Good Life Project - On Happiness, Morality & Fragility | Jonathan Haidt

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business (https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/jonathan-haidt) who researches the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures –– including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. He’s written several books, including The Happiness Hypothesis (https://amzn.to/2VnpXvM), The Righteous Mind (https://amzn.to/2MfbfTe) and The Coddling the American Mind (https://amzn.to/33f6e4i), and co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology to help foster connection among disparate groups. In today’s conversation, we talk about everything from deconstructing happiness to changing attitudes towards adversity to what it means to truly flourish — and the critical importance of connection, community, and relationship-building in the face of profound differences as a part of a good life.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I was first exposed to Jonathan Haidt's work about a dozen years ago when I stumbled upon this book called The Happiness Hypothesis. It was my very early introduction to this world of positive psychology and the exploration of human flourishing from sort of a more scientific meets ancient wisdom lens. My mind was absolutely blown open by that book. And I have paid close attention to his work over the years. In the intervening years, he wrote another book about morality called The Righteous Mind and a more recent book called The Coddling of the American Mind about sort of the state of education from the standpoint of how we learn and how the culture of learning in higher education, especially these days, has led him to move from his PhD to then jump into India to study all sorts of really fascinating things around purity, pollution, and sanctity, how that relates to the way we live

our lives, how that relates to spirituality and morality. And we explore happiness. We explore a lot of the touch points of his journey and really kind of zoom the lens out then and look at how all these things fit together, piece together into the exploration of a life well-lived. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You end up going to undergrad at Yale. You find yourself doing your PhD at UPenn. You get out of your grad work, and while a lot of people, the path would be either you go into, you try and get a teaching job, or you go into industry. You go to India. How does that unfold, and why?

So, in social psychology, it's not terribly common to do a postdoc, but it's not uncommon. And I finished my PhD in 1992, and it was on moral judgment across cultures. A study I did in Brazil and the United States across social class as well. And that was testing a debate. It's like a perfect grad student thing to do. Like there's a debate between two major figures in the field. And I developed the experimental design that was going to disambiguate. It's going to be the conclusive test between Richard Schwader, a cultural anthropologist who said that the moral domain is very broad and it varies

across cultures. And Elliot Turiel, a psychologist at UC Berkeley, who had argued that there's a kind of a universal moral domain around harm rights and justice. So I'd done this study in Brazil and the United States, it came out beautifully, vindicated Richard Schwader's views about cultural variation, and I was able to get a postdoc then working with Schwader at the University of Chicago. While I was there, in those two years, in that two-year federally funded postdoc, then working with Schwader at the University of Chicago. While I was there, in those two years, in that two-year federally funded postdoc, I applied for a grant to go to India to continue doing that research, because Brazil isn't that different from the US, I mean, on a world scale, whereas India really is. And especially on the topics of purity and pollution, which is what I was beginning to specialize in in my graduate days. I was funded by the American Institute of Indian Studies and administered by Fulbright

and spent three months in Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Orissa, and lived there for three months and did research there and pretended to be an anthropologist. But along the way, it really got my mind blown, got it just completely blown. Because in the same way that in a lot of Enlightenment narratives, you may know some great truth, but you know it only superficially. You know it as a proposition, and then you suddenly feel it. So all the stuff I've been writing about cultural variation, deep variation in what's right and wrong, I kind of knew it superficially. But in my three months there, I really had a kind of a visceral or had moments in which I really felt that I was beginning to get it viscerally.

Yeah. I mean, what's it like for you coming out of Chicago, stepping off a plane in India for the first time? I mean, also, you're somebody who's grown up outside of New York City. And you're also coming out of a really interesting time in our culture, which is sort of like the go-go 80s, where everything is fast. Everything is about money and drugs to a certain extent, especially in the New York area. You're in the world of academia and these esteemed institutions, and you find yourself stepping out of a plane and into this profoundly different culture and world. Yeah, the biggest difference was, well, so I was beginning to study some sort of big dimensions of difference between cultures and those that are individualistic or put the individual at the center and those that are group focused or put the group at the center. And that's kind of a proposition that I can say to you and you can kind of, you know, understand it. But along with the group stuff comes a lot of hierarchy, gender segregation,

religiosity, you know, belief in astrology and in auspiciousness. So it's a worldview that it's not just that it was different than mine. It's that as a kind of a young science oriented, you know, secular atheist Jew, I kind of really disliked like it's all this stuff that, you know, somebody like me would would really dislike. And, you know, especially if you put it in the context of the American culture war. So, you know, you were bringing us back to what was going on in the 80s. But in my mind, at the time, it was really more what was brewing in the 90s, which was the culture war, the, you know, around the time of Bill Clinton's election, I think it was Pat Buchanan gave a speech in 1992, I think it was, about the culture war descending on the United States.

And he was right. I mean, that really is when it became much more bitter was the 1990s. And the religious right, so I guess I'm just two years older than you, but if you were on the left in the 1980s, the boogeyman, the demon, the terrible thing was the moral majority and the religious right. And you're all supposed to hate them. And, you know, when I go to India, suddenly, I'm trying to understand a civilization. I'm trying to keep an open mind and open heart. I'm trying to understand it on their terms. And what do they have? Devoutly religious, very gender segregated. They believe in, you know, in all kinds of, you know of quasi-religious or religious rules of child-rearing. And so, in a way, it's kind of a social pattern that is resembling many elements of the Christian right in the United States.

This is not—I mean, India is gigantic and diverse. I don't want to generalize about the whole country, but this was, especially in the old town, it was a very religious Hindu priestly town. There was a lot of famous temples in Bhubaneswar. And so things that I would hate in the United States, I was at least able to give a chance when I was a visitor in India. And above all, because people were so nice to me, and I wanted to fit in, and I wanted to understand them. So all my defenses were down and it really changed my thinking and it allowed me, when I returned to the U.S., it allowed me, now for the first time ever,

to listen to people who were in some sense my opponents politically, let's say, and rather than trying to defeat them or say how bad they were, actually trying to understand what they're up to. Yeah, I mean, I think that's always one of the most powerful elements of travel to any country, but especially the experience that you had coming back here at that window of time. You also mentioned that you sort of focused on these two areas, pollution and purity. Tell me more about this. Yeah, let me explain that a bit to your audience. So there's a lot of research on how morality varies across cultures. And we can all kind of understand that some places are more hierarchical than others, and some are more egalitarian.

We can understand that some people have a notion of fairness that involves duels or feuds or norms of reciprocity that we can understand even if we disagree with. You know, if a Hatfield kills a McCoy, we don't think that McCoy has a right to kill a Hatfield, but we at least understand the motivation. But where it gets really kind of weird, much harder to understand, is if you read the Hebrew Bible, if you read holy books from other cultures as well, you find a lot of regulation about menstruation, what foods you should eat, skin rashes. So I first read, you know, I had a bar mitzvah when I was 13, obviously, and I became an atheist. By the time I was 14 or 15, I called myself an atheist. And it was only in college at Yale that I read the entire Hebrew Bible. And I was horrified by a lot of the stuff in it. There are beautiful elements in it, but

there's a lot of strange stuff to modern ears, and there's commands for violence and even genocide in places. So that really turned me off. But then as I was studying cultural psychology, what I discovered is that that book actually has a lot of stuff that's very similar to stuff in the laws of Manu and Hinduism and the Quran. I was reading a lot of anthropological accounts. And most cultures think that morality includes the foods that you eat and how you deal with corpses and menstruation and sex and all this physical stuff. And so that was really the puzzle for me in graduate school is how do we make sense of this? And it'd be one thing to just say, oh, well, you know, cultures make up weird stuff and they're

different. But when cultures make up weird stuff and that weird stuff is really, really similar across cultures, that's really exciting because then it's like, you know, for any listeners who know about Carl Jung and his idea of archetypes, I don't want to get all mystical here, but the point is, if you have complex constellations of meaning that pop up around the world, like witchcraft, either there really are witches, which I doubt, or there's something about the human mind that invents witchcraft beliefs because of certain recurring patterns of social interaction. And that's what I saw with purity and pollution. There's something about our bodies and our emotions, something related to the

emotion of disgust, I believe, that structures a lot of our morality. So that's really what I was studying. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting you bring up the emotion of disgust, right? Because it seems like that is sort of the through line through so much of this. And it's kind of fascinating, too, that, you know, you could probably draw a line between certain cultures and say, well, at some point, if you really trace it back, you know, they were interacting in some way, shape or form. But it sounds like a lot of what you started to reveal was that, no, in profoundly disparate cultures in all different parts of the world, where there really wasn't any way to trace back a relationship where they could have shared information, you were seeing the exact same patterns. No, that's right. You know, cultures in sub-Saharan Africa have not had any interaction

with cultures in Polynesia or North America in, you know, at least 50,000 years. So no, there's no, there's no shared. It's not shared in that way. It must emerge from the human mind. And the human mind, you know, there is a human nature, although there's variations around the world, but there is a human nature. The clearest way I can summarize all that purity and pollution stuff is this, that the human mind structures social space in at least a three-dimensional pattern. And so there's a horizontal dimension of closeness. We all have a sense of who's close and who's distant. There's a dimension of hierarchy. We all have a sense of who's above and should be shown respect and who's below and owes us respect. So if you know how to speak French or Spanish, you know that you need to encode that in your verbs. Do you say to or do

you say vu? And we do it in English too, even though we don't have the words. We feel really funny about calling a much older person by first name. We need to show the respects. We say Mr. Smith as opposed to Bob. So those two dimensions are easy. But here's what I found is that there's really like a third dimension, like a Z axis, which is purity and pollution, which is your degree of physical, spiritual purity or pollution. And it's not as though pollution is like a bad thing necessarily. Everybody has to defecate. And when you defecate, you're polluted. And then you bathe and then you're clean. And so all the books that talk so much about purine and pollution, it's not like, don't ever be polluted, don't ever defecate, you know, don't have sex, don't give birth, don't

die. You know, no, of course,, we're biological creatures. And what appears to be happening is that there's something about our biologicality which we feel is incompatible with our spirituality. Almost every culture has some conception of God or holiness. And so these purity and pollution practices are ways that cultures have devised to regulate our movement on this third dimension. If you're going to pray, and you should, or you should have contact with God, you just have to prepare your body first. Be sure that you're eating ritually pure foods before you do it. Be sure that you've bathed in the proper way, and then go greet God. But don't greet him while you're, you know, while,

in fact, there are lists. You know, you shall not, you should not even think of the Word of God while you are eating or having sex or coming from a cremation ground. So something about the human eye just seems to need to keep of worthiness of spiritual devotion. I'm curious whether you widened the lens and said, okay, are there cultures that we can look at where there isn't a strong sense of devotion, of spiritual devotion? And do these same things around purity and pollution exist? Do these same practices and beliefs? Yeah, so there are, you know, I try to take a dynamic view of culture in which you have to understand, you know, the last several hundred in which you have to understand the last several hundred years.

You have to understand the physical ecology, even the weather and all sorts of things. But they're all in flux decade by decade and generation after generation. And so one trend that we see as any society gets wealthy and modern is that this puritan pollution stuff fades out. And also the hierarchy stuff tends to minimize, but the purity and pollution stuff just fades out. And so if you look, I have a section somewhere on my shelf here of advice books for young men from the Victorian era. And they always have a chapter on masturbation and how bad it is and spiritual pollution and all that. And then by the 1930s, that stuff begins to disappear. So as cultures get modern and secular, they embrace more scientific rational methods, a lot of the stuff disappears. But here's the really cool thing,

it doesn't really disappear. It still will pop up in odd ways. And so you can see this if you look at any sort of modern ritual. So there's a deep spiritual emptiness that tends to go along with modernity. People have been writing about this since the Industrial Revolution. So Ferdinand Tönnies wrote, what's it called? Anyway, he developed these terms, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, about the two different ways of organizing societies. But a lot of the 19th century sociologists noted that in cities, as people are getting richer and more sophisticated, there's a spiritual emptiness and they try to fill it with other things. So, if you look at modern rituals, look at Burning Man or any other kind of ritual that people create, they tend to make it up in ways that are really recognizably ancient,

you know, like making something sacred, developing norms and taboos, circling around the object, the use of fire. So anyway, that's the sort of stuff that just really fascinated me early in my career. And it just set me up to later move into politics. Yeah. And you brought up the idea of taboos also, which was sort of spinning in my head, because if you have, is that almost the opposite of purity and pollution, of these devotional practices? And in the context of what's happening in modern society, you know, the last, I guess, 10 to 20 years, we have seen the running or fleeing of people from organized religion and the increase of the, quote, nuns, the non-affiliated people. Right, who call themselves spiritual but not religious. Right, exactly. Yeah.

How does taboo play into this whole dynamic? So taboo is the Polynesian word. I believe it refers originally to certain things are taboo or tapu to you because if you're in this tribe or this clan, you should not eat this animal. That is taboo to you. So it's ritual prohibitions, and they can apply to who you can have sex with, what you can eat. But the general concept is the idea that if you do something, something really bad will happen. It's not physical, it's not material, it's something hard to describe. But it's also not just about you. It's actually something the community will

need to enforce, that we can't have you among us if you're violating these taboos. And so, in the big religions, this gets developed into notions of blasphemy, heresy. The psychology here is that there are certain kinds of violations that demand a communal response. And, you know, if someone robs a grocery store, well, we can punish them, put them in jail, make them pay restitution, and then we release them, they go back down to society. But if somebody killed one of their parents and then ate the body, like there's nothing, I mean, that is, you are a monster, you are so far beyond, you are violating so many taboos. And we could add some other ones, which I won't. But it's about who's a monster, who's beyond, who must be cast out, ostracized, drummed out of our community.

And so once you see the operation of purity and pollution, blasphemy laws, sacrilege, now you can understand a lot of what's going on in the age of social media with cancel culture. There's this ancient urge. Somebody has transgressed our most sacred values, they're out, they're dead to us. Nobody should talk, oh, you talked to him, you're out, you're canceled. So canceling, blasphemy, all these things are contagious. And it's horrifying to me to see these ancient practices coming back. In a major religion that's evolved over millennia, there are at least checks and balances on it. There are procedures. But in the new cancel culture, which kids are inventing as we move, as we go, there's, I think, a real cruelty to it. There's no forgiveness. There's no way to get uncanceled. So I think this is doing—our ancient tribal and religious psychology is hurting a lot of people, and we don't understand it yet. Yeah, and I want to go a lot deeper into that. of people feeling that they're losing a sense of belonging, they're losing a sense of identification with some organized religion, structure, spirituality,

where the systems and the norms have been developed over generations, if not a lot longer. And then you start to cherry pick these things that give you a sense of power, agency, through dominance to a certain extent. You need the entirety of the structure for everything to remain healthy. Yes, that's right.

So this for me was another real, what's the word, not watershed or bright line or something. So I was always on the left. And it was when I began working in India with Richard Schwader and trying to understand religious conservatives. And then I came back to America and started to try to understand social conservatives and libertarians and all different parts of the political spectrum. One of the most helpful things I read was this amazing book by Thomas Sowell. He's an economist, just deep social thinker, Stanford retired now, called A Conflict of Visions. And Sowell lays out how there are these two conceptions of human nature, what he calls the unconstrained and the constrained. Okay.

And some people believe that human nature is basically good, and religion and society, they constrain us and they limit us. And if we could just throw off the chains, this is basically John Lennon's song, Imagine. Imagine if we could just throw off the chains, this is basically John Lennon's song, Imagine. Imagine that there were no gods, no nations, just all the people living life in peace. Wouldn't that be great? And so if you think that human nature is like that, well, then you need to tear down all this stuff and let people be free, let them be good. And people on the left tend to be attracted to that kind of view that we need to remove these constraints. But conservatives, and here I'm only talking about social conservatives like Edmund Burke-type People on the left tend to be attracted to that kind of view, that we need to remove these constraints.

But conservatives, and here I'm only talking about social conservatives like Edmund Burke-type conservatives. There are a lot of different kinds. We're not talking about authoritarians. We're not talking about free market conservatives, just the social conservatives who trace their intellectual heritage to Edmund Burke. They believed that human nature is complicated. It has good and evil in it. And people are only good to the extent that they get to participate in healthy social structures that limit the bad. So you have to have a good police force, judicial system. You have to have constraints on kids.

They've got to learn self-control. Can't spoil them. You shouldn't spoil them. You need to raise them to develop virtues, because if you don't, they're going to turn out to be little monsters. And, you know, I had, as I was writing The Righteous Mind, you know, I started it off as someone very much on the left, trying to write a book to help the left understand the rights, they could stop losing so much, like in 2000 and 2004, in the US presidential elections. And I started realizing that, oh, my God, you actually have to listen to

multiple sides of any complicated situation in order to understand it. I learned so much from that book, from Thomas Sowell's book, A Conflict of Visions. So back, I'm sorry, back to your question about the nuns or the spiritual but not religious. If you grow up within a religious tradition that offers these constraints, ideally one that has long had elements of the left and the right pushing, you tend to get then something that can end up being both constricting in a good way while also humane. Now, some variants of religion are incredibly repressive fundamentalists. I'm not saying they're all good. And some are so progressive, so basically far left that they end up kind of self-destructing. And from what I hear, the Unitarians these days might be

in one of those spirals. So a balanced religion is a beautiful thing. And people just left out on their own to find meaning in a world of consumer products and social media is so far is looking like a pretty ugly spectacle. Yeah. I mean, I see so much floundering and so much suffering, so much anxiety. It's really interesting to see us play with this idea of freedom and free will in the context of the world that we're living in today. And on the one hand, proclaiming we want it all. And on the other hand, to a certain extent, suffering because of, in part of what we're getting, at least that's my perception of it, we are wired to yearn for and flourish best when we have a

certain amount of constraint. When we kind of know what to do to a certain extent. I think some people move towards orthodoxy in any spiritual tradition because you basically wake up in the morning and it tells you what to do. And some people move in the exact opposite direction. But it seems like the sweet spot for human flourishing lies somewhere in the middle for a lot of people. Yeah.

Okay, let me just pause here and find. So what you're talking about here is basically what Emile Durkheim said. And this is another of the really formative experiences in my life was I took a course in graduate school from a criminologist, Marvin Wolfgang, who assigned us to read Durkheim's masterpiece, Suicide. And I'd never taken a sociology course, but Durkheim wrote, okay, I'll just read a couple of quotes and you can decide which ones to keep in the podcast. Our natural insatiability must be held in check by social controls. Society imposes limits on human desires and constitutes a regulative force, which must play the same role for moral needs, which the organism plays for physical needs. Like, we need a shell, we need something

to contain us. I'll find another one. Let me see. So Durkheim talks a lot about the way that people benefit from having limits, and people who have no limits tend to have a higher suicide rate. So he writes, poverty protects against suicide because it is a restraint in itself. Wealth, on the other hand, by the power it bestows, deceives us into believing that we depend on ourselves only. He finds also that people who are married have a lower suicide rate, people who are religious in times of war, people have a lower suicide rate. So it's from Durkheim that I learned that while we yearn for freedom, we actually need some degree of constraint.

And that is an essential part of a recipe for a happy and flourishing life. And that certainly felt strange to me coming at it from the left, although any social conservative would say, well, duh, of course. Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Yeah, I mean, part of what pops up when you share that also is the notion not just of constraint, but of community, but of the role of relationship. And Derek kind of spoke to this with his concept of collective effervescence.

You speak to it in your first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, when you talk about happiness being a function of the between rather than just the within. Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah. So my first book began, The Happiness Hypothesis began when I was teaching Psych 101 at the University of Virginia. And in teaching Psych 101, I would use quotes from the ancients to illustrate psychological principles. And I thought if I don't get tenure, because it was actually pretty iffy, if I don't get tenure, I'm not going to just transfer to a third-rate school. I'm going to quit the academy, and I'm going to try to just write books. And, you know, maybe let me try to write up these lectures. You know, let me try to

collect all this ancient wisdom. Let's see, did the ancients really know a lot about psychology? I mean, they were just horrible at biology and physics. There's like nothing, there's nothing we should read from the ancients about biology and physics. But it turns out they knew a lot about consciousness and about relationships. I did get tenure, just barely, but I did get tenure at UVA. And I decided to go ahead and write the book. And originally, it was just going to be the original title of the book was 12 Great Truths, Insights into Mind and Heart from Ancient Societies and Modern Science, something like that. And I got a contract for the book and I started writing it.

And I was running out of time. And so, I changed the title to 10 Great Truths, Insights into Mind and Heart. That's an old Mel Brooks joke for those who are older, listen to this. And then the publishers changed the title to the happiness hypothesis. And at first, I kind of objected because I didn't know what the happiness hypothesis was. I didn't have one when I was writing the book. But as I was revising the book, it became clear that there actually are a couple of hypotheses about happiness that are widely talked about and that can actually form a framework for understanding. So the first hypothesis is we're happy when we get what we want. We strive for things, we get them, we're happy.

But we all know that that's not true. Or rather, the happiness we get is amazingly fleeting. People have often commented on this. You strive for something for a long time, you achieve it, and you feel great for, you know, minutes or hours, maybe a day or two. But a week later, you know, it's like it never happened often. So the second hypothesis is happiness comes from within. Don't look for it from outside.

You know, try to get yourself right in your soul. And, you know, meditate. Live purely. So Buddha, many of the Eastern religions counsel non-attachment. Do your work the same, whether you achieve success or failure. Just do your work. And that's better. That's a better hypothesis. But by the end of the book, what I realized is that there is a thread running through all the chapters. It wasn't just a bunch of unrelated ideas. And the thread was that we

flourish when we are bound in to certain things, when we are connected in a certain way. And so, as Freud said, mental health is, he said, lieben und arbeiten, so love and work. If you can love and work well, you're healthy. So the formula I came to at the end of the book is flourishing, or the greatest happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between in three ways. Between yourself and others, you have to be embedded in social relationships, friendships, family. Yourself and your work, you have to have a sense that what you do matters, that you are doing something useful, and that you gain the respect and prestige therefrom. And yourself and something larger than yourself.

And traditionally, that was religion, the sense of connection to the sacred. But it can be part of any noble effort, just a sense that you are part of something larger. We need that. We evolved that way. Many of our happiest memories are of such times. And modern life allows us to live

in a much more independent way. So the metaphor that kept coming to me is that we evolved kind of like bees. Bees are hive creatures. They didn't evolve as individual organisms. They evolved as hives. So we're hive creatures like bees in some ways. But modern safety and wealth has allowed us to live as individual bees with no hive. And we don't do well in that way.

We have depression, anxiety, we're easily addicted, we take opiates. So that brings us right back to our early discussion of, you know, anomie and senselessness and the lack of meaning in many modern lives. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. So the happiness hypothesis was my first introduction to both your ideas and also this bigger world that was emerging around positive psychology and the sort of the exploration of, you know, Seligman's the other half of the cake that needed to be baked, you know, not just sick to baseline, but baseline to flourishing. It seemed like around then too, this became, there was a canon of happiness books that sort of exploded into the marketplace, Gilbert and all these other people. And it was interesting to see this exploration of, can we deconstruct happiness? Can we understand what it is, what it is not? Is there any universality to it? This seeming common revelation that it is much more the snapshot rather than the movie. And then a wave

that it feels like started to come later was, well, okay, this isn't all it. This matters. We all want it. But there's bigger stuff in the context of flourishing. And it seems like we sort of moved into an exploration of what are those, what is the movie? What are the elements of that sustained sense of I'm okay? Meaning seems to have entered the lexicon, the conversation in a really big way. And also, it seems like the evolution of your thought and your research into these ideas of morality, which we talked about a bit, you developed this theory of morality, five foundations, which eventually you distilled and added into these six sort of core elements. Where do you see the relationship between morality and a life well lived? Let me think of an answer to that. But before I answer

that, I'd love to ask you, what have you found? What are the best ideas? What have you, you know, you've been talking to people about this for as long as I have, I think. What's your, how would you convey a formula or not a formula, but what are the characteristics of a flourishing life? Yeah, and qualifying it by saying I am very much along the road with everyone else. Meaning seems to be a point that I keep returning to. Meaningfulness, a sense of purpose in life, a sense of meaningfulness in life. Completely agree with your sort of, where you came to at the end of the happiness hypothesis

is that us in relation to dot, dot, dot is really important. John Cacioppo wrote so much in his research around loneliness and what happens when we don't have that sense of belonging. So I think it's sort of three things. It's connection. It's meaningful, purposeful contribution. What I think is interesting too, and the world of positive sight hasn't addressed it in a

really powerful way, but I think it's coming around to a certain extent, is what I would call vitality. The sweet spot between mind and body, which we know are a seamless feedback mechanism. But I think mindset is certainly addressed a lot more, but from the head below. Yeah, that was largely absent from early positive psychology. Yeah.

And so you mean things just like energy, diet, sleep. Yeah, and what's interesting is, you know, you've done so much work in the ancient wisdom traditions. When you look at, for example, the eight-limb path of Ashtanga Yoga, right? In this country, we tend to practice the first few limbs, asana, being the most, you know, basically almost everybody stops at that, the physical movement part of it. But when you look at what was the original intention of that, you know, when this path was created so long ago, and this goes back to your original exploration

of purification and pollution, right? This was about purifying and strengthening the body so that we could sit in the pursuit of the outer limbs, the more esoteric, the more ethereal, for longer windows of time, and that we could dive into that space and keep ourselves there, and that it was those outer limbs where the real richness of life existed. That is beautiful, and that actually allows me to answer the question you asked me just before. One thing I found in my interviews

in Bhubaneswar is if I would speak to like the local village priest about purity and pollution, they had a very low level understanding. Well, you do this because that's what the scriptures say you do. But when I spoke with Sanskrit scholars or people who are elevate our, and basically, you know, given Hindu notions of karma, ultimately good life is one in which you act in ways that create good karma. A good life is not just one in which you, you know, have pleasures. It's not just one in which you are good to your family members. It's one in which you consistently act in such a good way that you generate good

karma. You're reincarnated on a higher level. So Hindu notions are certainly about all this that we're doing, even down to the purity and pollution, physical food stuff, is ultimately in the service of your spiritual advancement. And that's a good life, a life on this earth, and on this polluted, degraded earth, as many cultures have thought that we are, in the sublunary world, below the moon where everything's polluted and not out there among the stars where the gods are, that we have a brief time on this earth. And if you live in a good way, either you'll be reincarnated at a higher level or you'll escape from reincarnation. But so many of these religions have an idea that everything we do should be aimed towards

our spiritual advancement and that that is a good life. The word happiness, we think of in America, and this really came up in the early positive psych work, we think of happiness as like, I'm happy. It's a mood. I'm feeling good. But there was an awareness even in those early days that the word happiness used to mean like happy, like fortunate circumstance, like life, liberty, and the pursuit of feeling joyful. It meant the pursuit of positive, a pursuit of a, you know, living in a good way with plenty of resources and happiness. Good fortune. Good fortune. That's, yes, good fortune. That's where happiness was more about, about good fortune. So yes, that was sort of always my role in the early positive psychology.

I was studying moral elevation and some specific moral emotions, but it was also always to be the guy who says, now, you know, the good life also includes living a moral life, a virtuous life. And that morality isn't just something that you get to make up. It's something that has to emerge within a community. And we do better in a community that has a sense of moral standards. And of course, the definition of a community with no moral standards is a-no-me, a-no-me, normlessness, as Durkheim put it. So there you go. Is that a good answer? That works for me. And I'm really curious also, as you're working through this, sharing that you came to a place of atheism pretty early in life. As you're moving through all this research and these experiences and seeing over and over and over this sense of being part of a larger spiritual system,

being critical to, in some way, shape, or form, however you define a life well lived, and you, on an individual basis, are saying to yourself, I'm not really part of that. And maybe I'm making an assumption there on how you would define atheism. How do you square that? Yeah. Well, if happiness comes from between, and I was never able to believe in God. I mean, before my bar mitzvah, I wasn't an atheist.

I didn't think about God much, but I was willing to believe that there was one. But by 15, I was always a science kid, and I just thought it just thought it made no sense and the creation of the world and all the different religions. So by kind of rationalist means, I became an atheist. And as I've gone on in life and I've, I think, developed a more nuanced view of religion, that it has many benefits and also some drawbacks. You're right to say that I'm sort of like on the outside looking in. And actually, it's been a great pleasure to me that many people, many evangelical Christians and Mormons and Reformed Jews have taken the righteous mind and used it in their sermons. They've reached out to me.

I've spoken on many radio shows. And I love that. And I'm always treated very respectfully as like an atheist who, you know, is not bashing religion and is a naturalist. And I think one of the lines that got the most applause was when I talked about the God-shaped hole in all of our hearts. And that's a phrase, I think it's a paraphrase from, I think it's Pascal, who said something like that. And I gave a talk at the committee, or I forget what, CCCU, Convention of Christian Colleges and Universities. And I said,

you know, you're right. There is a God-shaped hole in all of our hearts. And I think it got there from natural selection. You think it got there because God made us? We can disagree on that and still talk about how are we going to raise kids at a time when this hole feels empty and is really harming a generation. We don't have to agree on the origin of it. We just have to agree that it's there. So I think I've learned a lot from talking with people in various spiritual traditions. I don't feel any emptiness in my life because I am so deeply engaged in my research. I love what I do.

I've got a great job here at New York University. I've got complete job security. I've got a great job here at New York University. I've got complete job security. I've got a wonderful family. My son's going to be bar mitzvahed in nine days, 10 days. So I'm doing pretty well on the between front. But is that, I guess, is that an answer? Yeah. And part of it is this, the notion is that it is the in-between on multiple levels, I guess. But maybe part of the idea here is also that you don't have to check every box there. I think that's right. No, you don't.

That's right. There are many paths to flourishing. Someone who had very little connection to love or work is not going to feel satisfied, although people are variable and there may be certain psychological diagnoses or conditions for people who are not as socially needy. But for most sort of neurotypical normal people, yeah, they would need lots of lots of between, but not everyone necessarily. Yeah. I brought up the word meaning and meaningfulness. Where do you feel that fits into this idea of human flourishing. So an interesting idea in positive psychology was the difference between how happy are you? Add up all the moments of happiness.

And this was, I think, Dan Kahneman's original idea. You look at the amount of happiness below the line, you graph out your happiness, and the more happiness you have over the course of your years summed up, the happier your life was. But I believe Kahneman changed his mind or at least added a lot of nuance because there's another school which says,

no, you don't just want total number of units of happiness. You want a good story. And most people, and I would ask my students this at UVA all the time, most people, you show them various plots of a life, some of which clearly have more happy moments by far, but others have a better narrative arc with some real downs, even some tragedies, but they end on an up, they end high. Most people would prefer that. So we experience our lives in the moment, but we also make sense of them retrospectively and looking ahead to the future. Neither one is right or wrong. We do this in multiple ways.

One thing that I think is now becoming very clear, if we have time to talk about the coddling of the American mind, is that if you give your kids too many moments of happiness and not enough struggle or difficulty or setback or failure or exclusion or teasing or anything else, that actually you're changing them in such a way that they will find it harder to find happiness as adults. They'll be more fragile, more anxious, and more depressed. So life should not be an attempt to maximize the units of happiness.

It should be an effort, especially early in life, it should be an effort to maximize the degree to which you are strong and smart. And then we can send you out in the world and you'll make your way and you'll make a difference. Yeah. Which really brings us to your most recent work, a lot of your exploration in your most recent book. And a lot of it is rooted in this concept of fragility and being anti-fragile, safetyism, and an approach to sort of, I think, raising maybe the, you know, Gen Z, I guess, is where a lot of the focus is, and a real shift in the way that we're raising kids, at least in the United States. I think it's different probably in different cultures.

And what the effect of that is now having on a society-wide level. Yeah. So let's start, let's make it into a detective story. And let's say, you know, like just as if there was an outbreak of Ebola or AIDS, and you'd have a lot of medical detectives saying, what is this? Where did it come from? How does it spread? Well, in the same way, in the psychological realm, around 2012, we see a very large increase in rates of depression and anxiety for teenage girls. It goes up for boys, but it's way up for girls in the United States. And it begins right around, depending on the measure,

2011, 2012, 2013 is when you begin seeing the graphs going up for girls. And so you might say, okay, well, why is that? And why is it mostly girls? And you can have all kinds of ideas. Oh, maybe it's the financial crisis. Maybe it's, you know, pressure is a bit of a delay, especially in New Zealand. In all cases, we see these graphs going up for girls much more than boys. So it's not anything special about America. It's not the financial crisis because that would affect millennials. They're the ones who are going out in the job market. Why would the financial crisis mostly affect 10 to 14-year-old girls?

Because they're the ones who are hit hardest. You might think, okay, well, it's just that they're comfortable talking about it. But no, it's not just that they've changed their diagnostic criteria, because you see the exact same curve in hospital admissions for self-harm. It's up about 60 or 70% for older teenage girls. It's up 190% for preteen girls. They didn't used to cut themselves, and now they do in the United States and Canada and Britain. So the leading explanation for it is that something really changed about the nature of teen social interaction, namely social media. In 2009, most American teens and most teens around the world were not online. I mean, they were on the internet, but they didn't have a Facebook or Instagram account in 2009.

And by 2011 or 2012, teens' social life had moved online. Most kids were interacting that way. And at the time, we thought, well, this could be great, or it could be terrible. Maybe they'll have super duper social skills. What could be so bad about them being really connected? Connection is usually good. And so we couldn't have predicted this beforehand, I think. But now it's becoming clear that there are certain kinds of social interaction in which young, in which kids become their own brand managers. In a sense, we all are brand managers, but if you make it from five interactions a day to 500 in which you're managing your brand

and rating other people's brand, and you're not only looking at the overall ratings, you're digging in. Hmm, why did he like this post, but she didn't? Hmm, you know, the obsession with the prestige and who liked what. So I do think that social media is one of the biggest single causes of this mental health crisis. That's one piece of the detective story. But there are others. There was a second shooter. And there, I think, Greg Lukianoff and I believe it's the vast overprotection that descended on American kids and Canadian kids in the 1990s. So just as our crime rate was plunging, we had a, you know, you and I grew up during a terrible crime wave. And it was really dangerous to walk in a lot of cities at night.

You know, even kids could sometimes get mugged. And that doesn't happen anymore. You know, here we are, we're sitting here in Greenwich Village, New York City. You know, I just sent my daughter to the, around, my nine-year-old daughter out to the store this morning early to go buy groceries. My wife can walk around late at night. America's been really safe in terms of crime for a long time, but we freaked out about child abduction. And we stopped giving kids the independence they need to practice adult skills. So sorry I'm lecturing here because this is what the whole book is about.

I've been talking about it so much. But the point is that kids need to struggle and have lots of setbacks in order to develop normal human skills. We learn from experience better than from lectures. And we basically stop letting kids grow in the 1990s, or to be more responsible about it. We greatly cut back on their experiences of unsupervised time, which included unsupervised failures and conflicts. And that weakened them. And then the same kids, this is Gen Z, we're talking about kids born in 1996 and later, these same kids who were deprived

the normal toughening experience of childhood, they got on social media in middle school because that's when it came out. And I think it's that one-two punch, overprotection and too early social media. Those are the two main causes of the epidemic of anxiety and depression, I think. I can't be sure, but based on what we review in the book, this we think is the most likely explanation. Right. So these two things come together, and now this

generation is also starting to enter higher education. Oh, no, they started to enter universities in 2014. Right. So we're a couple years into this now. Now they're started to enter universities in 2014. Right. So we're a couple years into this now. Now they're starting to enter corporations. They're starting to enter the work world. Right. So what happens when you take somebody who's grown up in this way? I guess what you would describe as a fully formed immune system where they can actually exist in a world where ideas are exchanged that are maybe profoundly contrary to what they believe is right. And whereas that same exchange a generation ago would have landed in one particular way, it seems to be it's landing in a very different way now. That's right.

So let's try to work through the case of jokes and humor. It's something I haven't really done in a conversation before. But let's try to work through the case of jokes. So, you know, I think kids, you know, kids like to make jokes. They tease. And when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, the students loved to make jokes. They often loved to make jokes about sex.

They were really interested in humor and sex and jokes about sex. And not that as a professor, you can't really, you know, you can only hint at them. You can, you know, as you're presenting lecture material, there might be some sexual connotation or something that you could maybe hint at and get a big laugh. And so humor used to be a part of social interaction. And of course, it's a really valuable part of human social interaction. And it surely was the case that sometimes people were offended by a joke that a professor told or that a fellow student told. And until 2014, you could be offended at a joke and that could be the end of it. Sometimes you'll hear jokes that you think are offensive.

And this especially happens if maybe you're at a family gathering and somebody who's from a previous generation, the previous generation, old men tell jokes that were appropriate 40 years ago, but that would seem inappropriate today. And it was possible to hear a joke from Uncle Charlie and to say, oh my God, Uncle Charlie, you are such a retro, you are so behind the times.

And that's the end of it, you just leave it at that. But since, at least for Gen Z, the way they were raised on social media, in which many of them have been raised in a call-out culture, in which you get prestige for calling people out for such things, you get social credit for shaming people or pointing out their transgression. So if you look at what a lot of the scandals and conflicts have been, at least in universities, a lot of them are over somebody told a joke, or somebody used sarcasm, or somebody, you know, like this is the original one. What was the big famous one? What was her name? The woman who tweeted, I'm about to land in Africa, hope I

don't get AIDS. And, you know, she wasn't being racist. She was, you know, it was a joke about her white privilege. You know, there was no reason to think that she had negative attitudes towards Africans or African-Americans. But that was, it became a global sensation. You know, Justine Sacco was her name. And it was covered in, with the book by John Ronson on reputation. Oh, so you've been publicly shamed, I think it's called. So humor is now so dangerous because if you offend someone, they have all kinds of ways to call you out, report you, punish you. And so classroom interactions, normal social interactions are just much more hazardous now. So I think that in a variety of ways, social media has changed the basic connectivity,

changed the sources of prestige, changed people's tolerance for feeling offended. I would not want to raise my kids such that if it was a little too hot or a little too cold, they couldn't stand it. They had to fix it. Like, somebody's got to do something. It's too hot in here. It's too cold in here. I have to have it be 73 degrees all the time. That would be a terrible thing to do to my kids.

And inadvertently, I think we've done that to be a terrible thing to do to my kids. And inadvertently, I think we've done that to kids. Language has to be within acceptable parameters. If I hear a joke that is offensive, I'm not just going to say, what a moron and move on. I've got to report that person. Something has to be done. So I think that diversity means there are going to be a lot of misunderstandings. There's no way to create a diverse workplace, diverse school offensive. Therefore, the more diversity we have, the more we need to raise the bar on what counts as a reportable offense. Whereas unfortunately, we've lowered the bar so that our most diverse places, I think, are doomed to eternal conflict. Universities now are, this university life just seems a lot less forgiving, a lot more, what's the word? It used to be really fun to be a professor. It used to be really fun to be on a college campus. There was a sense of trust. There was a sense that

we're all exploring ideas together. It was actually good to be provocative. That was actually a thing we said, like, that's a provocative idea, or he's a very provocative teacher. Like, that used to be a good thing. But I feel as though it's changed. And a lot of people tell me that it's changed for them, that they're self-censoring. They don't take risks. It's just too easy to be reported. There are too, interactions with other people, to grow beyond the scope of knowledge and experiences that they have. And I guess if you extend this out and say that the only conversation, the only thoughts that will be offered will be ones that don't challenge you in some meaningful way, then the fundamental idea of what continuing education is essentially falls apart. But the flip side to that is, aren't there also moments where people do need to be protected? The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. Arthur, moments when you need to be protected. From physical violence, certainly. From bullying, which is not something offensive, but some sort of harassment that goes on day after day and is continual.

Beyond that, to speak about intellectual life in the language of safety, danger, and protection, I think is counterproductive, especially for the very people, the very people that you might think that you are protecting. So I hope you'll indulge me here to just read one of the most important quotes in the book. Hold on a second. So the coddling of the American mind is based around three great untruths, three really terrible ideas. And they're basically three chapters from the happiness hypothesis, if you were to read them and then do the opposite of what the ancients advised. The first is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. And so if you think this way, then we need to protect people from things that will harm them.

And you might think especially, let's say African American students or LGBT students who come to a college campus. And even though, especially at our elite schools, they're generally pretty progressive and anti-racist and anti-homophobic, surely there will be people who have racist or homophobic ideas or who might make a joke. There will be uncomfortable situations. So I'm not saying we shouldn't work on our language. Language does need to evolve. But if we were to say these people, members of these groups, are the most vulnerable and therefore they need the most protection. So we're going to really make sure that nobody

says anything that offends them because that's the best thing we can do for them. Well, that makes a certain amount of sense unless unless you think about it a little more deeply, and think about it a little more psychologically, and understand anti-fragility, understand that everybody needs to learn to deal with the problems in the world so that they're not harmed by small things, they can pick their battles. And so Van Jones, a progressive activist, he was in the Obama administration, most of your listeners will know his name, is interviewed at the University of Chicago a few years ago. And David Axelrod, democratic strategist, has him on, they're friends.

And there had just been an event at the University of Chicago where somebody from the Trump administration was going to speak and the students were protesting. And Axelrod asks Jones, what do you think about this, this, you know, stuff about safe spaces? And so Jones says, it's just absolutely masterful. He says, there's a certain kind of safety, like if it's about sexual harassment or people who are, you know, calling you the N-word. There's a certain kind that has no place on campus. And if that's what we're talking about, I'm fine with that. Let's try to block that out. He says, but then there's this other kind of safety that I really disagree with. It's this idea that if someone says something that offends me, that I'm in danger.

And he says, and here's the quote, I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe emotionally. I want you to be strong. That's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you. Put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity. I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym. That's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. And he talks about how on a college campus is just the best possible place to prepare for a world in which not everybody holds your political views. And, you know, and he says there's a certain kind of progressive activist that comes out of these places that is basically obnoxious, that goes out into the world and doesn't win people over if this person offends people who otherwise could be brought to progressive causes. So, you know, I'm with Van Jones and many others who've pointed out that, you know, you might think you're protecting people, but you got to really think it through. Sometimes short-term protection is long-term weakening. Yeah. It's really focusing on strength as a goal rather than safety. Exactly.

That's right. This is the big challenge. It's really hard to find the truth. And we need to be training college students with skills to find the truth. It's really hard to go out into a world that isn't going to be perfectly safe and caring and loving. And we need to be raising kids who are a little stronger and tougher and able to go out there and thrive nonetheless.

Yeah. And it occurs to me also, you know, looping in the idea of call-out culture and try a lot of these conversations. Let's say we agree that we need to have these conversations. There are certain things you should be protected from. There are certain things which are not appropriate. There are other things which are on the edge, but we need to kind of learn how to become anti-fragile around them. The way to do that is not through big social public discourse where you type something into your device. The way to do that is say, hey, listen, this wasn't cool with me. Like, can we sit down one-to-one or in a small group and actually, can we talk about this? Let me go you one better. Yes, that's the right approach.

Don't do it publicly. Don't do the public shaming. That's a way to get yourself prestige, but it's not going to win someone over. It's going to make you an enemy for life. It's going to make your cause an enemy for life. So I'll go you one better. Approach the person privately and don't say, this wasn't cool with me. Say, I know you didn't mean anything by this, or I know you had good intentions,

but when you said this, maybe you didn't understand. How do you think it felt for people, et cetera, et cetera? So start by presuming good intentions, do this privately, and the person is likely to be grateful. So a skill that I'm really thinking a lot about, so I teach here at New York University at the Stern School of Business, and it's absolutely vital if we're turning out business, future business people, it's absolutely vital that they be able to function effectively in a complex, diverse world where sometimes they're going to have to deal with or make deals with or trade with or make contracts with people who say things they don't like, people who have views they don't like. And business has always been great at that, getting people to put aside their own personal religion and morality and just deal with people based on trust.

And so I'm thinking that one of the most essential skills we need to teach in business schools is nuanced thinking, pragmatic thinking, and abilities to navigate as a human being in a world that's becoming inhumane because of social media. And so part of what that means is you have to have really thick skin. You have to understand that we all now live in a minefield, that things can blow up quickly. So you need to give less offense yourself. You do need to be careful and you need to understand how words can offend. But then you need to take less offense yourself. Anyone who is careful and gives less offense while also taking't like, that's a person who's not just going to clog up your HR department with complaints. They're likely to bring public shame to your company. They're not going to be team players. So I think that Gen Z is finding it more difficult to cooperate because we've made them morally dependent. We've always told them, if you see something, say something. Don't settle it yourself.

Tell an adult. And we were not helping them when we gave them all those protections. They would have been better off if, of course, bullying is different. That goes over multiple days. But if the basic idea was, if you're in a conflict, you settle this yourself, and only under rare circumstances do you call in adult help, that's the way that kids learn to be adults. Yeah. And to be clear, also, what you're not saying, along with that, I completely agree.

We're not saying, though, if you want to get paid, just be quiet and total line. Right. That's right. Exactly. It's not just shut up and swallow your, you know, and ignore your morals. It's what do you want to do? Do you want to actually solve problems or do you want to make a big public stink and gain prestige yourself? Yeah. You know, you can't usually do both. how much of it this is about the prestige and social media and also just the diminishment of the experience of empathy when you remove the screen, you know, and the ability to actually handle real-time conversations that are synchronous rather than asynchronous, where everybody's formulating what they're going to say next. That's right. I've been so focused on the links between social media and mental health outcomes,

like depression, anxiety, and those clearly show up for the girls. But I've not been looking at the effects on communication ability. And anecdotally, people tell me that boys have trouble making eye contact now, that Gen Z boys have diminished social skills. I don't have data on this, so I don't want to put it out as a fact, but that's where I need to look next. So girls are on social media a lot, much more than boys. Boys have been on video games a lot, much more than girls. Video games are not associated with depression and anxiety. They don't seem to ruin boys in that way.

But for the boys that spend huge numbers of hours on them, you know, there may be certain benefits to, you know, reaction time. And the military says that some of the kids are better at, you know, operating computer stuff. But it's at least plausible that there's been a diminishment of social skills because we, you know, human beings as they grow need to have, you know, millions of interactions, face-to-face interactions. So, yeah, this is all new stuff. We don't know. We've been putting kids in a gigantic social experiment for the last 10 or 20 years. We don't really know We've been putting kids in a gigantic social experiment for the last 10 or 20 years. We don't really know what the result is, although so far the initial signs are about problems I don't know about any super benefits that kids have gotten from spending so much time online. that I just want to touch down before we do that, which is this idea of this whole conversation, especially the latter part of the conversation, we probably have people nodding along saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then we're going to have some people saying, well, yeah,

but there's a pendulum that swings back and forth. It's just going to naturally swing back. You're not a believer in that in this particular case. No, I don't think so. I don't think so. So in the book, in the middle of the book, Greg and I go through six trends that are all combining, almost like six fuses that all were burning and they all kind of blew up around 2014, 2015. And most of them, I think, are knock and reverse. So one is rising political polarization in the United States. I mean, 100 years from now, maybe things will be better. But in the next five or 10 years, I can't see any path by which, you know, even after Donald Trump is out of office, the polarization preceded him. And I think he made it worse, but it's going to continue on afterwards.

Social media has shredded any possibility of us being on the same page. We will never again, and here I do think never again, have a shared reality to the degree that we had it before the Internet. Overall, I love the Internet. I'm not saying we should get rid of the Internet. The Internet's fantastic. But I think social media as an element, it brings out a lot of the worst parts of the internet. Overall, I love the internet. I'm not saying we should get rid of the internet. The internet's fantastic. But I think social media as an element, it brings out a lot of the worst parts of the internet. So that's not likely to improve anytime soon. We overinvest in our kids. We overparent them. And that's in part because as wealth rises

and women get more educated, they have fewer babies. And when you've got lots of adults and a few kids, we over-parent them. That's not going to change anytime soon. I don't know. We're never going to go back to a time when most families have three or four kids. So for a lot of reasons, I don't see any pendulum-like mechanisms. I don't see any mechanisms that are going to reverse this. The only one possibly is that the generation after Gen Z, the kids who are being born now, and my son is 13, my daughter's nine, my son is Gen Z, we don't know when it ends,

maybe my daughter born in 2009, maybe she won't be, I don't know. It's possible that the little kids now are going to grow up and see all the difficulties that Gen Z has had and say, we don't want to be like that. We're not going to all get Instagram accounts at the age of nine. We're not going to, you know, we're going to make fun of, you know, trigger warnings and safe spaces. You know, so that's one hope that the kids themselves will see what's happening. And even, you know, Gen Z, what I find is that they're not in denial. Like when I talk with them or I ask, after I give a talk, I ask them to sign a vote on whether this diagnosis was correct, even though it's kind of insulting to their generation. And they overwhelmingly

say, yes, we're having these problems. So maybe the kids themselves will figure out whether they need to change or figure out what to do differently. But overall, I don't see these social trends as being like pendulums. I think they're kind of one way. Yeah. So if something's going to change, it will have to be through intention. It's really hard to predict the future, so I wouldn't say it would have to be,

but that is at least one path by which it could change, yes. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle also. Okay, what's this famous question that you end every interview with? It's the exact same question. So sitting here in this container with the Good Life Project, I've kind of touched on elements of it. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life. So I guess I would start with bird got to fly, fish gotta swim. And so, and this is, I think, the capabilities approach,

Martha Nussbaum and a few other philosophers. So fish gotta fly, bird gotta swim, human gotta what? Human gotta do something. So if we can answer that, that would be one approach to answering your question. Human gotta what? I would say human gotta develop social networks of love and trust that are the basis for success in our ancestral environment and that are, while not as necessary nowadays for material purposes, still just as necessary for emotional purposes. Human gotta do something productive, something that creates value for others, not just be a drain on resources, but actually be and be seen as a producer, as someone who does something of value. It doesn't mean you have to work outside the home,

but you have to have something that gives you a sense of accomplishment that is recognized by others. And I guess I'd say human gotta be part of a hive at least sometimes in ways that they can back out of and may not be all-consuming because that would be a cult. But human gotta be part of something larger than themselves. So actually what I've just done is basically just say happiness comes from between. You've got to get the right relationship between yourself and others, yourself when you're working, yourself and something larger than yourself. I guess that is my answer to any question about flourishing. Thank you.

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