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 shameful.

So hedonic happiness, I think, is what a lot of lay people 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, right?

Like there's something that it feels like to feel like things are good.

And often when we're thinking of hedonic pleasure, we're thinking of the real basic stuff, the 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 what 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?