Lionel Page is a professor at the University of Queensland and an author. Lionel is one of my favourite writers so I had to bring him on to uncover the invisible psychology which drives our happiness. How can we optimise for wellbeing in a world full of distractions and pressures? Why does persistent happiness remain so elusive, and what shifts can help us build a healthier, more sustainable relationship with it? Expect to learn what everyone gets wrong when thinking about happiness, the most important mechanisms that drive our wellbeing, how the role of comparison on social media contributes to overall happiness, why evolution didn’t design us with the ability to simply feel greater and greater satisfaction, the role of a meaningful life, why we overestimate the importance of our future success and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom Get $150 discount on Plunge’s amazing sauna or cold plunge at https://plunge.com (use code MW150) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Dude, I am in love with your sub stack. I subscribe to a lot of different sub stacks and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year. You're absolutely destroying it, dude. It's so great. It's evolutionary lens on things, big picture questions that everybody's already asking. I think it's awesome.
So when it comes to, I guess, what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied? What is missing from that?
Look, excellent question. So in one of my posts, I have this cheeky picture of, you know, the elephant and the blind. I think it comes from India, the story. And the story, I'm sure lots of your listeners have heard about it, but you've got a bunch of blind people and they're put in front of an elephant and they are asked, okay, what an elephant looks like?
And so, you know, one touches the trunk of the elephant and says, well, an elephant is kind of, you know, looks like a tube and it's wet at the end. And everyone touches... The tail says, well, you know, it looks like a string and it's very fluffy at the end. And another one can say, well, it's very hard, you know, and it's very smooth.
And so when you read the literature, sometimes in behavioral sciences and social sciences, and when they don't have an evolutionary perspective, you get the same kind of stuff. You know, I talk about the books on self-help, books on psychology of happiness. And you will see, you get a book, and this book will tell you to be happy, you need social connections.
The secret of happiness is to have friends, to have family. Okay, that's very interesting. You take another book, and this other book will tell you the secret of happiness is to control your desires, to learn not to want what you don't have. That's Taoism, that's Buddhism.
And another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars, to have very high goals, and to work very hard towards it. And then you look at these different things like, okay, but what's the link between these different things? I mean, are we talking about the same things that we're talking about? Happiness. And there is one explanation.
What's the connection between these different stories? And these books are like the blinds, you know, giving you a perspective of the elephant. And the elephant about happiness is that you have to consider that happiness is a system of valuation, design. And I use the word design, you know, not designed by a designer, but evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it's designing stuff.
designed by evolution to help you make decisions. And so when you take this perspective, all these different kind of secrets of happiness make sense, but in a big picture. So you're asking, you know, what kind of stuff it explains. Like, for instance, as I say, we are social species, so we will need connections. That's one fact.
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