Dr. David DeSteno
speaker
1,091 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2025
last heard Aug 2025
Dr. David DeSteno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
When you're young, you want the new iPhone, you wanna go on a great vacation, you wanna get ahead, all of these kind of bucket list things for that you think will make you happy.
As you begin to age and you can see the end on the horizon, people's values change.
Suddenly they value time with loved ones, service to others, kind of things that build a legacy, right?
Interestingly, if you look at the literature, those are the things that really bring happiness at any age.
Those are the things that experiences of people you love, service to others, make you happy.
And so as we age, we come to realize that.
Work by the psychologist Laura Karstensen at Stanford shows that if you have people contemplate their death when they're young, temporarily it reorients their values toward the things that truly bring hope.
Suddenly they'll start caring about that stuff.
And so the idea of contemplating death that is a part of almost every religious tradition, if you do it for a short period of time and not in a morbid way but daily, actually points you toward the things in life that make you more happy.
And so...
If you then become a person of faith, you also believe that the end is going to be good for you as well.
And so you don't have that anxiety.
And so I think religion and death is a complicated thing.
There is fear of death, but there's also a way to use the idea that life is ephemeral to help us find happiness sooner than we typically do.
I have a friend who's a rabbi and not being Jewish, one day I said to her, so, you know,
why do you still pray in Hebrew?
You know, in Catholicism, we don't pray in Latin anymore.
Like we pray in English.
Yeah, good point.
Right.
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