The Exchanges

Q How do you think about the role of religion and happiness then? Because it strikes me as you're talking that religion had a ritual around most of these things, right? You would go to church every Sunday, you would see people, you would connect with them, you'd see different people than you, you would get a different perspective on life. Talk to me about that.

A Yeah, well, there's lots of work that specifically looked at religion and happiness, and, and overall, what that work finds is that religious individuals tend to be happier on average, um, but you could imagine that's for two reasons. One is that, you know, many religions come with a whole host of, you know, spiritual beliefs about, you know, the afterlife, about, you know, a god, and whether there's someone taking care of you, you know, power bigger than you, and so on. These religions also involve the thing that I think you're getting, Which is all these rituals, right? Like, they force you to be a little bit more social. You, you, like, hang out with everybody on Sunday, or on the Sabbath, or something like that. Um, often they involve doing nice things for other people, and being present in prayer, and so on. And so, when scientists really try to dig into that, which is tricky, you have to separate, you know, people who are very religious, you know, then they have really strong beliefs, but then don't go to services as much, and so on, versus people who are kind of like, you know, I say I'm Catholic, but I'm kind of agnostic, but like, you know, I go every Sunday, and I go to the spaghetti suppers, and so on. 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 b…

AI assessment note: “correlation between religion and happiness seems to be pretty fully mediated by those religious behaviors”

Q And, and are there cultural differences in terms of what makes us happy? We're going to dive into the evidence-based approaches here in a second, but I'm wondering how much of what we know about happiness is Western versus Eastern, and how much of it correlates across all cultures?

A Yeah, I think, you know, I mean, many of these studies are done in Western populations. Um, you know, the psychologist Joe Heinrich often talks about how psychology has a WEIRD problem, um, and he uses the, the acronym WEIRD for, uh, Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. Most subjects in every published psychology study are Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, like, and they, they kind of come from those things, and that, Leaves out a whole host of different populations with different kinds of identities and backgrounds. Um, so that is true of the work that we talk about. That said, you know, for a lot of the practices I'm mentioning, when you look cross-culturally, what you find is that these things work everywhere you go. Um, you know, take the case of, you know, pro-social behavior, doing nice things for others, which is one that I think has been best studied worldwide. Um, Laura Aknan, um, has done some fantastic work on this stuff. Where she looks at the correlation, for example, between volunteering or donating money and happiness worldwide, and, and she's able to do that because you have some nice, you know, big Gallup surveys that look at these kinds of things, and she finds it's pretty much true in, like, every single country you study, right? Like, the idea is it's probably a cultural universal, and my guess is for most of these things, …

AI assessment note: “when you look cross-culturally, what you find is that these things work everywhere”

Q Let's talk about kids for a second. Can we adjust our kids sort of like baseline level of happiness based on our own modeling of behavior, or is it all sort of genetic? And is there a magic window where we can influence their happiness set point sort of easier? Yeah.

A Yeah. I mean, Sue, when you look at happiness and genetics, you kind of get, you know, two kinds of messages. One is that there's, there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable. So some of the variants we see in the population about, you know, happy people and not so happy people, that variance is probably due to somebody's genetic history, right? Um, however, that doesn't mean that genetics is destiny. Um, you know, even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect. Um, you know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's, it's not, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is like, well, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't. That's just simply not the case. And that means that there's a lot of room for, you know, the environment and epigenetic effects to take hold. And usually when I mean environment, I mean, like, you and your behavior of what you're doing to promote your happiness. And so that's the story about happiness and genetics. And I think, you know, as a parent, as you think about conveying these things to kids, I think it's about kind of building in these right strategies early on. You know, I focused on college students. I wish my college students got a lot of these techniques and learned about these evidence-based approaches much earl…

AI assessment note: “estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%”

Q What else comes to mind when you think about, um, sort of parenting, uh, techniques that are well intentioned, but you're seeing in college kids that, uh, backfired?

A Yeah, I think another one is, you know, I think a lot of parents are worried about their kids' well-being, um, and I think that that's, you know, good. I obviously want parents to care about how their kids are doing, um, but it tends to be, you know, in my experience, you know, very anxious parents that are worried about their very anxious kids. You know, when I meet the parents and I hear their anxieties about the kids' grades, I'm like, well, no wonder your kids are anxious about grades because you're embodying all of these kind of anxieties, and so I, I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of emotional contagion, that like, you know, we naturally catch other people's emotions. If you're embodying calm, and this is going to be fine, and everything's okay, then kids are going to follow that. If you're embodying, you know, anxiety, and like, oh my gosh, this is so, you know, important, like, kids are naturally going to catch that too. Um, and I think that that, that's tricky to remember. You know, I often get parents saying, oh, what can I do to, you You know, make my child feel happier, and I'm like, well, have you focused on your own happiness? Like, how are you doing? And it's like, well, no, no, no, I want to, I want to focus on them, and it's like, you know, you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, right? Not just because, you kno…

AI assessment note: “very anxious parents that are worried about their very anxious kids”

Q feeling burnt out and emotionally drained, and importantly, what specifically you can do that's backed by science to feel better. We'll also talk about an underappreciated aspect of happiness, protecting yourself from unhappy people. It's time to listen and learn. We put a ton of effort and energy into being happy, and yet so few of us actually seem happy. Why not? Like, what misconceptions do we have about happiness?

A I mean, I think it's important to start with this idea that we put so much effort in, right, because I think you could sometimes think about happiness of like, oh, we're all not feeling so happy, and that's because we're not, we're not trying, like, we need to try more, and I think that's not the problem. I think people are putting tremendous energy into the kinds of things that they think are going to make them feel good, feel successful, you know, lead to a meaningful life, but then even though we're putting in as much effort, we're kind of not getting anywhere, and I think the issue is that Our minds, the way I like to talk about it on the podcast is that our minds lie to us about the kinds of things that make us happy. We have these strong intuitions that, you know, if this would happen, I would be happily ever after, right? You know, if, like, I have the perfect job, or if I get a higher salary, or if I get a certain accolade at work, if I become partner, or for my students, if I get, you know, perfect grades, like, people think if those things happen that they'll feel happier, and 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. And so, yeah, so the problem isn't that we're not working at it, it's that we, we…

AI assessment note: “our minds lie to us about the kinds of things that make us happy”

Q Let's explore that a little bit because where do we get the idea that like a boat or a yacht or a house is going to make us happier in the first place? Is, is that sort of like, uh, related to René Girard and mimetic desire?

A I mean, part of it is that we're going, part of it is that we, we pick up on whatever reference points we see, right? And, you know, a capitalist society where we see stuff on social media and on the news is going to show us what it looks like to have high status, what it looks like to have happiness. And I think there are a lot of advertisers out there who could do a good job of convincing us, like, you know, look how happy everything would be if you had X product that we're trying to sell you. And so I think part of it's our culture shows us these kind of representations and those just naturally become reference points. Points that our brain soaks up and, and tries to go after. I think also we're evolved to go after the wrong stuff. Um, you know, you know, we, we are products of natural selection, which is a, a blind process that, you know, if you kind of intentionalize it, it's kind of going for anything that will get you to survive and reproduce into the next generation. So natural selection is like double down on all the resources, all the accolades, all the status, all that stuff, just in case, right? Cause we really want to, you know, make sure our genes get out there. Um, and that's, it doesn't care about you being happy. Like, it really wants you to be a craving, striving, always pushing for more genes in the next generation individual. And so I think we're, you know, …

AI assessment note: “part of it's our culture shows us these kind of representations”

Q What's your gut tell you about why we're feeling more lonely now than, than before?

A Um, I think, again, it's lots of things. I think, I think the technology really is a hit on this stuff. I mean, I noticed this myself. You know, I teach this stuff, and I try to be really careful about this stuff, but there are definitely opportunities that I've lost out on for in real life social connection because of my phone, right? You know, I, I'm embarrassed about the number of times I'm like, huh? And my husband was talking to me about something, and I was looking at something on my phone, but it wasn't like some important, like, you know, do or die email. It was probably like, The weather, or like, you know, I don't know. I was looking at real estate prices. This is like some stupid, incredible thing. Um, Katherine Price has this harrowing story that she told, uh, on my podcast that the woman who wrote this, uh, How to Break Up With Your Phone book, um, about she had just, uh, had a new baby, and she was nursing, and she realized as she was nursing that her baby was looking up at her into her eyes, and she wasn't making eye contact because she was looking at her phone to buy new doorknobs. She was like, I need new doorknobs. I'm doing this kitchen renovation. And she was like, oh my god, this, you know, like, millions of years old evolutionary moment of a parent looking at a nursing baby, and I'm not even present there because, like, I'm looking at friggin' doorknobs, y…

AI assessment note: “I think the technology really is a hit on this stuff.”

Q that we can do? Because in that moment, what's happening is we're reacting and we're not reasoning, right? So we're thinking we're just in automatic mode. And how can we get out of that automatic mode? How can we put a clutch in or just a slow down and just a kind of change of gear? How do we create that pause where we can move from reacting to reasoning?

A Yeah, I mean, one is, one is finding ways to be more present, and allowing yourself to notice what those emotions are, right? Like, when you're, you're in that meeting with a surly colleague, if you can develop these practices of mindfulness, you can be like, I'm watching my blood pressure rise, like, that thing with my jaw is happening, like, this is a signal that I, like, I'm feeling pissed, like, okay, like, it's okay to be pissed, but then now I have strategies to kind of deal with that. Um, you know, another is to kind of watch your reactions, and that, that The kind of timing of things. You know, this is where I often catch it, where it's like, you know, I'll, I'll have some interaction with a co-worker where I'm really annoyed, but then like three hours later, I'm talking to my podcast producer and texting about like, can you believe she, and, and he actually is, you know, we, he, he, we know the second arrow stuff, so he'll text me back to arrow emojis, and I know I'm like, you know, it's four hours later, like she has nothing to do with this, right? This is me, you know, keeping this going. And so, A little bit of mindfulness can really go a long way here of, like, once, because once you have this moment of noticing, you realize, like, I don't have to be my thoughts. I don't have to be my emotions, right? I can kind of, I can hit pause, and I can react to this differen…

AI assessment note: “finding ways to be more present, and allowing yourself to notice what those emotions are”

Q in terms of, uh, evidence-based approaches people can use, uh, writing down what you're grateful for, uh, writing down and expressing gratitude, doing things for other people, negative visualization, and sort of creating more free time, and then Being conscious about how you're spending that time too, and what activities that you're, you're engaging in. What am I missing? And what else do you want to add to that list?

A Um, you covered a lot of stuff. I think the one last thing I'd add is just the importance of remembering that, you know, your brain and your happiness are, like, tied to your body. You know, I think we think there were these, like, you know, minds that are floating off in nowhere, and we forget that if that mind is attached to a body that's not getting any sleep, that's not moving, that's, like, constantly, like, you know, flaring up its fight or flight system, like, we, we forget that those kinds of things matter a lot. And so one of the things I try to emphasize with my students is, like, these basic healthy habits. And it's funny, as we get, as we get busier, as we get more frantic, as we're feeling more depressed, you can watch these things fall by the wayside, you know. Like, when I'm having a particularly frantic week where I'm feeling really time famished, often the, my instinct of the first thing that should go should be, you know, my morning elliptical. It's like, ah, I could steal that hour back, but like, that morning elliptical is You know, there's evidence that getting, like, a half hour of cardio exercise a day is, like, significantly reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety. Like, we forget how powerful it is. That's exercise, and let's not even get into sleep, right, which is, you know, another one of the first things to go is, like, oh, I'll sleep less, but …

AI assessment note: “the one last thing I'd add is just the importance of remembering”

Q Is it because our reference group changes? So, like, if, if you're, uh, you get a promotion, all of a sudden you're comparing yourself against your, your new colleagues instead of your old colleagues.

A Yeah. There's kind of two biases. One is this reference group bias, right? Which is that, you know, our brains are just not built to pay attention to anything objectively, right? We just pay attention relative to stuff. So, hey, how much money should you earn? You don't have, like, an objective number. You have, like, you know, I'm, I'm a professor at an Ivy League institution. I'm like, well, I should earn about as much as other, you know, professors at Ivy League institutions. Like, you're a podcaster. You're probably thinking, you know, how much should you earn? Like, well, you know, what is the average pod, or what is a good podcaster earn? I kind of want to earn that, right? You know, so we never think in objective terms. We're always thinking relative to something. And that, what we think of as our reference point changes pretty quickly. You know, as soon as you become a, you know, a millionaire, now your reference point isn't, you know, you know, what I was earning in grad school. Like, now your reference point is like other millionaires, and you might not be as rich as other millionaires, right? They might have a better yacht than you or a better vacation house than you. And what's, what's a dumb thing about our minds is that we never look to reference points that make us feel good. We always look to reference points that Um, that make us feel, that make us feel crappy,…

AI assessment note: “Yeah. There's kind of two biases. One is this reference group bias, right?”

Q Um, and, and with, with the kids and, and with adults maybe, but I mean, you're getting hands-on experience with the kids. Are you seeing a, a notable difference during COVID as well as we come sort of like out of COVID and how that's affecting people? What are you, what are you seeing?

A Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, I think college students were at the breaking point when I first taught this class in 2018. All those statistics I was telling you were before COVID, you know, and many of them have just gotten worse. Like, you know, this pandemic is a sweet spot of destroying our social connection through, you know, flinging us into a period of extreme anxiety, you know, breaking of all of our rituals and routines, um, and it's just uncertain. We have no idea when it's gonna end. We keep being like, all right, we're out of it, but are we really? And, You know, that's tough, and, and that's happening to our young people at a time when, you know, those important rituals that you'll never get back again are happening at a clip, right? You know, there's, there's prom, there's first year formal, there's like, you know, like your sophomore dance or whatever, and, and they're missing, in many cases, students were missing out on a lot of these, at least during the depths of the pandemic, and, you know, that's tough. These are things they're never going to get back again. Um, I think also these, for our students, are really formative years of, Practice socializing, right? You know, we're, we now at Yale are realizing that our first year students are coming in, and the class of twenty-twenty-six, which will be our next, uh, college class that's coming in, you know, it wa…

AI assessment note: “many of them have just gotten worse. Like, you know, this pandemic is a sweet spot”

Q How, how much of our happiness is directed by where we place our attention?

A I mean, so, so much. Um, you know, one of the full lectures I give in my class is on what I call attentional hygiene, which is, you know, making sure you're paying attention to how your attention is being allocated. Um, there's some really stupid features of human attention, which is like, we kind of can't control where it's deployed, right? You know, if someone screams fire in a crowded theater, your attention is going to get deployed whether you want to or not. But the same thing is true. If you're, you know, if you see, you know, great vacation shots on Instagram, Your attention's just gonna get deployed to, like, how crappy your life is. You know, if there's binging and things, like, your attention's gonna get deployed to that, uh, you know, if you get a notification or something, even if you're having a nice conversation with your spouse, right? And so we put these devices in that are stealing our attention at kind of critical moments, and, and that's bad enough when our attention should be on something that could be improving our well-being. Like, you know, it's nice social conversation I'm having with my spouse, or being present and paying attention to the daffodils. Or just kind of feeling like, you know, you had some time, like sometimes these notifications just break up our time in a way that can make us feel, you know, a little bit more time famished, a little bit mo…

AI assessment note: “I mean, so, so much.”

Q Let's talk about kids for a second. Can we adjust our kids sort of like baseline level of happiness based on our own modeling of behavior or is it all sort of genetic and is there a magic window where we can influence their happiness set point sort of easier?

A Yeah. I mean, so when you look at happiness and genetics, you kind of get, you know, two kinds of messages. One is that there's, there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable. So some of the variants we see in the population about, you know, happy people and not so happy people, that variance is probably due to somebody's genetic history, right? Um, however, that doesn't mean that genetics is destiny. Um, you know, even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect. Um, Um, you know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's, it's not, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is like, well, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't. That's just simply not the case. And that means that there's a lot of room for, you know, the environment and epigenetic effects to take hold. And usually when I mean environment, I mean, like, you and your behavior of what you're doing to promote your happiness. And so that's the story about happiness and genetics, and I think, you know, as a parent, as you think about conveying these things to kids, I think it's about kind of building in these right strategies early on. You know, I focused on college students. I wish my college students got a lot of these techniques and, and learned about these evidence-based approaches mu…

AI assessment note: “there's a lot of room for, you know, the environment and epigenetic effects”

Q What else comes to mind when you think about, um, sort of parenting, uh, techniques that are well-intentioned, but you're seeing in college kids that, uh, backfire?

A Yeah, I think another one is, you know, I think a lot of parents are worried about their kids' well-being, um, and I think that that's, you know, good. I obviously want parents to care about how their kids are doing, um, but it tends to be, you know, in my experience, you know, very anxious parents that are worried about their very anxious kids. You know, when I meet the parents and I hear their anxieties about the kids' grades, I'm like, well, no wonder your kids are anxious about grades because you're embodying all of these kind of anxieties, and so I, I think one thing that's useful for parents to remember is about the science of emotional contagion, that like, you know, we naturally catch other people's emotions. If you're embodying calm, and this is going to be fine, and everything's okay, then kids are going to follow that. If you're embodying, you know, anxiety, and like, oh my gosh, this is so, you know, important, like, kids are naturally going to catch that too. Um, and I think that that, that's tricky to remember. You know, I often get parents saying, oh, what can I do to, you You know, make my child feel happier, and I'm like, well, have you focused on your own happiness? Like, how are you doing? And it's like, well, no, no, no, I want to, I want to focus on them, and it's like, you know, you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, right? Not just because, you kno…

AI assessment note: “science of emotional contagion, that like, you know, we naturally catch other people's emotions.”

Q So back to that coworker, just for a second. What role, broadly speaking, do boundaries play, if anything, in sort of our own internal happiness, whether it's boundaries from other people that we're setting, and or boundaries from work, or sort of like having a work home divide. How do you think about the role of boundaries and happiness?

A Yeah, I think, I think boundaries are really important. They are, in some ways, you, you could think of them based on the kinds of things we've talked about before as kind of control mechanisms that we use to deal with our attention. Right? Like, if you know it's gonna, like, be a situation that causes you to feel anxious or, you know, pissy, if you deal with this early colleague, then, like, you can limit the amount you deal with this early colleague, right? Um, emotion regulation and finding ways to control your emotions are sometimes about you experience that emotion. You've gotta control it and regulate it in the moment, but you can also be smart enough about, like, trying not to get yourself into that situation in the first place, um, which is often, you know, like, Emotion researchers call these things complicated things, but it's like situation selection. Like, don't select situations that are going to put you in this horrible emotional place. Like, kind of give yourself, you know, a little gift so that your hot self is not kind of put in these awful situations in the first place. And ultimately, I think boundary setting is a lot like that. You know, you're really kind of mindfully paying attention to things and making decisions about your well-being based on whether this is a good situation to go into or not. And, you know, sometimes that can involve hard decisions. I m…

AI assessment note: “boundaries are really important. They are, in some ways... kind of control mechanisms”

Q Two other rabbit holes I sort of want to go down there based on, on what you said. You mentioned rituals and routines. Can you expand on the importance of that when it comes to happiness?

A Yeah, there's, there's just lots of evidence that, I mean, obviously we're just like creatures of habit, right? You know, we, we do certain things, but, but habits really help our minds compartmentalize stuff, right? You know, you're, you're home with your kids in the morning eating breakfast, and then, you know, back pre-COVID, everyone, you know, hopped on the subway, drove in their car to work, and then you show up at work, you see different people, you see, sit in a different spot. It kind of allows you to compartmentalize the, you know, the identity you have as a, as a parent, as a family member, as a spouse, and the identity you have at work. When you're doing work from your kitchen table, and your kids are sitting next to you trying to do school, that can feel really jumbled, right? There's, there's no division anymore between these things. And that's bad for two reasons. One is that, you know, we, we need those divisions to keep these things separate. We kind of feel a little bit more cognitively overwhelmed when we're, like, juggling all these things at once. And, and a lot of us lost that. Um, but the second thing is that rituals are really powerful ways of, you Kind of connecting with other people and, like, putting our mind in the right mindset. Lots of lovely work from the psychologist Mike Norton and his colleague Francesca Gino about the power of using rituals, f…

AI assessment note: “habits really help our minds compartmentalize stuff, right?”

Q And how do we measure happiness? Like, how do we even come to some sort of quantitative approach to this?

A Yeah, I mean, I wish there was better ways to measure, you know, as a scientist, I wish there was, like, a little, like, happiness thermometer that I could put in your mouth that was like, do, do, do, like, you're 80, you know, 80.1 happy or something. Um, we don't have that, and we don't have that for good reason, which is, you know, happiness is subjective, right? Like, the best person to tell me whether or not you're happy is you, and so the way psychologists often measure it is that we just ask people, which sounds not very scientific, it sounds When you, when you tell people a lot of this work is based on self-reports, I think they think those self-reports are, like, some crap, like, you know, quiz that you'd get, like, on BuzzFeed or something, and, you know, you can have self-report scales that are true scientific instruments that have been really well validated. We know that they're measuring something that is, like, a true construct in the world. We know that these self-report measures correlate with things, like, if I were to do, like, a detailed hormonal analysis, or, you know, like, detailed interviews with your friends and family members, or, you You know, certain physiological markers. Like, we know those things correlate. But, you know, the best way to ask you, you know, hey, are you satisfied with your life? Scale one to 10 is I ask you and you tell me. You know…

AI assessment note: “so the way psychologists often measure it is that we just ask people”

Q Let's talk about kids for a second. Can we adjust our kids sort of like baseline level of happiness based on our own modeling of behavior, or is it all sort of genetic? And is there a magic window where we can influence their happiness set point sort of easier? Yeah.

A Yeah. I mean, Sue, when you look at happiness and genetics, you kind of get, you know, two kinds of messages. One is that there's, there's lots of evidence that happiness is heritable. So some of the variants we see in the population about, you know, happy people and not so happy people, that variance is probably due to somebody's genetic history, right? Um, however, that doesn't mean that genetics is destiny. Um, you know, even the heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect. Um, you know, estimates kind of vary, but it's probably around, you know, 40%, 30%. Like, it's, it's not, it's not that all the variants and the happy people that you see out there in the world is like, well, some people are genetically happy and some people aren't. That's just simply not the case. And that means that there's a lot of room for, you know, the environment and epigenetic effects to take hold. And usually when I mean environment, I mean, like, you and your behavior of what you're doing to promote your happiness. And so that's the story about happiness and genetics. And I think, you know, as a parent, as you think about conveying these things to kids, I think it's about kind of building in these right strategies early on. You know, I focused on college students. I wish my college students got a lot of these techniques and learned about these evidence-based approaches much earl…

AI assessment note: “heritability of happiness is, is lower than you might expect... around, you know, 40%, 30%”

Q another, and yet it seems like it's having a negative effect, especially on kids, and I mean, maybe you can talk just broadly about the effect of social media on adults, specifically what you're seeing when it relates to university-aged kids. And then how we can, um, think about this as, um, participants in this world where maybe we're not opting out, but how do we put guardrails around it?

A Yeah, I mean, social media is an interesting one because ultimately it's like a tool, right? It's a technological tool that we could use in all kinds of ways, and you could imagine a world where we use this tool for all the stuff that could promote happiness, right? Like, I could use Facebook Live to connect with my family members and really have social connection with people. It might be tricky without that technological tool to connect with. I could use, you know, Instagram to, you know, be really present with my food and, like, you know, mindfully notice it and really be there. I could Participate in charity appeals that are happening on these sites and things. Um, I could use them to set better reference points. So I saw, you know, I don't know what people in Ukraine are going through or like really kind of figured out the privileges I had and looked at reference points that made me feel good. In theory, we could do all of that. In practice, we basically do none of it. Like in practice, these tools are often used oddly, even though they're called social media, to reduce Social connection in real life. You know, if you think about the study that we mentioned about Nick Upley with, you know, people chatting on the train, like, why don't people talk to other people on their commute? It's because their head is stuffed in, you know, a piece of technology, maybe not on social med…

AI assessment note: “In practice, we basically do none of it. Like in practice, these tools are often used”

Q A lot of people, when they find themselves in this situation, seem to seek solitude. Is that the, the right approach, and if not, why not?

A Well, I mean, solitude, I think when you're experiencing this, the depersonalization, which is like rich cynicism, you know, I get it. It's like, I don't want to deal with people anymore. Um, but ultimately that's allowing us, that's forcing us to lose out on this one mechanism for kind of filling up our happiness tanks as it were, because other people really do make us feel better. Um, and I think this is the problem when we're, when we're in the fix of something like burnout, we often go towards the wrong stuff. Right? Like, we're often not like, let me pick up an engaging hobby that will, like, build my identity, but it's kind of hard. Like, you're emotionally exhausted. You're like, I'm not doing hard. I'm doing, like, plop on the couch and watch Netflix. But actually, kind of what you need is hard. What you need is to engage in a little bit of, uh, a little bit of flow. Um, the, the psychologist Adam Grant, uh, had a very viral article in the New York Times during, uh, during COVID on the phenomena of languishing, which isn't so much burnout. It's just kind of a, This sort of deep feeling of like meh or blah, right? You know, if you hit like full depression, you know, this depression can feel like an intense sadness feeling, but languishing is kind of like neither here nor there. You got nothing. And, you know, the, the science shows that the way out of languishing is to g…

AI assessment note: “forcing us to lose out on this one mechanism for kind of filling up our happiness tanks”

Q Well, we tend to think that amplifying things, you, you mentioned, um, the word intensity. So we, we seek to sort of amplify our happiness. Should we do that?

A Yes and no. I mean, yes, in the sense that I think we, you know, happiness takes effort, right? Like, I think happiness takes work, like all good things you got to put in some work to get there. And part of that work is understanding the misconceptions, but part of that work is like, we don't often have the best instincts about what will make us happy. The things that we kind of want to do in life are not necessarily the things we're really going to enjoy or like, or that will give us a meaningful life. So I think we have to Fight our misconceptions, and we have to sometimes violate our intuitions about what to do to, to live a healthy life. Um, you know, I think for me this works a lot like, you know, fitness and healthy eating, right? You know, like the things I crave and I'm drawn to, you know, maybe there's some people out there who crave salad and like a well-balanced protein, but for me I crave like, you know, like the, you know, candy and chocolate and fried and greasy things, right? Like eventually I'll get sick of that, but my instinct is to like go for that stuff, right? But that's not really, you know, what a well-balanced, healthy diet looks like, right? You know, you kind of have to overcome those craving urges and intuitions to go for something that's a little bit more well-balanced, and I think happiness kind of works like that. Like, you got to put some effort i…

AI assessment note: “Yes and no. I mean, yes, in the sense that I think we”