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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Kevin Roos. I'm Casey Newton. And we're the hosts of Hard Fork, a show from the New York Times about technology and the future. About the future that's already here, Kevin. Every week on the show, we bring you news from the front lines of tech, interviews with key newsmakers, wacky experiments that we get up to, and we just generally have a lot of fun.
Yeah, so whether you're curious about developments in AI or just what's happening on TikTok, we are here for you. So that's Hard Fork.
You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.
From The New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. Are you happy? It's a deceptively simple question, right? But for me at least, it's a really difficult one to answer. Another tough question. Why is it so hard to be happy for so many people?
Despite a culture of wellness influencers with their happiness hacks and mindset tricks, all of the indicators show that we Americans are less happy than ever. What is going on and what can we do about it? I put those questions to Dr. Lori Santos. Santos is a cognitive scientist whose class on happiness quickly became the most popular in Yale's history.
And through her podcast, The Happiness Lab, and her free online course called The Science of Well-Being, Santos' reach has extended well beyond the classroom.
I wanted to understand what the science says happiness really is, how our understanding of what it takes to be happy has changed over time, and why, with the pandemic in our rearview mirror, it's still been so hard for me, and many others, to do the things that will actually make us happier. And what she told me was surprising. Here's my conversation with Dr. Lori Santos.
Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad you could join me. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I am going to start in a bit of a strange place because like so many people in the world, I was really obsessed with the story of Punch the Monkey, that little monkey in Japan whose mother sort of rejected him and he had no one to socialize with. So he adopted that Ikea monkey toy. Yes.
And I have a theory about punch that connects to happiness. And I wanted to put it to you because apart from being a happiness expert, you also study animal cognition and you started your work with monkeys. Literally everyone that I know sent me information about punch. I was like getting in real time what was happening with punch.
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Chapter 2: Why is happiness a complex question for many people?
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.
You know, I spent a lot of time in advance of this conversation really thinking about the nature of happiness. And I want to start by digging into just what happiness is and maybe do some basic defining of terms because I went down a few rabbit holes. You can. It's very easy to do with this term in particular.
Yeah.
And so as I discovered, lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece. And there's two main types of happiness, according to ancient Greek philosophers, as far as I could tell. And one is hedonic and the other one is eudaimonic. Can you explain what that is, what the difference is, what they were looking at back then?
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?
And a lot of the interventions I talk about with my students and maybe we'll even talk about today, there's a real question about which type of happiness we're building up. And I think where the research falls is saying that like if we want to do this well, we should probably be going more for the eudaimonic stuff. Like that's the stuff we don't get used to.
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Chapter 3: What does Dr. Laurie Santos say about the science of happiness?
They probably grew up the same way and so on. And so what scientists do is they say, well, if there's a genetic component to happiness, if something about the variance that we see in the population is controlled by our genes, then those identical twins should look more similar in terms of their happiness than the fraternal twins. And like lots of studies have looked at this.
And what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. In other words, that doesn't mean there's a gene for happiness or anything like that. That means that some of the variants that we see in the population is due to the fact that somebody has one set of genetics versus another set of genetics.
The important thing to know about those heritability studies, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low. It's about the same rate as what you'd see for the heritability of something like religiosity or risk-taking, right? I mean, religiosity is probably, you know, if your parents were super religious, maybe you're more likely to be super religious, but obviously it's not set in stone.
Same thing with risk-taking. And I think that's the message of happiness. Yeah, there's probably some component that's a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control. so we can learn to be happy? I think that's the premise of my work, honestly. It's that we have much more control over it.
And interestingly, this was something that the ancient Greeks didn't totally realize. You know, if you look at Aristotle, he's like, we should cultivate virtue, you can do it, but it's going to be hard. You know, Aristotle talked about the happy few.
It's like, you know, you can go for it, but it's going to take a lot of work and probably a lot of folks aren't going to be up for that level of work. I think we think it's a little bit more malleable scientifically today, but we still share with Aristotle this idea that like, if you want to be happy, you can do it. But like all good things in life, you got to put some time in.
When we think about happiness or well-being, is there a goal or is it just in the way that Aristotle said, an endless pursuit? I mean, can we reach the mountaintop and we just sit there or is it just always... searching for that place.
The pursuit of happiness is not like a destination. Like if I hopped on a flight and I got to L.A. If I hopped on a flight to get to L.A., I'd just be in L.A. And I'd be like, all right, L.A., I'm here. If I had the ability to stay, I could just stay there for a whole time. But like happiness doesn't work like that. It's not really a destination.
And I think that it's funny when we think about happiness because I think we do kind of think of it as a destination, but we don't think of that with other good things in life. You know, take fitness. Like, say you're trying to get fit. I'm going to go to the gym. It would be awesome if you took, like, one really hard HIIT class and then you're just good.
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Chapter 4: How do hedonic and eudaimonic happiness differ?
One is that this is the first time where we're not having all the, like, Middle Ages stuff that you were just talking about, right? This is less— 18th century, again, a little less pestilence, a little less terrible stuff going on. Life is starting to feel more controllable, like even in really stupid ways, right? They could control the smoke that was coming out of their chimneys.
They made bedding that was like a little bit softer. They had better lighting in their houses, right? Better food. Better food, right? It started to feel like, oh, I can, it's reasonable to think I might be able to control my hedonic happiness because I've seen some evidence that my actions can do that. And at the same time, you get cultural changes that fit with this, right?
This is around the science-y time of like Isaac Newton and others where we're learning like objects just move in certain ways. You know, gravity pushes objects towards one another. Scientists are also starting to think, well, what does that mean for humans? Oh, we move towards pleasure and away from pain. These are like Jeremy Bentham type arguments about this stuff.
So the idea is like, oh, we're built to seek out pleasure. Like this is a thing we should go for. So, yeah, so I think every generation has wanted to feel happy. I mean, I think, you know, Bentham was right. We are built to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. But the cultural context in which we think about that can be different over time. We are in the notion of, like...
It looks maxing, like, you know, like getting all your pleasure right now and, you know, spa pedicures and this kind of stuff. I think we really just definitionally think of happiness as about me, me, me. And so much of the science and so much of this classic wisdom tells us, no, it's not. Like, that's the way you get off track. That's the way you pursue it in the wrong way.
All right. So that brings us to what we deal with today. Yes. And I really want to focus on social connection because the pandemic, I think, showed us that if you don't have it, you're really, really going to suffer in ways that were – perhaps not clear. And I have been trying to figure out what happened to me during that period, honestly.
I became a lot more insular, and I had to sort of relearn how to make those social connections after that period. Am I typical?
Yeah. No, studies bear this out. Pretty much every survey I know of that asks people about COVID, like, was it smooth sailing when you jump back into it? People are like, no, right? There was some friction to this. We kind of got out of practice from it. And that makes sense because... Even though we're built to be social, right?
Even though in some sense this should be easy, social connection is hard, right? There's another mind there that you're trying to like navigate and predict and you don't often get direct access to it. So it is clunky and it does have some friction, right?
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Chapter 5: What role do genetics play in our happiness levels?
Like, they're built to be interesting. They're built to have every interesting thing in the history of the universe. But the consequence of our eyeballs being glued to them is really dangerous, dangerous for the social connections we care about most.
I mean, this speaks to the wider situation in which we find ourselves, because I was looking at some data from 2012 to now, and there was a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute that shows that across all age groups, people are now socializing with their neighbors less. And the authors blame a lot of things like technology, political polarization, post-pandemic issues.
But do you think we've just become sort of as a nation, indoor cats instead of outdoor cats? Like we just have lost the ability to...
roam in the wild yeah i mean i think there's something to that and this is something that scholars have been worried about for a while right rewind the late 90s early 2000s and you have robert putnam's like seminal book on bowling alone where he argued like back in the day we'd go out to bowling alleys and we people would bowl with their friends and bowl together and bowl leagues
Nowadays, or nowadays being, you know, early 2000s, nowadays people just go and they bowl alone, right? They're not part of a league. They're not talking to their neighbors. They just talk to their immediate friends. I talked with Robert Putnam for my podcast, you know, and he had this interesting idea of like, you know, I wrote that before, like the internet was like in baby days.
Like we didn't know that like viral TikTok videos were coming, right? We didn't know that there was television, which he was worried about, right? That was one of the factors he talked about. But we didn't know there was going to be like, you know, streaming services that picked algorithms to get you exactly the best documentary that only you, Lulu, would love, right?
We're fighting against technology that makes stuff interesting and attractive. Like there are whole companies that are built to keep our eyeballs on that stuff. Of course, regular social connection with my friend at the bowling alley might suffer like in the face of that kind of competition.
Yeah.
Yeah, I also spoke to Robert Putnam and his prescription was to put it, you know, succinctly, join a club, right? But I think a lot of people feel like they don't have time for that in between work and caretaking. They don't feel like they've got time anymore for those kinds of labor-intensive social connections. Yeah.
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