Afford Anything - What’s the Point of Happiness, Anyway?, with Dr. Bill Von Hippel

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

#371: Psychology professor Bill von Hippel explains the evolutionary science behind how we’re hardwired as humans. We’re wired to be social, to connect, to communicate and cooperate. We’re wired to want to learn and teach, to build a collective body of knowledge that stretches beyond what any single individual could ever learn in their lifetime. We’re wired to feel surges of happiness that fade, so that we’re intrinsically motivated to keep repeating behaviors that lead to additional surges of happiness. Once we understand the evolutionary science behind what makes us happy, Dr. von Hippel explains, we can apply this knowledge to making better decisions for our work, money and lives. Bill von Hippel is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Michigan. He’s currently a psychology professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. He joins us to share his insights into the history and science of happiness. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/shownotes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to any limited resource that you need to manage, like your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, saying yes to anything carries an opportunity cost. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most? Not what are your default priorities handed to you by society, but what genuinely is a priority

in your own life? And stemming from that, the second question is, how do you translate that into action? How do you practice the type of decision making, both short term and long term, that fuel that which matters most? Answering those two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and today, psychology professor William Yvonne Hipple, joins us to discuss the evolutionary science behind why we are wired to be social, why we are wired to cooperate and communicate, and what makes us happy.

The Afford- Anything community is overwhelmingly comprised of people who aspire to grow their wealth or their net worth to such a point that work becomes optional, work for the sake of collecting a paycheck, for the sake of survival, for keeping the lights on, for paying the bills, becomes optional. And when that happens for those of us who are fortunate enough to achieve that inflection point, when that happens, it opens a huge host of next order questions around now what. now that a certain level of wealth and comfort have been achieved, now that financial survival no longer seems to be at stake, what work do I do, what activities do I participate in, and how do I find meaning, purpose, happiness?

Rather than just pontificate on these answers without any framework, I wanted to bring on a psychologist who could present the evolutionary science behind what it is to be human and what we can, learn from that, that we can apply to our decision-making around how we should spend our time, our money, our focus, our energy, our attention, how we allocate those limited resources in the most meaningful and pro-social way possible. Today's guest, Dr. Bill Von Hipple, received his BA at Yale and his PhD at the University of Michigan. He taught for a dozen years at Ohio State University, and he is now a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia.

He's published more than 100 articles, and his research has been featured in the New York Times, the BBC, Le Monde, El Mundo, USA Today, and the Australian. He's the author of a new book called The Social Leap. Here he is, Dr. Bill von Hipple. Hi, Bill. Hi, Paul. It's nice to meet you. It's great to meet you, too. Thank you for being here.

Bill, at the risk of asking the unanswerable, what is the purpose of happiness? That's a great question, actually. Evolution gave us happiness because it wanted to motivate us to do what's in our genes' best interest. And so those ancestors who got happy by doing things that were unhealthy or by going off alone and never talking to any other human, well, they didn't become our ancestors because they didn't get into the mating game or they killed themselves off before they could do a good chance in raising their kids. But those ancestors who got happy by doing things that were in their genes best interest, by doing healthy things, and then by meeting and. and mating, where they're the ones who ended up in that we reflect their genes. And so what happiness does is it gets you to do things that over time, it's been winnowed down by evolution, it gets you to do things that are in your species' best interest. So if you and I were dung beetles, we would be very happy if we could roll a really big ball of

poo because that's what it takes to be a success as a dung beetle. As human beings, however, what makes us happy are the things that are going to make us attractive to other members of our group that are going to make other members of our group want to keep us around and that are going to make us individually success so that if we could rise and stay this a little bit compared to other members of our group, maybe we'll be picked to be somebody's mate. But we're wired for survival and reproduction, not happiness, in an evolutionary sense. That's right.

But happiness is a tool that gets you there. So just imagine two ancestors. One of them really loves the taste of feces. The other one really loves the taste of fat sugar and salt. Well, the one who loves the taste to feast is going to kill himself before he gets very far. The one who loves fat, sugar and salt, which are very rare in our ancestral environment, is going to be seeking out healthy sources of food. And so one of them will be fit and strong and will be an attractive partner at other people,

and one won't be. And so happiness, just like everything else, evolution is no advanced plan. People who have the right motives who work in ways that serve their genes, then they're going to have more children, and the proclivities that made them happy are going to make their children happy to, and these things will spread throughout the gene pool. And so in today's world, it's super-duper rare to find somebody who gets happy by doing, you know, things like eating feces, although it happens, of course, there's always randomness, but it's super-duper common to find people who get happy by being with close others, by being with their friends, by having really good food,

by doing the kinds of things that we tend to think about every day is what makes us happy. There's a negative consequence of this, though, and that is that evolution also doesn't want to lose its best tool. If it can motivate you by making you happy when you do X, let's say you achieve something that causes you to raise in status, maybe for our ancestors, that was a successful hunt. For you and me, it might be picking the right stock or going out to a great dinner or meeting a new friend or something like that. The problem is that evolution can't give you permanent happiness because then it would lose one of its best tools. And so evolution gives you a little bit of happiness and the bigger your achievement, the bigger your rise in happiness. But then it's super important that you drop back to baseline. Because if you were permanently happy, then you're unmotivated to do anything ever again and the world's going to leave you behind.

So complacency then becomes a detriment. Exactly. And so to that end, is contentment a detriment? I mean, I think a lot of us are striving for contentment, but is that to our disadvantage? Well, contentment's not a detriment. Contentment's a great thing, in fact. And part of the reason for that is that we can see happiness and others. And so if I run into you on the street and we're meeting for the first time and you seem happy,

I'll say, well, Paula obviously has lots of good things going on in her life. She's happy. She would be a good person for me to get to know, be part of my coalition, whatever, because all signs are indicating that you're a success. If you're really down and upset, but then I think, hmm, maybe things aren't going so well for Paula. I've got enough trouble in my life. I'm not sure that I want to form a friendship with her. And so it's very visible to others, and it's important.

The problem is you don't want to be a 10. If you're a 10 out of 10 scale, well, then you're not motivated to do anything. What you really want to be is a 6 because a 6 has lots of room to go up, but it's on the positive side of the scale. And so a bit of contentment, a bit of baseline happiness is a really good thing. And most people show that. But too much happiness is just as detrimental for your future success as too little happiness. One of the things that you mentioned in terms of what makes us happy are strong social ties,

spending time with family, friends, community. What is it at an evolutionary level, at the brain level, that makes that so important? Our ancestors, once we left the trees, so once we split apart from our chimpanzee cousins about six million years ago, and we left the trees and went on to the savannah, there was an enormous premium, on being with each other for safety. There's lots of big predators on the savannah. We're not as fast. Chimps in the canopy, nobody can mess with them.

Not even leopards will go after them when they were with their group because they're just too fast and too dangerous. We're not fast and we're not dangerous. And so what we rely on is each other. And what that means is that those ancestors who kind of like to wander off alone, those ancestors who didn't really like the company of other people, well, they ended up becoming somebody's dinner and they slowly get wintered out of the gene pool.

Those of us who like to be with others, ideally with others that we know well, that we know we can count on, that we have real bonds and connections with, those are the ones who were a big success because they could protect themselves in the savannah. And then when we got even more powerful, they could turn that around and they could become an important force as their group went off and hunted whatever animals that they were after. Right. And there were a few things that you wrote about that really surprised me. Number one, you mentioned that we didn't leave the trees. The trees left us. Yeah, so that was, I'm sure, a huge bummer for our ancestors, but basically it's what made us who we are today. So we're the lucky recipients of that. And essentially what happened, and I've looked into the geology, but I just don't fully understand it, is for reasons that elude me, Africa's tearing into two continents. There's the Somali plate and then the rest of Africa, everything to the left of what's now the Great African Rift Valley. And it's just pulling in two different directions.

And so my understanding is that there's basically an upwelling underneath of the mantle, and it's just spreading it, it's spreading the crust apart. As a consequence of that, for other reasons that I don't fully get, East African plates, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, is all rising up in elevation. Now, it's been doing this for about 30 million years. So about 30 million years ago, the rainforest started drying out on the east side of the roof valley.

But by about 6 million years ago, there's essentially not enough rainforest left. It's now tiny little bits and bobs of forest, and what it really becomes is woodlands and open savannah. And so as our ancestors were slowly sort of sequestered in smaller and smaller pieces of the rainforest, eventually the parts that they were on just disappeared entirely. And more and more often they had to venture out of the trees to cross the open savannah until they essentially lived on the open savanna. So the trees really left us behind.

Those ancestors of ours, potential ones who were on the west side of the Riff Valley, well, they're still chimpanzees. That never happened to them. But those of us whose ancestors were on the east side of the Rift Valley and were forced out of the trees, They're the ones who eventually turned into us. And it was the ones who were most able to cooperate, who could then band together and survive the exposure that comes from being on the Savannah, out on the open savannah.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And probably the critical event was when we became bipedal, which we know we were about 3.6 million years ago, as osteopithecines, they're now walking upright just like a human does. They're not all bent over like a chimpanzee. Once that happened, it opened new potentialities for us and made the value of cooperation way greater. And so cooperation probably really accelerated at that point,

which then led to the acceleration of our brain mass and this sort of reciprocal, what you might call, virtuous cycle, of us getting smarter and using our brains even more effectively, and thereby creating even more reasons to get smart. Why would the value of cooperation increase as a result of bipedalism? If you look at chimpanzees, they mostly compete with one another. And that's part of the problem why their groups never become more effective than some of their individual parts. Because nine times out of ten, they'll compete over a piece of food or another chimp or something like that.

Once we became bipedal, we gained this enormously important capacity. It's probably, well, it is that it's a single most important military invention in all of history. And that invention is the capacity to kill at a distance. And so imagine that we're basically chimpanzees. And there's a leopard that we're all in the savanna and a leopard runs at us. Well, all we could do is hit it with a club or a stick that we might have with us, but whoever goes first is guaranteed to get eaten by that leopard and probably whoever goes second and third. Maybe by the time its mouth is pretty full of your cousins, could you get in there and give it a good whack and win that fight? But if you can throw stones, if you could do something that attacks it from a distance, now from a position of relative safety, a larger force of weaker individuals can subdue a smaller force of stronger individuals.

And so once we develop bipedalism, coincidentally, we develop the musculature and the ligament and tendon structure. They gave us enough flexibility to effectively throw rocks. Throwing is, it might look like just tossing with your arm, but it's actually a full body motion that starts on the opposite side. It stretches out all your muscles, tendons and ligaments. And then it's like the snapping of a rubber band at the end. So even though chimpanzees are way stronger than we are pound for pound, we throw way better

than they do because they simply can't generate that elastic energy that we can. By the time we got to osteopithecines, they now had the bipedalism gave them the body structure so they could rotate their waist, twist their shoulder, snap their wrist, all that sort of thing that would suddenly have allowed them to effectively throw. Now, the key with throwing, of course, is that one osteopithecines throwing rocks at you would be annoying, especially if you're a lion. We know more than that, but lots of them working together would suddenly change the game entirely. And so at that point in time, once they realize they could effectively throw, there was a newfound pressure on us to start cooperating with each other. Because if we all sprinted for the woods, well, only one of us will die, and I'm

going to hope it's you and not me. But if we don't have to sprint for the woods, if we could all throw rocks, well, then none of us die. And so now I feel this tight bond with you is I want you to stick around, you want me to stick around, and we all orient ourselves toward this predator. And so as a result, our brains became hardwired for community and cooperation. Yes, so this becomes one of our most important needs. Those ancestors who, when they wander across the Savannah don't really care about the rest of the group or can't work well with them are going to get either tossed out or left behind to die. Those ancestors who can form that type bond, well, now they've got opportunities to protect themselves that they never had before. It doesn't take a genius to then

turn that on its head and say, hold on, if I can defend myself against a lion when I'm with my group, maybe I could hunt for things when I'm with my group that I couldn't possibly otherwise hunt for alone. And so it goes first from a protective motive to eventually a predation motive. And it was the beginning of the return, of our return as a species to the top of the food chain. Whereas previously we were skulking around the edges and running from everybody, now everybody has to run from us because we're so effective at working together. But that required more brain mass. And so that's when we see our cognitive ability start to accelerate. Now, one thing that's unique about us is that many animals form groups together. You'll see a herd of zebras or a school of fish,

but they don't necessarily work together. We uniquely cooperate. We uniquely cooperate. Now, we're unique in our particular line. Ants are great cooperators. Bees are great cooperators. There are groups of animals that get together and they cooperate incredibly effectively,

but they do it via other mechanisms. They do it, for example, via genetic mechanisms, whereby they're more closely related to their sisters or brothers than they would be to their own offspring. So they're highly motivated not to bother reproducing but to just help each other. We have a very different story.

whereby we come out of this line, these primates, who are not very cooperative inherently, certainly not the great apes, which we're related to. We get out in the savannah, we get this motivation to cooperate. And now, unlike the other mammals, we need to start getting a lot smarter in order to leverage this newfound capacity that we have in our group. Remember, we got there where we already have hands, we can manipulate objects, we already are awfully bright. I mean, the chimpanzee is way smarter than a zebra.

And part of the reason for that is that a zebra doesn't gain that much by being smart. It's running around from predators and it's eating grass. You can only eat so much grass and there's not that many calories in it. But we're omnivores. And so we had the advantage of trying to bring in more and higher quality calories in order to pay the rent on this very expensive brain. Once we started bonding together, new capacities emerge. So if we're cooperating, well, what about division of labor?

Chimpanzees aren't smart enough to do that, but we are. And so each step in cooperation introduced new possibilities, which really could then leverage and continue to move up that sort of intellectual chain. So we sort of traded in brawn for brains. We created this cognitive niche in nature, and then we exploited it. And so this explains two things. One is why we are hardwired to find happiness through community and cooperation, and two, why we are intelligent.

Does it then follow that those who are the most intelligent also are capable of the greatest happiness? That's a great question. Unfortunately, and this is one of the bummers, when evolution gives with one hand it typically takes with another. As we learned division of labor and as we learned cooperation, in order to get to division of labor, you have to start being able to predict the future.

You have to say, well, look, I think that mastodon's going to come down this valley. So you stand on one side, I'll stand on the other and we'll both roll a rock down at the same time. Now, that's simulation of the future and that creation of nested scenarios is a uniquely human ability because no other animal can simulate the future and act out plans in their mind. But if you and I are going to kill a mastodon, we can't just give it a go. Uh-oh, that didn't work out. Let's run away and try again. You know, that's super dangerous.

What we can do, though, is sit around the campfire at night and make plans and try to come up with a strategy whereby two tiny little weak individuals could nonetheless bring down this enormous one. But the problem is that the capacity to simulate the future leads to all sorts of bad things. It leads, for example, to realization that I'm going to die someday. It leads to a realization that that day may be tomorrow. And so you introduce anxiety into an organism that didn't experience it before. Every other organism on the planet, to the best of our knowledge, lives in the present. And so they don't experience anxiety until they become aware of a bad fact about to come. So when my dog gets to the vet's office, it's like, uh-oh, I don't like this place.

But it was living in the present until it got there. And now it's really scared until it gets it shot or whatever it needs. But then it goes right back to living happily in the present. But you and I could go, you know what, it's been a while since I had my life. a shot. That means I've got to go to the doctor. That means I'm going to get the shot and I find them scary. We can envision all sorts of bad things that are going to happen. So our brains brought us happiness by allowing us to band together, by allowing us to achieve enormous things and move right back to the top of the food chain. But they also brought enormous

unhappiness in the forms of anxiety, in the forms of big questions like, well, why are we here? And do I matter? And what happens to me after I die? And am I really just this tiny and significant spot on a tiny and significant planet, you know, et cetera, a writ large. And the smarter you are, the more you're capable of contemplating that stuff. So it's a plus in survival, but it's not necessarily a plus in happiness. Are there any studies documenting correlation between intellect and happiness? To the best of my knowledge, that effect has never been found. We can see correlations between intellect and different kinds of social behaviors. So the smarter you are, the earlier you start to lie. Because it, depending on, you,

drops and you realize, gee, the whole world doesn't actually have all the knowledge I have in my head. They have different knowledge. And so I can try to plant some fake knowledge in their head that would benefit me. Like, I didn't eat the extra piece of cake or whatever the case might be. And so we often get a little upset when our children start to lie. But it's actually a lovely little IQ test that shows, all right, they've crossed that rubicon and now understand that they can manipulate the contents of other people's minds. And nothing makes you more successful in life than persuasion. You know, some of us are so big and so strong, we can force people to do what we want. But as a rule, that's not how humans work. And so the smarter you are, typically, the more effective you are of persuasion, the more capable

you are of finding ways to get others to see the world in a way that's favorable to you. So brains definitely lead to success. But that doesn't mean that they lead to happiness. Happiness is a strategy that evolution uses to get us where it wants us to be. But it's not an outcome that evolution cares about of its own. It only matters to the degree that it then helps us to achieve other things. And so if you're a big success and members of the opposite sex like you and you have lots of children and you survive for a long time, well, you're an evolutionary success story, even if you were miserable your whole life because you worried about bad things that might happen to your family or whatever it was that was concerning to you. So for all of the cliches

and aphorisms about success does not equal happiness, there is an evolutionary explanation as to why it doesn't and in fact why it must not. That's exactly right. And in fact, the more important success is to you, usually that's a sign that your baseline happiness is a little bit lower and you need constant hits of successes in order to get happy. As Ted Turner put it, you'll never meet a super achiever anywhere who's not driven by at least some level of insecurity. So why does the guy keep working so hard when he's achieved so much? Because he's a little bit worried maybe I'm not good enough. I'm not as happy as I want to be. Maybe I need to win a big sailing race or maybe I need to start a new network or, you know, all the things that people like that do. Given that success and happiness must be divergent concepts, is there any way to channel any degree of success that we achieve in such a way that it can increase our happiness, or at least not decrease it? No, that's a great question.

And I actually think that you have been going about this the right way all along, and that is you talk a lot on your website and your blogger. and stuff about using success to buy freedom. And the problem is that lots of people use success to buy stuff. And what they don't realize when they buy stuff is that they put themselves in what we call a hedonic treadmill. Now, buying stuff, it sounds like a good idea. And for our ancestors, well, they didn't have money, but having stuff was important.

And so imagine that you live in a group of 30 people and your nomads on the Savannah. If you're the best arrow maker and now you've made yourself a really good set of arrows, well, you've got something over everybody that you'll ever meet for the rest of your life. You're always going to have the best arrows. No one will ever have better arrows than you because it's just a small group of people. But now we live in this world with billions of humans and no matter what stuff I buy, there's going to be better stuff next year that's produced by some other company. So I think, oh, if I just buy myself that new Jaguar, I'll have a nicer car than my neighbor

and I'll be happy forever. Well, that kind of status competition, social goals, you're guaranteed to fail at them. because even if I completely trounce all my neighbors, my next goal is to now move into a nicer neighborhood and now I'm behind again and I have to start the process all over. And so those products don't actually make me happy. They do nothing for me unless they're better than the products of those around me and they give me this sort of status bump. And searching for status bumps in today's world is a recipe for failure because there's just

too many humans and there's always going to be humans who are higher in status than I'm in I'm going to keep resetting my sights and I'm going to keep falling behind because there's just too many others. For ancestors that worked for us, it's a guaranteed disaster. And so what do we do instead? Well, what the data show very clearly is seek out experiences, do stuff with your money that gives, that allows you to be the person you want to be, to go the places you want to go, to have leisure time that you want to have. If you seek out experiences, if you try to have freedom, then your money will bring you happiness. If you try to buy lots and lots of stuff and always have better stuff than the other guy, well, your money's not going to buy you happiness. It's going to put you

on this permanent adonic treadmill, which is anxiety provoking, gives you brief bumps of happiness, and then it's as if it doesn't even exist and you're just right back at it again. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size. But they also have the FinTech Hustle that got them named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune Magazine. That's what being a fifth-third better is all about.

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Don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W-A-Y-F-F-A-R.com. Sale ends December 7th. That tendency for social comparison is that part of the innate drive to cooperate? It's part of several processes. It certainly involved cooperate because I need to decide, are you the right person for me to be working with? Can you and I go hunting together?

Will you share with me with what we catch? I need to make all sorts of social judgments about you. And those social judgments are great, and they facilitate us connecting with each other. The problem is that we also engage in social comparison for a host of other reasons. So again, imagine we're back on the Savannah. There's only 50 of us. You're one of the few females that's about my age. Well, now, in order to get you to try to pick me, hopefully that you'll want to mate with me,

I need to look around and say, well, how do I compare it to the other guys in my group? Now, if I'm kind of a schmock, but they're complete schmocks, I'm fine, right? It doesn't matter if I'm great or ordinary. All that matters is my great er or ordinary er than everybody else in my group. And so in order to see how I'm doing, I engage in this constant social comparison process. of saying, well, do the other people in my group have more stuff than I do? Are they smarter than I am? Are they nicer? Are they cooler? Any dimension that I might want to compare myself on. And those dimensions tend to make us unhappy when we engage in those comparisons. Because

you've been given something great, maybe. You just achieved a new goal. But if somebody else achieved a greater goal, you've lost a little status in this competition. So rather than basking in what you always wanted to achieve, you just feel bad that you didn't achieve as much as your next-door neighbor. And so it's a really unfortunate process that's highly disruptive of our happiness, our inability to stop ourselves from making these comparisons and our constant goal to be in the status hierarchy competition, which is one of the few zero-sum games in life. If I gain in status, it's at somebody's cost. We can't all gain status together. But there's good news here as well. And that is that our social comparisons can make us unhappy when we look to our neighbors and see that they have more. But our social comparisons can also make us very happy when we look to people who have less than we do. And it's a remarkably flexible process. So I was just on vacation. I was in the States and I was skiing on the first day of what was to be a one-week-long ski

vacation that I'd much looked forward to. And on the third run of the first day, I foolishly skied over a rise at high speed where I couldn't see below it. And some poor guy had stopped. And he was out of my view, but I crashed right into him. Put me in the hospital. It was the end of my ski vacation. And then I even had to cancel.

On the way home to Australia, I was going to stop in Fiji for a wonderful week of beaching. I couldn't do that either. because I bashed up so badly that I had air in my chest cavity and couldn't fly. Well, this is the kind of thing that could make you bummed out forever because you just ruined your vacation. But from my perspective, I'm thinking, you know, I didn't really hurt that guy. Fortunately, he was big and robust and he skied off. What if I had skied into a little kid and killed him?

And so my immediate comparison is, boy, that could have been a lot worse. And then when they brought me to the hospital, even though I was in and out of consciousness the whole time, one thing I remember very clearly is they had me on this flat gurney because they were worried I'd broken my back or my neck and I might never walk again and they wanted to have me as stable as possible. And so I could think, so I've got a couple of broken ribs and I ruin my trip. Big deal. I'm still, I can walk. I haven't destroyed myself, et cetera. And so we can take, you know, a big failure, a stupid thing that you've done and turn it into something that doesn't really bother you that much by comparing how it might have been. And we know people do this all the time.

And so if you take breast cancer, for example, and women have to get this surgery and especially when they're young and they really don't want it and they're hoping to have kids and all these things, sometimes they bounce back really well because they say, well, all right, fine, that was a bad thing, but it could have been way worse. And that counterfactual process of imagining a more negative social comparison can take a negative event and actually turn it into a positive. Are social comparisons ever neutral? They can be totally neutral.

So I'm going to work and I note that you drive a red car and I drive a white car and I say to myself, oh, okay, Paula likes red more than I do. I wonder if maybe I can use that fact in the future someday. You know, I store it away there. And it even can be, it's the kind of thing that helps kids learn that the contents of other people's minds differ. That's why I really like the yellow jelly beans, but you seem to be eating the red ones. And when I'm a little kid, I go, holy cow, I did. I thought all humans like the yellow ones.

But now you like the red ones. And now we can trade. And so we can use that information to create the positive some world that we live in, where I give you things that I have extra of. and I don't really need that anymore, and you give me things that are, that you have extra of and you don't need them. Both of us have benefited from it. So we can use the social comparison process to make these kinds of judgments that are completely neutral. But we often use them to attach a tag, oh, that's good, that's bad. Uh-oh, I'm not doing well.

Or, oh, great, I'm doing really well. The understanding that the content of someone else's mind is different than your own, the content of everybody else's minds is different than that of my own. that is the necessary precursor to be able to teach. Absolutely. Because I certainly can't teach somebody unless you understand that what's in their head is different than what's in yours. And the mechanism of teaching is a critical part of how we derive meaning and purpose. And I imagine also plays a significant role in our evolutionary success. Can you talk about that, like all of this?

No, you're absolutely right. So we call this knowledge that other minds. minds have different contents from your own. We call that theory of mind, but I have a theory that your mind differs from my own. I don't necessarily know exactly what's in it, but I do know it's not the same as mine. And sometimes I know some of the contents based on your experiences and preferences. That in turn enables us to teach, and teaching is probably the single most important things that humans do. Every other animal begins life as if there have been no generations before it, as if they've learned nothing, because they now have to go off and learn to hunt. They have to go off and

learn whatever it is, and they would learn that by just watching typically their parents, but maybe not their parents, maybe it's hardwired knowledge, which also happens sometimes. Human beings enter this world knowing nothing. We are so much more worthless than almost every animal when it's born. You know, wildebeest can get up and run away from a lion in a half an hour. A human being can't run away from a lion in 12 years. And so we're born knowing nothing, but we're born into this amazing world where knowledge is cumulative, where culture every generation can ratchet forward. A 10-year-old kid today knows what even the geniuses of the world didn't know 500 years ago. They know what Copernicus discovered. They know what Darwin discovered. They

know what the greatest minds that have ever lived, discovered. And they start with that knowledge from when they're really young. And the way they start with that is that we teach them. We provide them with this knowledge. Now, we have the enormous advantage in today's world that we can write, which gives you access to the contents of people's minds that you'll never meet. And we also have the internet where people can record conversations like this one and you can have access to them whenever and wherever you want that's really ratcheted this problem or exponentially exploded this process but even prior to that our ancestors had these oral storytelling traditions where they could explain for example how they got away from that lion and now i'm i got away from the lion but i'm all

bit up and it didn't improve me a bit and you can listen to my story and go wow that's what i'm going to do if i ever run into a lion in that circumstance and now you know how to solve the problem without paying this enormous price that I paid by getting chewed on. And so this storytelling and the sharing of information, this teaching is the most important capacity that we as humans have. And as you point out, it's enabled by the fact that one day the penny dropped and we realized, in contrast to all the other species, that not all humans know the same things that we know. And so to the end goal of finding meaning, finding purpose, does it follow that if we think about the things that we are evolutionarily hardwired to do, those are likely to be things that will give us meaning and purpose. It does. That's exactly right. Our ancestors didn't worry about meaning or purpose because they typically had these religions whereby they often worship their own ancestors and they thought that they went into some sort of state whereby they could, they were godlike or something like that.

And whatever the religions differ across all these small scale societies, but they always meant that you were intercaled. connected and that you had a place in the world. Well, science has given us a lot of amazing things, but for a lot of people, it's taken that place away. If the earth is not the center of the universe, if we just evolved in a meaningless fashion, maybe there is no meaning and purpose to my life. Maybe I'm just an organism that got randomly created, will live randomly and will die randomly. And that's very intimidating thought. And maybe I'm just one of a gazillion organisms in our galaxy, much less than all the galaxies. Again, a very intimidating thought. And so, Our ancestors didn't have to worry about meaning of purpose because they always felt that there was one there.

It hadn't been taken away from them. But simultaneously, the way that they achieved the meaning of purpose that they knew about was by being interconnected with others, by cooperating, by having friends and family, by doing those things that evolution wants us to do. And what that means is that by and large, we can do the same things. And in fact, you see this in if you look across human lifespans. So when you're a young adult, people are typically at their most ambitious. That's when they're striking out and trying to become an individual success. However, they get there. They may be an entrepreneur.

They may be a member of a very large company. There's a variety of ways. When you get older and you now hopefully are somewhat of a success, people's mind turned away from that kind of accumulation and it becomes much more about legacy. Well, how can I help the world? How can I mentor young people? How can I do things that reconnect me? Because I unconnected myself for a little while.

I was focused on myself and my ambitions and hopefully I achieved as much as much as I wanted. Most people don't quite achieve everything they want. They get to the point where they realize, she, that's kind of leaving me a little bit cold. I need to reconnect. I need to do the other things that are part of the human experience, which is about community, it's about family, and it's about hopefully leaving something after yourself that will carry forward whatever it was that you were doing in a positive way. Community family legacy. Would it also follow that doing things that give us a higher chance of surviving, would also lead to greater happiness?

And if so, why then do we have the capacity for risk-taking and self-sabotage? Yes. The first answer is yes. Doing things that enhance our survival are super important, and they tend to make us very happy. And so a great meal. Well, what makes a great meal? It's typically high in calories, high in fat, high in salt, high in sugar, and hopefully

put together well. And that tends to make us happy. And it definitely enhances our survival over a very meager meal. However, evolution only cares about survival to the degree that it facilitates reproduction. And so if you live forever, a thousand years, but you never have a baby, well, you're evolutionarily irrelevant. You may matter for everybody else. I'm not trying to make a value judgment, but evolution doesn't care about you.

Evolution only cares about you to the degree that you reproduce. And so what that means is there's all sorts of tradeoffs in our genes that represent that kind of distinction between what do I have to do to successfully reproduce versus what do I have to do to survive. So what my kids are now adults, but when they were little, they were enormously metabolically costly to me. They were waking up constantly in the middle of the night. I have a photo of me when my first child, my son was born and he's a brand new baby, and I'm patting him. And I look young and full of beans. And just a few years later, I'm desiccated and worn out and thrash because it was so biologically expensive in order to do that. And so evolution makes

that trade-off on purpose. It says, well, look, the chance of Bill Living Forever is near zero because parasites or predators are going to take him down anyway. And so what we want to do is we want to make him as young and as vigorous as possible so that he can get out there in the mating pool. And one of the things that men have to do in order to achieve that is testosterone. We know that not always, of course, there's always variability, but on average, men with higher testosterone are more likely to attract a partner. But what else does testosterone does? It makes you bit agro. It makes you competitive. it makes you potentially aggressive. And so higher testosterone men are also more likely to die in accidents.

They're more likely to kill each other. All sorts of bad things can come of it. What it does mean, though, on the positive side, so to speak, is that because male reproductive variability is much higher than female reproductive variability, and this across most animals, certainly all mammals. Some males have bazillions of kids. Many, many males have none, whereas females almost always have a few because it's very biologically expensive for females, but there's always males who are interested. So the end result is that

males have evolved to take much bigger risks than females have, because lots of males got left out of the mating game altogether. When we look at our DNA, we can trace all our male line by going through our Y DNA. And if you're female, you don't have a Y chromosome, but your father does, you can trace back his. And then you can trace your female line by looking at your mitochondrial DNA, the DNA inside the powerhouse of the cell. For reasons that elude me, that goes entirely from your female line. When you do that, you see a lot more variability in female DNA than a male DNA, meaning that there's just fewer male ancestors, meaning lots of males got left out entirely. And so one of the threats on males of most species is the possibility of never reproducing.

Now, that does mean that I want to reproduce. It doesn't mean that evolution gave me a desire to have kids, whether I'm a goat or a human or a lizard. Most animals don't know how to have kids, but it gave them a tendency to be risk-taking and a tendency to look for opportunities to mate. And if you do those two things, well, then you're going to have a good chance of reproducing, at least if you're a male. And so unfortunately, you can do things that disrupt your own happiness

by taking what people from the outside would say, well, that was an unnecessary risk. My skiing over that rise was a stupid and unnecessary risk. There could have been somebody there, and there was. Now, my son did the same thing, but he was like four feet to the left, and he was totally fine. So obviously, you can take lots of risks and get away with it, but then some days you don't and then you pay a heavy price.

We'll return to the show in just a moment. So this discussion originated with the question, do we find happiness by doing things that have a higher likelihood of ensuring our survival, such as eating a great meal? And if so, why do we take risks? What can we extrapolate from the activities that are best for our survival and or are evolutionarily advantageous? What can we extrapolate from those

in order to have greater happiness meaning purpose? That's a great question. I think you answered that question well with a lot of the advice that you give on your website, but the one piece of advice that I think is missing is it's important to become financially successful in order to gain financial freedom. But at the same time, work is for almost every human,

work is a large part of their life. And so if you're lucky, it may only be a few hours, hours a day. If you're less lucky, it may be many hours a day. But in either case, most of us are forced to work at least some of the time. Now, if that's the case, and if you don't enjoy your work, well, that's a real problem. Now, sometimes people are lucky and they love their jobs, and so they just want to get to it every day. I happen to love being a professor. And so I enjoy teaching my class. I enjoy doing research. And that gives me purpose and meaning. But if I had been less lucky. Imagine that I have a job that I don't particularly enjoy. It doesn't mean I can't still get

purpose and meaning out of it. And the key to achieve that is to find ways to be a helpful, useful cog in the machine, to be a cooperator who makes the world a better place. And so if my job is working at a petrol station, well, if I can help people out when they come to my petrol station, they can't find the right motor oil or they don't know which of these sodas is the tastiest. If I can be engaged in people's lives and I can be a cooperator and I can be helpful, I'm going to go home from work with a sense of satisfaction. And it's even better if I happen to work into it in a team and whatever it is that my team is doing, if I can make my team more successful, if I can bring ideas to the table that benefit them, if I can help execute the goals that we've

all agreed on. And so by all means, when I work hard and gain financial freedom, that can give me happiness. But I can also gain happiness, even in drudgery, if I do that drudgery in a way that met the ancestral goals that we have of cooperating and elevating all of us. And how can a person do that if they don't have the autonomy to change the way in which they work? And so the way in which they work is, or the environment in which they work is non-cooperative and or the type of work that they do does not elevate others. Yeah. I would say first that what you want is to work with good people.

Not every job has good people in it. Lots of people are nasty. Lots of people try to lord it over you. Lots of people give you unnecessary drudgery to do, et cetera. and that's super unfortunate. And if that happens to you, then in an ideal world, you just find a new job, even if it's doing exactly what you're doing already, but in a place where you like the people, where you're working with people who you respect and admire and who are friendly and good to you. That's the sort of baseline thing that can't be fixed. In fact, I would say that most jobs that suck suck because the people that you're working with typically your boss being a lousy boss.

Nine times out of ten, what makes the job unpleasant is not what it is that you physically do, even if what you're doing is mopping. the floor, not that great. It's the people that you're working with. But even if your job is very little autonomy, even if your job has very little mobility, if it has all, you know, you're just a cog in the machine and you have very little choice over what you're going to do, you can still do it better and in a more helpful way or worse and in a less helpful way. And I still remember my first job at Ohio State University where I taught for a dozen years, the janitor who cleaned our area was the nicest, happiest guy I've ever met. And every day I'd be working late because, you know, I'm this young guy trying to make it.

And he would come by, now he's coming in after most people have left. And he would always stop and chat and he would say, oh, I noticed that you must have spilled a Coke on your floor. And so I tried these three different products. And I tried to get it out and none of them worked. But then finally I got this and it worked. And I was like, oh, I noticed that. Thank you so much.

You know, he really took pride in his job, even though it was a job that most people wouldn't enjoy at all. And this is, you know, this will date me a little bit. But this is a guy who'd fought in the Vietnam War and they'd been pretty banged up. And so it wasn't even that easy for him to get around. But he was this happy guy who was part of a machine that he could try to make a little bit better every single day. And then I don't know if he stopped and chat with everybody. Maybe there were people who were somewhat rude to them and he'd just learn, you know, don't bother with them.

I don't know what the case might be, but you can find this kind of satisfaction in almost any activity that you do. If you can find a way to use that activity to make the world a little bit better place. That's beautiful. Thank you for that message. We are coming to the end of our time. Are there any final messages that you would like to communicate to the people who are listening? I don't have anything else I'd like to add. I have been very impressed by your blogs and podcasts and website.

I think there's lots of great advice in the kinds of areas that I have expertise. I know nothing about how to invest, so I can't comment on that. But the goals here, I think, are very good goals. And I think if people take them seriously, you can't, like I said earlier, you can't become permanently happy. But you can move, you can notch yourself up a little bit and you can make more of those happy moments. And when you add them all together, you know, that's probably the best that humans can do. Well, thank you. Thank you.

Where can people find you if they'd like to know more about you and your work? So I'm easily Googled because there's only one Bill Von Hipple on this planet. My book is available in Amazon and everywhere else that people look at the bookstores. But there's also, I have a large collection of academic work for people who might want to take a much deeper dive. Most people aren't interested. But if you are, again, that's easily found on my academic webpage, on sites like Researchgate, on sites like Google Scholar, I'm very easily tracked down. Thank you, Bill.

What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, you may be familiar with research around what's known as a happiness set point. The set point theory of happiness suggests that our level of happiness, known in research as our subjective well-being, oscillates around a particular default level. We will tend to return to our default level over time, according to happy. happiness set point theory, approximately 50% of that default level is genetically determined, and the other 50% is based on life circumstances that are more within our control. The concept of happiness set point theory is a frequent topic of discussion within the

financial independence community. I've seen presentations that include it at the Economy Conference, at Camp FI, and at the Chautauqua events, all of which are conferences and gathering spots for people inside of the financial independence slash fire communities. And so I raise it now in order to link it to something that Dr. Von Hippel said when he talked about an evolutionary reason why it would be disadvantageous for us to be consistently happy. There's a negative consequence of this, though, and that is that evolution also doesn't want to lose its best tool. If it can motivate you by making you happy when you do X, let's say you achieve something that causes you to raise in status. Maybe for our ancestors, that was a successful hunt. For you and me, it might be

picking the right stock or going out to a great dinner or meeting a new friend or something like that. The problem is that evolution can't give you permanent happiness because then we'd lose one of best tools. And so evolution gives you a little bit of happiness and the bigger your achievement, the bigger your rise in happiness. But then it's super important that you drop back to baseline. Because if you were permanently happy, then you're unmotivated to do anything ever again, and the world's going to leave you behind. So complacency then becomes a detriment. Exactly. Dr. von Hibble describes a surge of happiness that then returns to baseline or aversion to the mean, which then inspires us to drive more and more of these surges of happiness.

And so while the cliche or the aphorism, money can't make you happy or success can't make you happy, is true, if overly simplistic, it's also the can't that money, success, all of these external forces necessarily must not result in perpetual happiness, because that would give us nothing to strive for. And our innate nature is to strive, to work, to progress, to learn, to teach, and to never become complacent. And so to apply this notion to the topic of wealth and financial independence, the challenge the thing to strive for, if you will, then becomes what to choose to strive for once you've mastered the money game. When building your net worth is no longer your primary focus, because you've saved, you've invested, you've reached your quote-unquote FI number, if you have one, and you've built your

net worth to the point at which you know that every subsequent dollar has diminishing marginal utility. When you reach that point, know that you will have a surge of happiness, but it will only be temporary. And after that, your lifelong practice must be deriving happiness in other ways. And when you pursue those other avenues to happiness, know that those will all be temporary as well. The joy comes in the practice, not the pinnacle. That is key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, I've been thinking a lot about Ted Turner's quote, about how success can often be driven by insecurity. And in fact, the more important success is to you, usually that's a sign that your baseline happiness is a little bit lower and you need constant hits of successes in order to get happy. As Ted Turner put it, you'll never meet a super achiever anywhere who's not driven by at least some level of insecurity.

So why does the guy keep working so hard when he's achieved so much? because it's a little bit worried maybe I'm not good enough. I'm not as happy as I want to be. Maybe I need to win a big sailing race. Or maybe I need to start a new network or, you know, all the things that people like that do. Now, a moderate amount of insecurity is probably not a bad thing. It keeps us self-aware. It keeps us reflective.

It provides a nice counterpoint to overconfidence bias, which is a known cognitive bias. It provides a counterpoint to the Dun & Kruger effect. But there is a distinction between ego-driven insecurity. which leads to the desire for purely personal gain, which is non-cooperative and antisocial, versus a desire to strive rooted in cooperation, community, and altruism. That leads towards a path of finding pro-social activities that contain the elements of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And what we know from other research is that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are,

attributes associated with enjoying your work, and enjoying your work, working cooperatively, with others for the sake of a greater good, for the sake of advancing your field, and in some manner making a contribution that benefits collective humanity, that is, in a very real way, what we are hardwired for, and I hope that that's what came out of this conversation. As Dr. von Hipple described how we are wired to be social, we are wired to cooperate, and by living and working together and teaching one another and creating a collective body of knowledge, knowledge that compounds on itself, that is what it is to be human. Does anyone remember, and this is a little bit of an aside, a related aside,

does anyone remember the early days of the internet? I'm talking the year 2000. When people wouldn't even use the word internet, they would call it an information superhighway. I remember hearing that phrase, this might have even been a, the late 90s, hearing the phrase information superhighway and wondering, what was so special about that? Why would it matter that information could travel quickly? Which, of course, is a naive question in hindsight, because the answer, of course, is that sharing information and ideas, reading, listening, learning, teaching, speaking, writing, absorbing, analyzing,

synthesizing. This is the most significant work that we do. It's the foundation of any domain, any field. And so for those of you who are pursuing financial independence, for those of you who know that once you reach a certain level of wealth or net worth, or a certain level of residual income, your focus will shift away from how do I make money and towards what's next. Stay immersed in the world of ideas, never stop learning and never stop teaching. Because to learn and to teach, to listen and talk, to read and write, and to do so for cooperative and pro-social purposes, that's what it is to be human. And so that is key takeaway number two.

Finally, key takeaway number three, let's talk about relative social status versus absolute means. And so imagine that you live in a group with 30 people and your nomads on the Savannah. If you're the best arrow maker and now you've made yourself a really good set of arrows, well, you've got something over everybody that you'll ever meet for the rest of your life. You're always going to have the best arrows. No one will ever have better arrows in you because it's just a small group of people. But now we live in this world with billions of humans.

And no matter what stuff I buy, there's going to be better stuff next year that's produced by some other company. So I think, oh, if I just buy myself that new Jaguar, I'll have a nicer car than my neighbor and I'll be happy forever. Well, that kind of status competition, social goals, you're guaranteed to fail at them. Because even if I completely trounce all my neighbors, my next goal is to now move into a nicer neighborhood and now I'm behind again. and I have to start the process all over. And so those products don't actually make me happy. They do nothing for me unless they're better than the products of those around me, and they give me this sort of status bump.

And searching for status bumps in today's world is a recipe for failure because there's just too many humans, and there's always going to be humans who are higher in status than I'm, and I'm going to keep resetting my sights, and I'm going to keep falling behind because there's just too many others. For ancestors that worked for us, it's a guaranteed disaster. If you lived in a tiny group of 30 people, sure, everyone could have their specialization. Everyone could have relative social status about something that they're better at than the other 29 people.

But we live in the era of Instagram where we're plugged into a global community in which there's always someone showcasing whether real or imagined something that on the surface seems to be better, which is why. Why spending our time, money, energy chasing relative status symbols is, as Dr. Von Hipple describes it, a guaranteed disaster. And so what do we do instead? Well, what the data show very clearly is seek out experiences. Do stuff with your money that allows you to be the person you want to be, to go the places you want to go, to have leisure time that you want to have. If you seek out experiences, if you try to have freedom, then your money will bring you

happiness. If you try to buy lots and lots of stuff and always have good. better stuff than the other guy, well, your money's not going to buy you happiness. It's going to put you on this permanent hedonic treadmill, which is anxiety provoking, gives you brief bumps of happiness, and then it's as if it doesn't even exist and you're just right back at it again. And so experiences are better than stuff, but the corollary to this is to truly enjoy those experiences for what they are. Don't turn your experiences into a form of social flexing. In fact, to put this into practice at a tactical level, don't post about it on social media.

Don't brag about it to your friends. Live the life, but don't make a thing out of it. And that's when you know that what you have is real, your enjoyment is real. You're experiencing it intrinsically for what it is and not using it as a form of soothing your insecurities or trying to one up the game. Because in the era of Instagram, certainly you could all. get on a consumer treadmill of experiences as well. And you wouldn't want to do that for the same reason that you don't want to get on the consumer treadmill about stuff. Those are three takeaways that came from this conversation with psychology professor Bill Von Hippel on

the evolutionary science of what makes us happy. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, there are four things, four things you can do to connect. Number one is to share this with a friend, a family member, a coworker, share this with somebody in your life. Connect with them. Send them this episode. It spreads these ideas. It deepens your relationships.

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