David DeSteno

In Judaism, even on New Year, the year that you're supposed to be celebrating what's going to come, part of the service is a prayer called the Unetana Tokep.

In Christianity, there's Ash Wednesday.

In Buddhism, there is

having meditations on death, even some where the monks, these are hugely intense, will actually meditate in front of a decaying corpse to actually really see what happens when you die.

So why is this a good thing?

Well, when you meditate on death, what it does is it

increases the sense that your end could come at any time and when that happens science shows it reorients people's values that is suddenly what you care about isn't um getting the new iphone or where you're going to go on vacation or you know are you going to get a raise it really becomes focused on um

finding people you care about and sharing experiences with them, engaging in some type of service.

Science shows that these are the things that bring the most happiness to people.

And so this simple practice of not doing it in a morbid way, but of contemplating a little bit your death daily, is a way of constantly reorienting your values to the things that actually matter.

brings joy.

And, you know, another one is what do all religions do?

They have prayers of gratitude or rituals of gratitude.

What does gratitude do?

Well, in my lab, we study gratitude a lot.

And when we make people feel grateful, either by counting their blessings or by doing lots of other shenanigans that we do to make them feel grateful, um,

they not only become more likely to repay favors, they become more likely to pay them forward to help others.

They become more generous.

They become more honest.

They will cheat less when we give them opportunity to do that, right?