. They say the opposite of love is indifference. So my question is, what's the opposite of happiness? Is it actually sadness or is it the absence of feeling or something else?

[A]

Yeah, I think it's not negative emotions. Right. I think happiness. I always go back to sort of Aristotle's definition and really Aristotle's definition. Okay, I'm gonna look up John Stewart more his words. Eudaimonia. Right? Like happiness is about living a good life. And I think the opposite of eudaimonia is feeling like something's off. You're feeling overwhelmed. You're not feeling like you have a sense of purpose. You're feeling kind of meh, like those kinds of signals that you're really not living up to the good life that you could be. And so by making some changes, that research really shows that you can get back to Aristotle's definition of eudaimonia and a kind of way of pursuing happiness. That'll feel a lot better.

[B]

Dr. Laurie Santos, thank you. I made a list of simple things just to summarize. Have gratitude for simple things, engage in acts of kindness and get more friends. We can all do that.

[A]

Sounds pretty good.

[B]

We can all do that, right?

[A]

Sounds pretty good.

[B]

Okay. Thanks so much for your insight. You should come back a lot because I feel better already.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

Thanks so much.

[A]

Thanks so much, Brit. Thanks for having me on the show.

[B]

My conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos continues for members of the Cafe Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss what we call the Keanu Reeves doctrine and mastering the art of letting things go.

[A]

I think what he's onto is something important, right? Which is that all of us mess up every once in a while, right? And it's important to kind of give people some compassion.

[B]

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.cominsider Again, that's cafe.cominsider. to end the show this week, I'd like to reflect a little further on the interview you just heard with Laurie Santos. Dr. Santos described during our interview something called the arrival fallacy, the mistaken belief that happiness waits for us at some distant destination. A promotion, a bigger house, a certain milestone. But time and again, research and life experience remind us that happiness isn't a place we arrive at. It's the journey itself. Now, that may sound corny, it may sound like a cliche, but that's because it's true. She also spoke about the power of gratitude, that when we stop to notice what we have, we shine a light on the things we might otherwise take for granted. Again, cliche, sure, but that's because it's true. And we still don't do it enough. So as the year winds down, maybe we can make time to savor the moments that truly matter, the time spent with family, the laughs shared with friends, and the quiet, ongoing journey of discovering ourselves. This holiday season, let's try to give ourselves the gift of presence, of slowing down long enough to appreciate the path. And finally, from my conversation with Lori Santos, the thing that surprised me the most and that stuck with me the most was the revelation supported by science that helping other people not only makes the person you're helping happier, but in fact the person doing the helping happier. Acts of kindness, even small ones, are a path to your own happiness. As Laurie pointed out, there's all this discussion in the happiness sector about self care and taking care of yourself and worrying about your own body and your own health and your own prosperity. And that's all good and important, but the path to happiness also comes from helping other people out. Be good to yourself always, but also be good to other people. Science says that it'll make you happier. From all of us here at Stay Tuned with Preet, we wish you peace, gratitude, good health and a renewed appreciation for the journey. Happy Holidays. Well, that's it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me, Reet Bharara with the hashtag AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That's 66924, Preet. Or you can send an email to letterscafe.com Stay tuned. It's presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tadashore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noah Azolai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernandez and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Leanna Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I'm your host, Preet Bharara. As always, Stay Tuned.