Happiness

“So we get wired for problem seeking and problem destruction. It's good for achievement, but it's not good for happiness is to be a problem seeker.”

“People tend to be happy early in life. And then in mid, mid years, there's this like, they call it the smile curve. Cause like generally they become a little less happy. And then that curve goes like up and up and up as people get older, which is really intere…”

“What I think is true. Is that on average, people who have more money tend to have fewer bad days, but I don't know if they have more better days.”

“Happiness is always a fleeting emotion. Like most people are rarely happy for more than a couple minutes at a time. And I think it's very similar to humor, where if I tell you a very funny joke, you don't laugh for 10 years. You laugh for a couple minutes. Hum…”

“Both money and happiness are They're like oxygen. When you don't have any, they solve everything, but when you have some, it solves nothing, right? So yeah, if you're broke, go get some money. Like, that's definitely gonna solve your problems, and if you're re…”

“Happiness is always a five minute emotion. Happiness never hits you for more than a couple minutes at a time.”

“If you're happy, more money will make you happier. If you're poor, more money is likely to make you happier. If you're not poor or you're not happy, more money is not going to do a thing.”

“Happiness and unhappiness are not opposites. They're largely governed in different hemispheres of the brain, as a matter of fact. So to say, if I got rid of the screens and had fewer aggravations and mood disorders, I would be happier. That's wrong. You'd be l…”

“There actually isn't very much correlation at all between cognitive ability and happiness.”

“We find that non-religious people tend to be less happy than religious people because they don't think that there's something big and good and beautiful that, that, that lies in store for all of us if we live right”

“There are ways to buy happiness. Now to begin with, more money early on, and there's a bunch of studies on this that shows that when you have more money, when you're poor, then you, your wellbeing does rise. And the reason is not because of happiness. It's bec…”

“So there's five things you can do with money. Okay. This is a very much a Cody Sanchez part of the conversation, isn't it? Number one, you can buy stuff, right? We've already talked about that. Number two, you can buy experiences. Number three, you can buy tim…”

“It shows that happiness increases post 500 K in income or up to 500 K in income. After 500 K, there's sort of these plateaus, and it's not really materially different.”

“As someone climbs the intelligence curve, AKA they become more and more intelligent as measured by IQ, it turns out that being around other people, social interaction, friends or otherwise actually decreases your happiness.”

“And it's this thing of just, like, if your expectations shift, then the littlest thing can make you upset. It's like, when you go to the quiet car, yes, it is quieter, but you also have this, like, sound debt that comes with it, you could say. This invisible s…”

“Like what can money do to make you happier? Because there's no other purpose. There's nothing else that you should even think about other than that.”

“Happiness, which is not a feeling. Very important because emotional self-management is critical to living a good life. And if you're just hoping for happy feelings, this is not going to lead you to emotional self-management. So, so we start off with a proper d…”

“Then we talk about the dishes in the happiness diet. And those dishes are faith, family, friends, and work.”

“The researchers can tell you, and there's a lot of good research on this, making happiness your goal is a way to make you unhappy.”

“I do think there is an algorithm for happiness, though, a pretty good one, and that is to be rich but anonymous, because at some point I'm going to become the villain.”

“A lot of people say, you know, if you want to be happy, don't have expectations, and I think that's a really good way to be unhappy for the rest of your life, because people, if you don't have expectations, there, you will just put up with everything, right? I…”

“Happiness is not an average rate, man. It's a rate of change. You gotta go thinking in calculus again, right? If a person is sitting still, no matter where they're at, whether they have a bunch, let's use money. If a person has a bunch of money or no money, th…”

“I feel like being indifferent, and having low expectations, like really low expectations, is the key to happiness and content.”

“You know, even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect. You know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is li…”

“You know, there's studies that look at people who get those wonderful things, and yeah, you get a little happiness boost for a little while, but it doesn't seem to last. Lasting happiness comes from something else.”

“When you really do that work, what you find is that the effect of the correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors. So going to church, doing nice things for other people, you know, taking part in al…”

“There's so much evidence that when we're mind wandering, when we're not fully present, that that's a time when we're also not very happy.”

“If you actually look at the chart shows that if you look at it on a non log scale, which he puts the graph here, it's basically like the more money you have, the more your satisfaction goes up and there's no flattening out. It doesn't go up at the same rate. S…”

“Most of what we think is competition is just made up and is hurting your happiness.”

“Money never bought happiness. Even early on, you find that people actually have a higher affect balance. They feel better about their lives when they go from poor to not poor. It's absolutely true, but it's not because they're getting happier. This sounds like…”

“Happiness and unhappiness are, as cognitions are processed in different hemispheres of the prefrontal cortex. Literally, a different part of your brain is lighting up when you're having unhappy feelings as opposed to happy feelings.”

“My intuition is that really it turned around in the late 19 eighties and that since the late 19 eighties, we actually have been a relatively secular decline where we came up a little bit at the end of the nineties, beginning in the 2000. And most definitely we…”

“And 50% of your happiness is genetic, by the way.”

“Happiness arises from one's relative standard of living, whether that's relative to how you lived last year or how you're living relative to your neighbor and seeing some progression over time is the only thing that keeps people happy.”

“There is no correlation. Zero. Between happiness and achieving a milestone.”

“I will guarantee you that that path will continue to bind you in unhappiness, because there is no point where you suddenly wake up once you're on that treadmill and think, oh, that was it. That extra million, or that extra ten million, or that extra billion, t…”

“A recipe for happiness is to help our child over and over again choose to give up what they want at that moment for something they actually want more.”

“Nobody has kids because kids bring immediate happiness. On the contrary, you find all the evidence suggests that every additional kid you add to your house lowers your happiness.”

“There is virtually no correlation between the amount of money one has and one's happiness that's pretty well known past a certain basic The factor that's the highest correlation is whether is relationships, sense of community across societies.”

“To some extent, you know, our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels, these are also habits.”

“Today I believe that happiness is it's really a default state. It's what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.”