How to Talk to People - How To Build a Happy Life: Subtraction as a Solution

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

From how we build our cities to how we shop, it can seem as though our natural human tendency is to add. But a culture of accumulation may be exactly what holds us back from the simple solution in front of us: taking things away.  University of Virginia professor Leidy Klotz helps us analyze the benefits of subtraction and how less may create the space for what we truly desire.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.  Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), JADED (“Blue Steel”), and Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure that they're using their new tools to change our institutions. their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might

happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. Hey, Becca, I was thinking, what? What was the thing during the worst of the COVID that you missed the most? I used to work at a coffee shop before COVID hit and knowing that my friends would come in to entertain me on my shift and basically the life that comes from engaging with others. I mean, there's really nothing like that. And as much as I tried to emulate that, it was impossible. This is How to Build a Happy Life.

I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor, and contributing writer. at the Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at the Atlantic. Now tell me something that's a little bit harder. This is a harder question. Okay. Okay. During the coronavirus epidemic, some of the things you lost, you didn't miss. Tell me something that you didn't miss from before the coronavirus epidemic, during the epidemic, you're like, this is kind of nice. I definitely did not miss the complexity of getting together with friends. I feel like people became so much more open to meeting in parks. You know, people just prioritize seeing one another in whatever the easiest possible way to do that was.

And showed me how much I could simplify things if I care a little bit less about what the activity is and focus on just spending time with other people, which was the whole point in the first place. if it wasn't for this time where we suddenly had to choose who were the few people in your bubble or whatever it may be, who you're going to rely on in these tough times, if it wasn't for that forced simplification, I would have continued to be that person who wanted more friends and wanted more people at her birthday party or whatever it may be. And it was only because having less people around was the only option did I just have to make do. There's this paradox in which we're always driven to more, more, more. But a lot of the time we get more pleasure and happiness from less. Today we're talking about the happiness we can get from subtraction.

The first time you do it, just don't do something. It's a really liberating feeling, so I totally encourage it. If subtracting can have such positive effects on our happiness, why is the concept so novel for so many people? What exactly explains our tendency to believe that more doing, more money, more everything, will continue to make our lives better? And what are we afraid of losing when we take things away? I started thinking about why it's so hard for us to get to a place

where we truly enjoy less after reading a great book called Subtract, the Untapped Science of Less. The author, Lighty Clots, helped me think through why our default mode is more. I'm by title, a professor of engineering and architecture at the University of Virginia. Most of my research is in behavioral science and how we design. You're quite well known for saying if you want to design your life appropriately. For that matter, if you want to design anything appropriately, appropriately, your career, your relationships, back, your vacation.

You should really start not by saying, how much more can I stuff into this little bag, but how can I start taking things away? What led you to that? The closest thing I have to an epiphany was playing Legos with my son, Ezra, who was three at the time, and we're building with these Duplo blocks, basically making a bridge as a three-year-old might. And the problem we had was that the bridge wasn't level. And so I turned around behind me to grab a block.

to add to the shorter column. And by the time I had turned back around, Ezra had removed a block from the longer column and had already made the level bridge. I mean, it's a really simple story, but right there in my living room was this example of an idea that I had been thinking about, but it brought a new insight into that idea,

which was that why didn't I even think of this as an option? If my three-year-old wasn't there, I would have just added the block and never even considered whether subtracting the block could have been a better way. to change the structure. And so your conclusion from that, or at least the epiphany, the minor epiphany that you had that one day playing with Legos with your son is sometimes you can make things a lot more than

they were by actually using less. Yeah, the fundamental framing of the situation is, hey, we've got all these times in our life when we want to take how things are and change them to some way that we want them to be, right? And, you know, so whether it's a Lego bridge, whether it's your calendar, whether it's kind of the mental model that you're working from, there are these two basic options. One is to add to what's already there, which we think of immediately and exhaust all the possibilities. And the other one is to subtract from what's already there, which it seems we don't think of.

And then even if we do think of it, it's hard to follow through with. So is there anything as you move forward because you're trained as an engineer? Is there something in the world of physical engineering that's been a major breakthrough that when people do less that there is more, I mean, obviously you don't want to keep part of a bridge to be missing, but what can you do? I mean, that's one thing with Lego. Is there something else with a bridge I'm trying to drive across? Give me an example from the world of physical engineering where less is more. Yeah, the Lego Bridge would actually be more stable if you were driving across it from an engineering standpoint. That's because our bridges are all old and falling apart.

Yeah. But one of my favorite engineering examples, there's this woman on a Kikeline. She was a fascinating woman. She's the first female architect in Pennsylvania. She volunteered during World War I. So she did all these amazing things, designing buildings. And she was also a serial inventor. And her most influential invention was basically the hollow building block. She designed the first version of the now ubiquitous blocks, a concrete block with holes in the middle. And before Kiklein, building blocks were solid, whether it was the Roman Coliseum all the way up to it's the foundation of your house if it was built before the 1920s or so. But the hollow building block is lighter, easy to assemble, and actually works better in a lot of

ways. And there are examples from my world as well. One of the things that I find, I'm a social scientist in the business of happiness. And people ask me all the time because I specialize in the second half of life. And so I get executives all the time saying, oh, man, I'm about to retire. What do you recommend? What I recommend that you do is that you keep. a schedule that has about a quarter as much stuff in it as before you retired. In other words,

if you don't do anything, it's like, I'm just going to hang out and watch TV. You're going to be a mess. You need to do stuff that you're good at, but do less. In other words, don't rush your workout. Give yourself two hours with your kid for lunch instead of one hour, so you're not running off. So you're still doing stuff in a schedule, but it's a very expanded. It's an oxygenated schedule. You have lots and lots and lots and lots of time, and that's consistent with well-being, life, satisfaction, happiness. If you're saying do a quarter of what you were doing, you're telling them to subtract three quarters of the stuff.

And I just love that. One of the most useful time-saving things that I've come up with, and Bob Sutton, he's a Stanford professor, the no-asshole role author. He calls it the rule of halves. So it's like you take a meeting, for example, and just cut everything in half. The length of time, the frequency of the meetings, the number of participants, You set a half time in the meeting and say, okay, at half time, it seems like this isn't going anywhere. We can all kind of abort the meeting.

One of our studies actually, and this was when we were doing all these studies on people adding and subtracting, we eventually got to this point where like, well, let's try to design somewhere people just definitely will subtract. And so we gave them this ridiculous travel itinerary in Washington, D.C., so Lincoln Memorial type things. and people could add new activities or they could subtract activities from the day. And more people added and really astonished us. But I also, you know, in my vacations, you know, my wife likes to check off all the different top 10 trip advisor things to do in this location, which I think has brought us some really great memories. And I also think that the other way to bring great memories is to kind of not be over scheduled on the vacation. So maybe we'll use your rule of quarters.

Let's do a quarter of these things and let them fill up the time that we have and see what happens in the middle. Yeah. So your big point is basically you've got options, man. You have options you didn't know you had by doing less of whatever it is you're happening to do. Now, this is the simplest thing ever. I mean, it's so crazily simple. And yet it's so unbelievably elusive. So let's get into some of the behavior behind this.

Why don't we think this way? Man, we're creatures of more, more, more, not less, less, less. What gives? Yeah, I mean, the first thing from our research is that we just fundamentally think of adding first, right? We're wired to think of adding first. I mean, if you look at just some of the biological things, going back to food, for example, one of the studies I mentioned in the book is how pack rats stockpile food, right? Researchers have done experiments.

They'll take away the stockpile of food that the pack rats have and they immediately make another stockpile and you're like, well, that big deal, right? That's what I do when my pantry gets low. But the pack rats aren't planning and deliberating, right? This is an instinctive behavior to acquire more food because it's helped them pass down their genes. I think the other one that ties really a lot into my life, I think, when I look at the ways that I overad is this desire to display competence. And competence is actually a very biological thing. I mean, showing that we can effectively interact with the world. I mean, there are birds that build ornate nests just to attract a mate because the mate then sees that whoever this bird is that built this nest

is able to effectively interact with the physical world. And it's an idea that has been extended into task completion, not just physical things, but me attending a meeting or me kind of writing another 200 words in a piece of writing that's not going to actually make it better, but it's going to show that I was displaying competence. So there are definitely some biological reasons why we might be doing this. I mean, a peacock who's going to, is risking his life by having these heavy tail feathers and being really obvious to predators is basically saying, I'm not afraid. And so more, more, more actually shows a level of genetic fitness that will lead to pro-creative ability and being a better competitive force in the mating market. I hate owning stuff,

I think. But I never own less. I always own more. Right. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats.

We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country, and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Altocracy in America, available now. Tell me just in general. Give me some examples of how having more affects our well-being. There's this really interesting study from the U.S. Army War College, and they studied their officers.

And they had literally more assigned tasks than time to do it in over the year. So think about what's going on cognitively for those officers, right? The decision here is, look, I literally can't. can't do this. I'm a upstanding military officer who's gotten where I am by doing everything that's been asked of me following orders, and they're being forced to cut corners. This feeling when there's too much to do that you can't do it all is psychologically damaging. The subtraction there is to actually do stop doings, right? When you're sitting down to your to-do is how much are you looking at your existing calendar and saying, I don't need to go to this thing anymore? That's the subtraction.

when it comes to time. And that's just, that's really hard to do. But it's the same situation that we're in with physical stuff, with information, where it's like we just have the system that's kind of incrementally, incrementally adding just more than it's subtracting. And eventually you get overloaded. So we need to figure out how to relieve some of that burden. Now, from my research, I find that the well-being connection on all this really does have to

do with time. And the reason is because we have a chronic tendency by adding more and more things to our schedule to get overly big. busy. I found one of the ways to deal with this personally because, you know, I'm a chronic saying yes to everybody kind of guy. And part of the reason is not because I'm nice and not that nice. The reason is because everything sounds awesome. You know, it's like I'm blessed with lots and lots of opportunities. It's like, oh, I'll do that. Yeah, totally. And it's like when I was a kid, I'll like, yeah, I'll eat that. And usually, you know, I'll make a list of, you know, my to do list.

And I'm very careful about prioritizing it in two ways. One is things that have to get done. And And then they're the things I want to do, right? And so it's like a two-dimensional list. But basically, I can figure out a way to order it one through 10, where the top five is a mixture of things I just have to do and things I just really, really want to do. And the bottom part of the list are things that are a little less urgent and a little less fun, but I should do them. And I make that list.

And then I cross off the bottom five and I don't do them. So what's the difference between subtracting things from your life and saying no to new things? things. Well, saying no is just the not adding. And so like my friend Ben worked with me on some of the basic research that we did. He came to me like two years into doing the research and said, hey, we installed this no bell outside of our office. And it was like one of those triangles shaped Western dinner bells. And they would ring it every time, you know, his chair would come to him and say, hey, Ben, will he be on this committee? And he'd say, you know, I'm booked. And that's saying no. And it's great. It's just that he didn't actually take something off of his plate. So

it's a good strategy saying no, but it's not the same as taking away from what you're already doing. Let me tell you a story about somebody who was too busy and the problem was not what I thought it was. This friend of mine was confessing to me that his work schedule was completely out of control. He was traveling all the time and it was wrecking his marriage, quite frankly, because, you know, he wasn't home with his family and she missed him. It was all for all kinds of good reasons. I started making suggestions to him. I kind of like you'd coach him.

Once you do more on Zoom, you know, do you really have to go to Dayton, you know, for the third time this month? You really had really. And I kind of realized that actually the causality was reversed. It's not that he was, his marriage was on the rocks because he was traveling too much and too busy. He was actually keeping himself too busy and staying at a holiday end because his marriage was on the rocks. And then it got me thinking. Sometimes I think that I'm a little bit too busy because if I'm not, I have to be at home by myself in my head. And distraction is a little bit easier.

So one of the art of doing this is not just the insight that Lighty Klaas is bringing to how to build a happy life. It's like, man, take something away. It might be better. It's like you've got to learn how to be comfortable with the white space that you just uncovered when you take things away. And a lot of people aren't, right? There's a famous study, and it's actually by Tim Wilson. and he's a UVA professor. They were basically interested in why don't people like to think

and they studied in all this different ways showing that people just didn't like to be sitting there with their own thoughts. The nail in the coffin evidence was people could either think or they could shock themselves. And a lot of people chose to shock themselves. It was only six to 15 minutes of doing nothing in a room. Just six to 15 minutes.

The only thing they could do was to actually administer a pretty painful shock. You don't have to sit there quietly for six minutes. I'm like, I got to feel something, man. I got to feel something. There's a reinforcing cycle here that's problematic. The more you care about something, the harder it is to subtract. Subtracting from my parenting is one of the things that I came to last, even after doing all this research.

I was actually on a podcast with Yal Shunbrun, who's a friend, but the podcast is psychologist off the clock. So she's like a psychology researcher, a parenting researcher, but also like a practicing psychologist. And our podcast interview kind of turned into a therapy session where she was like, leading me to the fact that I like overparent my kids, it's always thinking about how can I interject myself into this parenting situation to make my kids lives better. And it led to situations where, hey, my son's playing happily with my daughter. And I'm like, hey, what do you guys want to go do?

Let's just let this happen, right? Don't try to make a happy kid happier. But sometimes it's to the detriment of the outcomes we actually want. And once again, this goes against a lot of our culture, but also against a lot of our natural tendencies. You know, I remember asking my dad, you know, because I didn't do very much to my dad. I think we went on two family vacations, my entire childhood.

And one of them, you know, it's because I harangued my parents into going camping. Suffice to say there's plenty of white space in my childhood. I asked my dad when I said, dad, why did you have kids? And he could, you had to in those days. I know. It's like, that's making me feel really good, Dad. That's making me.

I'm here now. I know. But, yeah, one of the techniques that we actually developed in the last season of how to build a happy life was the concept of the reverse bucket list. And I want to bounce that off you. And it's actually been really helpful to me. You know, I went back and I found my bucket list when I was 40. and I got every single thing on that list and I wasn't happy.

And I wasn't happy. And so we always get our bucket list wrong. We always think those things are going to give us satisfaction and satisfaction that lasts. And so I developed a thing called the reverse bucket list where I make a list of all of my cravings and attachments and desires and ambitions. And then I say, if I get it fine, but I'm going to make a conscious sort of metacognitive strategy for detaching myself from these things. In other words, if I don't get this, how am I going to get this?

going to feel? Nope, I'm going to be fine. And moving it kind of from the limbic system of the brain to the prefrontal cortex where I can manage my own feelings so those feelings are not managing me. The problem with a bucket list is you're basically listing your desires and letting them manage you, letting them drive the bus, which is going to make you add and add and add and have more and more and more and more doing the exact opposite of what you're actually telling us to do. So what do you think? So instead of saying, hey, I don't, I want to visit Machu Picchu before I die. How How would I turn that into a reverse bucket list? You say, I might visit Machu Picchu before I die, but if I don't, I don't care.

Basically what it comes down to. In other words, it's not a question of not visiting Machu Picchu. It's not caring about visiting Machu Picchu. Subtracting the attachment as opposed to subtracting the thing. That's the distinction that I'm trying to make. You can subtract responsibilities from your life. You can subtract a couple of bricks from your bridge, but you can also subtract the attachment to your own desires.

And in other words, these things might have. but if it doesn't, easy come, easy go. And that's a real and substantial emotional subtraction. Right. When you subtract, if you're going against the grain, there's a chance when you miss the meeting that it's going to be perceived as you being lazy or you're not caring. We don't appreciate that it's hard, right? You see something that's simple. You see somebody who has it all together, this streamlined life, and you're like, oh, that looks like it was easy. And all these things that we've been talking about, whether it's more cognitive effort or a little more physical effort, right, to build something and then to take something away from it, oftentimes it takes a little more work.

It's just a little more, but we can't expect it to be easier. We're not going to get there. So if the first point is like, hey, this is hidden, we have to see it. The second point is like, this is hard and we have to know that it's going to be a little hard and be prepared to do a little bit of the work. It's about focusing on the heart of the matter. When I'm hanging out with friends, it doesn't matter as much what we do. It just matters that we spend time together, working from that simplified mindset and then asking myself, do I need all the extra stuff that I had before the pandemic?

I talk to people about this all the time. They'll say, yeah, you know, the gossipers at work, you know, the people that I, they're my deal friends, not my real friends. Right. And it was a relief, not having to spend all my time on these certain relationships. So one of the things that I think is worth thinking about is making a list of all the things that you didn't miss. On the contrary, that you were glad they were gone. Right. And then saying, what's my strategy for getting rid of these things for the rest of my life?

Because you know what? You don't have to call that person back. Right. You kind of don't. You don't have to reestablish the toxic relationship. Right. If a lot of people don't, some people have to, but not everybody has to go back to the job that they hated afterward, which is one of the reasons that so many people, people that are contemplating a job change in the next two years, which is really unprecedented.

But it can be really good for us. And this is a lighty cloth principle, I think, that taking things away can be generative, can be inspirational, can actually help you to find, to find the person that you really are, but you have to be creative about it. And if we go running back because the costs were higher than the benefits, look, get rid of the cost, but keep the benefits. If you can, That's all for this week's episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudina Bade. Fact-check by Anna Alvarado.

Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of

autocrats. We could win. But we are very, very, very, very. likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.