Making Sense with Sam Harris - #266 — The Limits of Pleasure

Episode Date: November 2, 2021

Sam Harris speaks with Paul Bloom about the role that pain and suffering play in living a good life. They discuss the limitations of hedonism, the connection between chosen suffering and meaning, the research of Daniel Kahneman on well-being, integrating the experiencing and remembering selves, moral motivations, the effects of parenthood on happiness, unchosen suffering, the asymmetry of loss and gain, Nozick’s “experience machine” thought experiment, effective altruism, valuing the future more than the past, the power of contrast, false ideals of happiness, polyamory, money and status, the role of the imagination, boredom, the power of apology, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Uh, no housekeeping today, apart from a note to say that Ricky Gervais and I are working on the third season of Absolutely Mental. So if you want to catch up with the first two, you can do that over at absolutelymental.com. And that's been a lot of fun. Okay. Today I'm speaking with Paul Bloom. Paul, I think, holds the record for most appearances on this podcast. I have lost count, but it's been many times. He is now a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and remains an emeritus professor of psychology at Yale. His research focuses on the psychology of morality, identity, and pleasure. He has received many awards and honors, including the million-dollar Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize. He's written for Nature and Science and the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and he's the author or editor of eight books, most recently

The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering, and The Search for Meaning. And it's a very fun book, which we discuss in part. We talk about the role that pain and suffering play in living a good life. We discuss the connection between chosen suffering and meaning, the research of Danny Kahneman on well-being. We talk about the possibility of integrating the experiencing and remembering selves that Kahneman differentiated. We discussed moral motivations, the effect of parenthood on happiness, unchosen suffering, the asymmetry between loss and gain, Robert Nozick's experience machine thought experiment, the value of pleasure, effect of altruism,

valuing the future more than the past, the power of contrast, false ideals of happiness, polyamory, money and status, the role of the imagination, boredom, the power of apology, and other topics. Anyway, as many of you know, trying to sort out what it means to live a good life is one of my core interests. And given the nature of the topic, it's probably one of yours. And now I bring you Paul Bloom. I am here with Paul Bloom. Paul, thanks for joining me again. Hey, thanks for having me back, Sam.

So you have this habit of writing very interesting books on topics that are sort of hiding in plain sight. The last book, which I'm sure we discussed, I'm not sure it was on our last podcast because we did several in that period, sure it was on our last podcast because we did several in that period, but your last book, Against Empathy, sort of brought the dark side of empathy, at least empathy as emotional contagion, into focus. And while that's something that it seems like many people should have noticed before you wrote a book about it, your deciding to focus at book length on it, really brought it into the conversation. And I would count your current book to have a similar property here. There's sort of an open secret component to these topics, because it's not like they're totally unobserved. I think many people know much of what you're focusing on here, but they don't know they know it, and they

certainly don't, they've never had a chance to see it in the context of current research on the mind. So there's really a pleasure in this. The new book is The Sweet Spot, The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning. And I'll let you summarize your thesis there before we jump into it. What is The Sweet Spot? First, thank you. Thanks for having me on. And we did talk about Against Empathy. In some way, you could put these books in sort of a pair of anomalous claims against empathy in favor of suffering. This is kind of a different sort of book. Against Empathy was kind of pugnacious, saying that the way we've been doing it is wrong. We should do morality differently. This is more of an exploration of people's curious appetites and just a careful look at what we like. When I started writing this book, I was just preoccupied with certain puzzles,

which is, why do people get pleasure from certain forms of controlled suffering? Why do we take hot baths, go to saunas, do martial arts, run marathons, go to scary movies, listen to sad songs? And I was really interested in the role of suffering for pleasure. And I was going to call the book The Pleasure of Suffering, but as I sort of got into it more and more, I realized that some suffering is actually not in the service of pleasure, but in the service of meaning and purpose. And so I ended up, you know, it's basically sort of two books in one. The first part deals with pleasure. The second part deals with suffering as part of a good life. And in the course of writing this, you know, which wasn't a lot, it was a fun book to write, but in the course of writing this, I sort of settled on a claim which is at the core of the book, which you call motivational pluralism, which is that we're after many things.

We do want pleasure. It's a hot day. We like a cool drink. But we also want meaning and purpose. We want morality. Sometimes we want truth. Sometimes we want beauty. And my book tries to put this together through the lens of chosen suffering. Yeah, this is so interesting because

it's one of those topics that the fact that there's so much diversity of opinion on what constitutes a good life is pretty surprising given that the answer to this question is probably the most important answer we can ever find, right? I mean, there's nothing more tragic than a life misappropriated. And it's a little bit like, perhaps even more surprising because it's a much simpler question, the fact that there's diversity of opinion or basic confusion about what constitutes a good diet is also surprising. So we've been on this earth for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years in our current form. We've certainly had a few centuries to look at it carefully, and we're still confused about what we

should be putting in our mouths on a daily basis. And we're even more uncertain about the recipe for a truly good life. So there's a lot to consider here. I mean, some of the problems are definitional, and so maybe we should jump into that part first, or just the semantics of it. Because we have words like pleasure and satisfaction, and meaning, and happiness, well-being, flourishing, eudaimonia. And obviously, these are overlapping concepts. Start us off with some clarification on terminology. Yeah. And for each of these words, there's a lot of debate about it. People use it, use the words in different ways. Happiness notoriously can mean very different things. Meaning is notoriously very vague, and I try to make it less vague when I talk about it. But, you know, let's start with pleasure. So there's an intuitive sense. Pleasure is what makes us go, ah. Pleasure is my way of seeing a sort of short-term experience that we like,

is my way of seeing it as sort of short-term experience that we like, that we say, bring us more of it. And you contrast this with suffering or pain. You know, pain is the physical part of it, but also, you know, shame, humiliation, boredom, anxiety, disappointment. And you would think they're total opposites. You would think, you know, and in fact, you would think that you want the pleasure and you want to avoid the suffering. But it's a very interesting fact about people that experiences that are normally painful, that normally could bring you suffering and difficulty, in all sorts of ways are what we sometimes want. And sometimes we want them because they're in the service of pleasure, like BDSM, I talk a bit about that, or rigorous exercise, which is difficult. And sometimes we want them because they're in the service of pleasure, like BDSM, I talk a

bit about that, or rigorous exercise, which is difficult. In fact, it's supposed to be difficult. It was easy, what would be the point? As well as sort of longer life projects that we take on, and we say, we know this is going to be hard. But if it wasn't hard, it wouldn't matter. And this brings us to the definition of meaning, which is, you know, and I'm not taking this from a philosophical point of view, just trying to do this a priori. If you ask people, what's the meaningful experience? You ask people, how meaningful is your life? They answer coherently. It's a coherent question. And so we can look to see what they're talking about. And they seem to be talking about projects that are difficult, that take a lot of time, and involve struggle and doubt and uncertainty. They involve suffering of different sorts. And if it didn't involve suffering, it wouldn't be meaningful. Yeah, one of the main problems here is that people are unreliable narrators to their own adventure here.

To some degree, we're always in the presence of an unreliable narrator, or at least a potentially unreliable narrator, in several respects. There's the fact that most people, really maybe all of us, don't know what we're missing. There's certain experiences we have that we like, that we keep gravitating toward, and invariably there are opportunity costs associated with each of those. And we don't know how much better life would be if we had slightly different priorities, or even vastly different priorities. So even in satisfaction of our desires, even what we imagine our noblest desires, even on those days or weeks where we're living exactly as we feel we should, again, we just

don't know how much greener the grass is on the other side of the fence that we can't see. And then you add to that all of the failures of memory and the problems in integrating memory with an evaluation of just how happiness or well-being or the absence of suffering is accruing. And this goes to the famous issue that Danny Kahneman ran into in his research on the experiencing versus the remembering self. Maybe you want to summarize that and then we can get into it. Because I think you and I have a different, I don't think you and I agree with Danny in his view of it, but he perhaps remind us what he thought he figured out there. Yeah, I mean, we could talk a lot about the general idea. We could be wrong. We could say something's meaningful and valuable and worthwhile

and just be deluding ourselves. And just before we get to Danny, I just want to point out that my argument is about chosen suffering. Unchosen suffering is a very different thing. This is fresh in my mind because I wrote an excerpt in my book in the Wall Street Journal, and I got an email from somebody who was furious at me. She said, I live in chronic pain. Who the hell are you to tell me this is valuable as part of a good life? You know, screw you. I'm very angry. And I pointed out in a response, look, I'm very careful. I'm not talking

about unchosen suffering, chronic pain. Your child dies. You have a horrible illness. Your house burns down. You get assaulted. That's suffering of quite a different sort. But at the same time, and building on what you're saying, we tell stories about that. We are very good storytellers, and it's a very natural narrative to say, this happened for a reason. This made me a better person. And I'm actually kind of skeptical about those stories. There's a whole literature on post-traumatic growth, which finds that people often say after a horrible thing, I'm better, I'm stronger, I'm more resilient, I'm kinder. But it turns out when you look closely, there's not much evidence for a real change.

It's more of a story we tell ourselves. That's interesting. Let's get to that because I think that's important to explore. I think that's important to explore, but let's table the unsought suffering until we deal with the other requisites of happiness here. So yeah, give me Kahneman on the experiencing and remembering selves. Kahneman's the coolest. So this is Danny Kahneman, our Nobel laureate in psychology and well-deserved. Technically a psychologist, but a Nobel laureate in economics, which is the only thing he could, I guess, qualify for.

And somebody will jump in and say economics isn't a real Nobel Prize, and I'm just going to steer clear of that ugly debate. I'll give it to them for the Peace Prize. That has been so devalued that it's an embarrassment now. We'll keep chemistry, physics, and on some days, literature. So Kahneman's done some lovely studies on our perception of our memories of experiences. And he points out there's a difference between what you get when you weigh the actual pleasure and pain you feel versus how you recall it. So one of his findings is what he calls duration neglect. You have a miserable

four-hour flight where you have nothing to do and you're going crazy with boredom versus an eight-hour flight, which is just as boring and just as unpleasant. You would think the second one is twice as bad, and it is twice as bad unpleasantness, but you remembered them about the same. A wonderful two-week vacation and a wonderful one-week vacation. You get home, it doesn't matter when it was twice as long. You remember it the same. But now you get to the really weird part, which is when assessing the quality of experiences, we tend to judge the peaks and the endings.

And so Kahneman did some really amazing studies. He did it both in the lab and also with people experiencing colonoscopies. This was done a while ago, and colonoscopies were actually quite painful. So he gives people a painful experience that ends on a very painful part, and then stops and says, you're done. Then he gives another group exactly the same experience, ending on exactly the same high degree of pain. And then he adds some mild pain.

So the second one plainly has more pain. It's the same pain as the first one, plus some more. Then he asked people, what do you prefer? And people say, oh, the second one was much better because it ended on a more pleasant note or less painful note. It leads to the bizarre fact that if you're having a painful dental operation and then it just ends and the dentist says, fine, you're done, you could go home. You say, could you give me a little bit of mild pain so I remember this better? It's just perverse. And overall, Kahneman says, your judgments of your day-to-day pleasure and pain, you could do this in a different way by giving people an iPhone app that beeps at random times and people say

how happy they are, how sad they are, will differ from your remembered judgments of what kind of life you live. And then there's a big debate in psychology and philosophy too, which is what do you want to maximize? Do you want to maximize the sum total pleasure you have in your life? Or do you want to maximize how, when you look back on your life, you experience it? Kahneman famously says, remembered happiness is what should count. He says it's what people really take seriously. While other people, like my friend Dan Gilbert says, it's experience that counts. Yeah, and so Danny famously decided that you really can't reconcile these two different modes. The person you're talking to when you're asking someone about their life is always the remembering self who's making a global judgment about how good the vacation was or how

good life is, how, you know, how satisfied, how meaningful. And then when you compare that to the experience sampling mode of the person who just gives a quick rating of their level of well-being at random points during the day, when you give them an app to do that, it's just they're two totally different measures. And I think the way Danny phrased it at one point with me was that what people really want, I mean, in the end, the way people go about their

lives so as to live the most meaningful, satisfying lives is that what they want are good future memories. You want to live in such a way so that when we ask you in the future, how happy were you with the last year, decade, life, that person says, oh, I wouldn't change a thing, right? Even though that's just one moment in time. And I've never bought this analysis. I'm

not denying his findings. I think this seems clearly true of us empirically, that there's a disjunction here. But I think something close to what Dan Gilbert imagined should be possible, that you should be able to just sum the area under the curve, recognizing that the remembering self is none other than the experiencing self in one of his or her modes or one of his or her moments. And it's different in that it has a different salience

and it is what always comes online when you ask a certain kind of question for a person. And the crucial bit to integrate is that the answer that you're able to give to that question, whether prompted by someone like Kahneman or just to yourself when you wake up at four in the morning and you're thinking about your life, that ability to answer that you're satisfied or that you wouldn't change a thing has further effects on the rest of your experience, right? It's not truly an isolated moment. It matters that whenever you find yourself in conversation with someone and they say, well, so how's it going? How's your life? How's your family? That conversation feels a certain way, and it changes your status or perceived status. This sense of satisfaction builds or erodes depending on how those conversations go.

And so I just think it's not, but it's happening nowhere else but in the timeline of your experience. You're not on some other planet for those moments of conversation. So it's, anyway, I don't know if you are sympathetic with that, but it seems to me that they can be married. I like the argument. I actually talk about Dan's work quite a lot in my book. And I end the book later on with a discussion of exactly that scenario. He offers the example of a swimming pool. And you spend, you know, 95% of your time just lying in a swimming pool, you know, drinking pina coladas and feeling great. And then 5% of the time you look back and say, my life is a waste. I've just been wasting. I think this has no value. And the way he would

put it is, well, that's 95% happy and 5% miserable. That's pretty good math, actually. That's, you know, better than most lives, so stick with it. I don't... Yeah, that's crucially different from what I'm... Feel free to press on and criticize that view, but there's a few wrinkles there that I think I'm going to agree with you that that doesn't capture what I'm after. So how far are you willing to go? So there's a view, which I think Dan holds, because he told me he holds it, which is a sort of straightforward hedonism, which is we think there's something about the experience of saying, oh, my life is a waste, and I wish I was helping people, and I don't have any purpose. We think that's sort of a different kind of motivation than a

motivation that makes us want to lie in the pool. But it's all the same. It's all pleasure. Right. And so all altruism is, in fact, some kind of self-gratification. That's right. I mean, Dan doesn't make this argument, but I've heard it enough. I've made a lot of, I've done a lot of work looking at moral motivations and why we sometimes do good things to each other and cruel things to each other. And I think there's very strong evidence that we have more, honestly, moral motivations. We don't just want to impress others. We really want to do good stuff or sometimes bad stuff. But the hedonist will push back and say, well, you know, when you give up a really pleasant afternoon to go visit a sick friend in the hospital, you think you're doing it because you care about the friend, but really you like the buzz you get

from doing it, and you want to avoid the pain, the guilt of not doing it. Well, there is truth to that, but that's not as deflationary as I think a hedonist would allege. I mean, so the buzz you get, you know, another word for that is, or potential words for that is, are love and compassion and connection and, you know, it's friendship, you know, it's like, depending on the circumstance, that's some of the good stuff in life that you, yes, you can say you want it selfishly, but it's a wise form of selfishness. It's not just another hot fudge sundae. You know, there's no regret component. Like, there's a kind of hedonism that is, by its very nature, superficial, and therefore, when you look back on it, it doesn't really survive scrutiny. It's very easy for someone to run

the argument that, okay, you've wasted your life. All you did was stay in a swimming pool the whole time, really, the whole time. I don't care how perfect the temperature of that pool was, there was more to life than that. And yet you wouldn't say that of, someone wouldn't say, oh, all you did was surround yourself with people who you deeply loved and cared for, and you made their lives better, and you prioritized minimizing human suffering across the board, and you became famous for your compassion, and millions of people said you were their hero, and you had this virtuous circle where, you know, everything was aligned in your life, and there was no possibility of hypocrisy and what you were like behind closed doors was every bit as noble as how you seem to be in public. And oh yeah,

you just wasted your life. Exactly. I mean, there's two separate objections you could make. First is what you alluded to earlier, which is, you know, suppose you say, you know, you spent the afternoon visiting a sick friend and it wasn't a lot of fun. But afterwards, you said, well, I feel good about it. I did the right thing. First, why do you feel good about it? Well, you feel good about it because you want to do good things, because you have a motivation to do good. You recognize its value. And that's what drives the pleasure. It's not the same pleasure as biting into a sugary treat or having the pool the right temperature. And I think second, and this is maybe a deeper objection, is as a motivational theory, this is often simply mistaken. We both have kids and we want our kids to flourish and be happy.

And sometimes it's a lot of suffering for us to do. So it's a lot of work. Maybe, you know, you miss out on things you want to do. Maybe your child's going through a difficult time and you're struggling with your child to help out. And if some psychologist was to say, well, you're really just doing this because you get a pleasurable buzz from doing it, I think you're right to say that's ridiculous. You're doing it because you value certain things. But doesn't the research show, I mean, I think this goes to Dan Gilbert's research specifically, that basically parenthood is a net negative for almost everybody for a very long time. I forget what the time course of recovery period is here, but don't you basically have

diminished happiness for many, many years reliably becoming a parent? You know, it's complicated. So yeah, there's some work still done by Danny Kahneman finds that if you use a beeper with parents and it beeps randomly when they're with their kids, despite what they'll tell you, they're kind of miserable. And, you know, being with kids ranks somewhere around, you know, menial housework and far below things like interacting with friends or having sex or having a good time. And this research finds that non-parents, sorry, parents have it worse than non-parents. Other research, which Dan loves to describe, looks at marital satisfaction when you have

kids. And the idea is you start off very happy before you have kids and ideas. You start off very happy before you have kids. You have kids, satisfaction drops. You have more kids, it drops more. Their teenagers is at the bottom. And then they start to leave the house and your happiness rises and rises. He has this line saying, the only sign of empty nest syndrome is increased smiling. Wait, this is Kahneman or Gilbert? This is Gilbert. This is Gilbert. Kahneman is nowhere near as funny. Brilliant, but nowhere near as funny. But it gets more complicated. So other studies since then have found that it

depends who you are. Fathers tend to be happier with parenthood than mothers. Older people, happier than younger people. And there's an enormous country difference where countries that have a lot of child support, Scandinavian countries and so on, for them, parents are actually happier than non-parents. The country out of a survey of 22 countries where there's the biggest happiness below to having kids, for one reason or another, is United States. So even if you're just a hedonist, I don't think you should be just a hedonist, even if you're just a hedonist, it's kind of complicated how you're situated whether

or not to have kids. But I think in the end, when you ask people, do you regret having kids, even on a private survey? People say, no, greatest thing in my life. And here's where you might jump in and say, well, this could be a case of self-delusion. To say this biggest thing of your life, which caused so much transformation, some of it negative, was a bad thing, a mistake, maybe too much for people to bear. And they might tell themselves good stories about it. But I actually think that when people answer a question like that, they're not talking about hedons, they're not talking about pleasure, they're talking about other sources of value. Yeah, I mean, this is so interesting, because maybe let's jump to

suffering for a second, because there's something, and unsought suffering, because something clarifying about it. I was thinking at one point in reading your book, I asked myself, I think you were talking about why people seek out horror movies and other noxious stimuli, and also those cases where a bad experience is rated as something that in the end is a net positive, which seems somewhat paradoxical, or can seem paradoxical, because it can be something that in the end is a net positive, which seems somewhat paradoxical or can seem paradoxical because, I mean, it can be something that by definition you would never want to repeat, right? But you get people saying that they're glad it happened to them, right? And so I asked myself the question, what's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life? So maybe I'll describe this because

maybe a trigger warning is in order. That's how I'm about to describe something. I'm stealing myself. Yeah, absolutely horrible. But it's not that I wish this thing hadn't happened because it happened to somebody else and it was a horrible thing to happen. But I can't say that I wish I hadn't seen it. But there's no way if you told me, okay, you can see that again, there's no way I would decide to see it again. So psychologically, it's strange to be in this spot. But anyway, I was on a trip to India, and we were in the back of a taxi and driving down one of these predictably chaotic roads outside of Delhi. And there was a bus that was parked at an odd angle with the curb.

And there was a massive traffic jam. We were slowly passing this bus and people were milling around. And it had all the signs of something untoward had happened. And the bus looked like it had hit something and just, you know, like parked on the curb, and I was scanning the scene looking to see, looking, you know, as one does, you know, morbidly looking for the thing that you were, you're going to wish you hadn't seen, but still, this is why traffic predictably slows when there's an accident. So I was looking over the scene to see what had happened, and I was, I mean, it unfolded

this way. So I'm looking, it looked like it had hit a fruit cart, and it was just, you know, the fruit cart was just obliterated, and I was looking for a person or people, and I thought, I experienced this profound relief that there was no people, there were no people in sight that had been hit by this bus. And then I recognized in the next moment that what I thought was a fruit cart was in fact a person who had just been obliterated by a speeding bus. I mean, literally this person had been smeared over 40 feet of pavement. And it was an absolutely mind-stopping vision of just the most awful thing that can happen. And so that's the worst thing I've ever seen with my eyes that was real. And yet, I can't say that I wish I had never seen it, but I would, of course, never want to be in that situation again. So it's just,

psychologically, it's, if I had to specify the good that came to me from seeing it, it's the, I mean, I was sitting with one of my best friends. I mean, it was a shared experience, right? So this is now something that we have, we haven't talked about it often, but it has come to mind occasionally. And it was just, it's a kind of corner condition of human existence. It's like, it's a kind of peak, I mean, it's strange to call it a peak experience, but it's a kind of peak experience in the sense that it was that arresting. So there are experiences of emergency and just sheer unpleasantness and horror that can still, if they're abbreviated enough, or if their knock-on effects are not continuous and terrible

for you personally, they do sort of go in the column of experiences you were glad you had and you wouldn't, in fact, wish to be without. I think that's right. I, for the most part, take the intuitive view that unchosen suffering is a bad thing. But occasionally, there are things that you would experience that could have a positive effect on you that you would have never chosen to experience. And it could have a positive effect in terms of changing how you think about the world, changing your emotions, or simply broadening your scope of human experience. So I think a lot of claims about the benefits of unchosen suffering are exaggerated, but there's actually psychological evidence that looks at the amount of suffering people have had in their life. And it turns out

that people who have had very low amounts of suffering tend to have low pain tolerance and low resilience. And in other research, they're less kind. They're less able to help other people. There may be something to be said for the idea that a certain amount of unchosen suffering, I don't know, builds character, toughens you up. You know, the same studies find that people who report a lot of suffering in their lives also have low pain tolerance and low resilience. There's kind of a sweet spot in the middle. Yeah. Wouldn't you just expect there to be some kind of normal distribution over this, where on the question of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? I mean, there's going to be a cohort for whom that is absolutely true and a cohort for whom it's absolutely not true?

I would expect that. I would also expect that maybe the suffering that does us the most good is of an intermediate sort. You know, Nietzsche is as, you know, he loves aphorisms and it's such an exaggeration. Often what doesn't kill us causes us terrible damage we never recover from. But sometimes, sometimes the right sort of unchosen suffering could lead to a positive transformation. Yeah, I mean, so there's so many intersecting issues here because, I mean, you would think, you know, as Danny Kahneman thought early in his career, that you should just be able to aggregate this stuff in a straightforward way. But we know that there's so many other variables. There are framing effects where basically the same experience can be good or bad depending on how you conceptualize it. I mean, this is obviously Shakespeare got here first. What's the actual quote? There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Yeah, yeah. And so there's that.

And there's also just this asymmetry between pain and pleasure or happiness and suffering, which is the bad, commensurately bad things are, in fact, incommensurable with the good things. And even just the order of things matters. We weight loss as more significant than gain, even when we're talking about the same thing, right? Which is to say, people care more about losing $100 than gaining $100. So how do you recommend that we start doing the arithmetic in our own lives as we're trying to figure out what's important, what should supersede something else, what sacrifices are worth making, how much meaning-making struggle is a good idea versus just an expense

we shouldn't actually be paying when we really should. We'd be wiser to be in the big warm pool with Dan Gilbert. How do you think about these things for yourself? I think that's the hard problem of life. If we're motivational pluralists, which I think we are, and we want many things, then there's the question of how to trade them off and how to determine the relative value. And it's a question that can't be ducked. At every point, we have to decide whether to sort of, you know, lie on the couch and watch Netflix or visit the sick friend, or I don't know, read up on astronomy and learn some facts we didn't know. You can stand on one leg and watch Netflix and just kind of get both going at the same time. Yes, you could do Netflix while doing push-ups or something and just get everything all worked out.

But yeah, there's a certain balance and people choose different sides of this balance. There's a wonderful thought experiment by the philosopher Nozick of an experience machine, where they plug you into a machine and you live a rich, full, happy life that's not real. It's the matrix, basically. And Nozick says, well, nobody would want to choose to go into the machine because the problem with the machine is you think, I don't know, you think you have a rich, fulfilling relationships and people who love you and climbing Mount Everest and solving world hunger. But it's just an illusion. It's just a dream. You're not doing anything. You're a blob. And then Nozick says, who wants to be a blob? And I share Nozick's intuition. I'm actually curious whether you do too, that I wouldn't want to get plugged into

the machine regardless of how much pleasure it gives me. But I got to admit, I've been asking students, undergraduates, graduate students about the experience machine for a long time. And a substantial number of them, I think I'm getting to now more than half, say, yeah, I plug in. Yeah. Well, it's also interesting when you consider it from the other side, because, and this is something you do in your book, when you try to disentangle it from status quo bias, and imagine you're already in the machine, and now you're being lifted out, and you're consulted, you know, do you want to go back to that supremely happy fake life that you just thought was real for the last 50 years? And viewed from that side, you could see more people wanting to plug back in if they

realized the thing that they had been enjoying so much is what they're returning to. It really shook me up when I read about the case where they switch the priors, when they switched the status quo, because I was definitely a no machine kind of guy. And then if I wake up, boom, all of a sudden there's a flash and I'm sitting in a room and some technicians are saying, you know, you've been in the machine for 10 years. This is your annual, we take you out and we say, you know, do you want to go back? And if, of course, if you go back, we wipe out your memory of this experience. You think it's a real life, but it's just an illusion. And I think back, imagine thinking about my children and the people I love and the projects I'm engaged in. And I would feel this wave of horror that it was all nothing, just a dream. But I think I'd want to go back to them. I have too much attachments

to think of cutting myself loose, even if they turned out to be imaginary. Well, and certainly most people have had this experience of wanting to get back into a dream, right? Like you wake up from an incredibly fun dream and you wish you could just close your eyes and just jump back in. In fact, I think once or twice in my life I've managed to do that. And so that's, you know, obviously you're not committing for the rest of your existence to do that, but it's, you know, people have, they show a, certainly a willingness to be diverted as pleasantly as possible by something they know isn't real, you know, not for their entire lives, but for a surprising portion of it when you count all the time we spend vicariously going on adventures with others through fiction and film and television and all the rest.

That's right. So to go back to your question, how do you balance all of this? The answer is you don't give pleasure zero. I've encountered a lot of people who are hedonists and they say, look, there's just a one word answer to what people want and it's pleasure. And I don't agree with them, but I also don't agree with people who say, eh, it's all about meaning and struggle and purpose because pleasure has some value. It has some intrinsic value and it has some value as part of a good life. I mean, to go back to your question also about all of these biases and negativity bias and order bias, I think, and how do we cope with this?

You could take it in a bit of a different direction and say, whatever problems these pose, they're also a source of fun. So in a part of my book where I talk about suffering as a source of pleasure, part of this involves playing with these biases. as a source of pleasure. Part of this involves playing with these biases. So you might give yourself a bad experience, like a very hot bath or a sauna or spicy food, in order to get pleasure from the relief when that goes away. It's a very sort of common human pleasure. You may enjoy the mastery of control pain. You may enjoy the rhythm. So, I'll give an example of revenge films. You must have seen John Wick. I've seen one of them, or most of one of them. Yeah. So,

I think you got the gist. In the first one, he's a retired assassin. And then early in the movie, some Russian mobsters he has a run-in with kill his dog. And it's very sad. And then the rest of the movie, he takes his revenge. That's how you know they're really evil. Killing the family is not enough. If they have to kill the dog, then you know they're really going to deserve what they get. Right. So you feel, right, if they simply kill some people towards the end of the movie, you say, isn't this excessive? But it's not excessive at all, as John Wick must have killed a hundred, it's excessive, but it's not excessive at all as John Wick must have killed a hundred, a thousand people. You feel, yeah, well, it was a dog. They had it coming. And this movie has a rhythm to it. And it's sort of a classic rhythm for many, many movies and many stories, which is

bad thing, then good thing. And if you were sort of so foolish to think, wow, this would be a better movie if you took out that sad part of the dog. Well, you can't have the good part without the bad part. Revenge films have to have the bad act so we feel so justified and so happy when the good stuff comes. Yeah, well, there's a direct analogy to life too. This is kind of back to Kahneman and the peak end rule, or I guess just the end rule, the order of things matters. I mean, we feel like a bad thing followed by a good thing redeems the whole enterprise, whereas a good thing followed by a bad thing is a catastrophe. That's right. There's a rhythm of the lives we want. Psychologists have asked people questions

like, how do you want your life to go? And people want their lives to get better and better. There's something called a James Dean effect where people really love lives that end on a high note, as opposed to most of our lives, which kind of peak out at a certain point. And then often the last few years aren't so great. And people, even if those last few years are happy, still, it's better to end on a high note. Or take a more local case. Take a job you work at for 10 years, and each year your salary goes up a bit. Forget about inflation.

I just mean absolute amount. Your salary goes up a bit. Versus you work on a job for 10 years, and each year your salary drops. But suppose it turned out that the math was such that in a dropping case, you actually made overall more money. Still, people say, well, that sucks. I want things to get better. Yeah, it really is interesting because I'm always tempted to take the step further back and say that, okay, our default reactions to these parameters are very likely wrong, and we should be able to subsume even those with a wider view still, which corrects for them. So I mean, once you understand

the asymmetry between loss and gain, and that it's not strictly rational, that you should care about $100, exactly $100 worth, right? And it shouldn't matter whether it's going into your wallet or coming out of your wallet. Yeah. Then you should be able to perform that correction for yourself and even, I mean, in certain cases, uncouple what you deem to be good from, I mean, even if you can't change your moment-to-moment experience of it

or even the way you feel when making a retrospective account, you still should be able to perform some kind of course correction here. And the only place in my life I'm trying to figure out where I've actually applied this, and the only place that's coming to mind is on the topic of altruism and philanthropy. This is, I don't know if you've heard any of my conversations with the philosopher Will McCaskill, who's one of the young fathers of the effective altruism movement. And so famously what they've done is they've worked to uncouple judgments of

the most efficacious use of resources from the way any given use of resources makes us feel, right? So there are causes to which you could give your money, which give you immediate good feels. They have, you know, really compelling stories and nice graphic design on their brochures, and sometimes it's a cause that shouldn't even exist, right? It's just a completely misconceived charity that's not only not doing the good it thinks it's doing, it's actively doing harm in the world. And then you have far less sexy causes to which you could give money, which you can never feel quite as good about because there's just no way to tell a super compelling story about them. But when you actually do the analysis,

they're super efficient ways of mitigating human suffering and long-term risk. And so it's just, you know, I've just made, having thought about it enough, talked about it enough, and wanting to idiot-proof this part of my life, I've just decided, okay, doing good, actually doing good, is fully divorceable from how I feel while doing that good. And I want to get as many good feels as I can out of it. But if in the end, the project can't be made salient enough for us to give me the feeling of heroism I would feel if I ran into a burning building and saved a little kid, well, then so be it. In terms of resources, I'll prioritize the non-sexy, efficacious thing, because in the end, it just matters how much suffering you're in fact mitigating.

No, I mean, as you know, you're talking Catholicism to the Pope. My anti-empathy book turns on exactly that point, that our feeling, we've talked about this many times, I think we're very much on the same page, which is what makes us happy, satisfied, makes us feel like good people, is often quite divorced from actually what makes a difference. Peter Singer has a great example of this. He says that often people like to give to many, many charities, small amounts, sometimes so small amounts that processing the checks causes the know, causes the charity to lose money. They've become a burden to those charities.

That's right. And for each one, they think, oh my gosh, I'm saving the whales. Oh, wow. I'm helping Africans. And they get a little, you know, an example is like going through a tasty buffet. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs

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