Modern Wisdom - #033 - Carl Cederstrom - What Happens When You Dedicate A Year To Optimising Your Life & The Happiness Fantasy

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Carl Cederstrom is an Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, an author of several books and a writer for The Guardian, The New York Times and Harvard Business Review.  Carl dedicated a full year of his life to immersing himself in the Human Optimisation Movement. This is the equivalent of going completely dick & balls on a 12 months of back to back Life Hacks episodes and Carl's experience is both hilarious and insightful. We also discuss his new book The Happiness Fantasy which analyses society's obsession with becoming happy and offers a fascinating alternative view to what we should be aiming for in our lives. Expect to learn why optimising masturbation is a difficult process, how you can write an entire book in a single month, what he found to be the single most effective optimisation strategy and why happiness might be a redundant word. Further Reading: Follow Carl on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cederstromcarl The Happiness Fantasy Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Fantasy-Carl-Cederstr%C3%B6m/dp/1509523812/ Desperately Seeking Self Improvement: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Desperately-Seeking-Self-Improvement-Optimization-Movement/dp/1944869395 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, we are back again and this week we're talking about life hacks but perhaps with a little bit of a different angle. Karl Cedarsstrom is an associate professor at Stockholm Business School, part of Stockholm University and he's writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic and Harvard Business Review amongst many others. Karl spent 12 months immersed in the human optimization movement, him and his co-author, Andre Spicer dedicated one month of the year to a different area of their life and trying to optimize it as much as possible. This is the absolute zenith Mount Everest of trying to optimize your life and the experiences

that Karl went through have elicited some really, really interesting results. He'll tell us exactly what out of 12 months of pure optimization was the single best tool that he came across, how he was able to optimize his sex, his relationships, his vanity, his looks, his finances and a whole bunch of other things. And then we move on to his new book, which is called The Happiness Fantasy. Now, recently we've discussed happiness quite a bit with Susanna Hallanon and in the Q&A that I did with Johnny and Yusuf. And it's an interesting to see Carl's approach to it. He makes a strong case that happiness isn't something that any of us should be aiming

for, and that there are much more worthy terms that would make us much more fulfilled and content within life. I'm going to leave it there. I won't present any spoilers for the rest of the episode, but I wanted to give another shout out to Scott McGrath, who sent in a screenshot of him sending out on another company internal internet, one of our podcast episodes. Now, thanks very much for that Scott. I really appreciate it. Again, if you do manage to share one of the episodes on a big network, please let me know and I'll be able to give you a shout out on a future episode. Coming up soon, we have got how to survive university, me, John, you knew, so if talking about that. And the long awaited life

fails one or one edition, which is essentially the antithesis to our very slick approach to human optimization. So there's lots of exciting stuff coming up. But for now, thank you. How are you doing? Very good, thank you all the way from the increasingly cold England at the moment. Where are you in the world? I'm in the increasingly cold Sweden Stockholm to be precise. Very nice. You're a associate professor at Stockholm Business School, right? That's right, which is part of Stockholm University. Fantastic. For the listeners at home, could you give us a little bit of a background to yourself, please?

All right. Well, I live in Sweden, been living in the UK in Cardiff for a few years, but now based here, liveinstock home to children, a wife, and the author of a few books, which I believe we will talk a little bit about. of a few books which I believe we will talk a little bit about. What else can I tell you? That's it really I think that that would be necessary to know. That's the brief. The zeitgeist tape to Carl Siedist from I like it. Did you manage to tune your hearing into the Welsh accent very quickly when you were over there? Well, I could still now today spot it and recognize it quite easily, much more easily than before, but I was never able to imitate it

or speak anything like the Welsh accent. It's very subtle. I mean, my English is just too inferior to imitate any kind of accent. Just as Swedish, maybe it may back a do a French, German or Danish accent if I really try to. I got you. I want to, I won't make you jump through that hurdle today. Thanks. That's okay. So I want to get straight into it. You have had an

interesting journey with the field of human optimization. Would that be fair to say? Yeah, that's fair to say. So as a lot of the listeners will know, we have our most popular series is a sequence of episodes called Life Hacks. And on those, we try and find tips and tricks, strategies and approaches for a productive and efficient life. And you took the human optimization movement

to an extreme for 12 months, yourself and your co-author and friend Andre Spicer, is that right? That's right. I mean, the background to that project is that both me and Andre two university professors who have spent just too much time in our life in front of a computer sitting on a chair in our offices and studying various things. And we both been interested for a long time in the optimization movement and we've been interested in self-help culture.

And we wrote a book a number of years ago called The Wellness Syndrome, which was really a critical diagnosis of what we call a wellness society, a society where everyone is really so commanded, whether it's an injunction to be well, to be happy, to be healthy, unless you live up to those requirements you see as a worse person. So I mean, this is really what it all began with many years ago and we were interested in understanding this culture from a more sociological, political and philosophical perspective. And then when that book came out in 2015, a number of people said, but look, guys,

did you really try any of these things? And the truth was that we had rarely left our officers for the last, I don't know, 10 or 20 years. So I never tried , I'm, you know, I'd never been to a gym, I've never tried mindfulness. I really, I tried nothing really. So we thought, why not write a book where we start on January 1st and spend an entire year and try all of those things that we've written about from a more theoretical perspective, a very sort of distance approach, and just immerse ourselves into this culture and do everything that a human being could possibly do to optimize every area of our lives.

So we sat down together over lunch when I was visiting André in London where he lives. And we thought out 12 main broad categories of optimization areas, very things that you could optimize in your life. And so we just wrote down these 12 categories, starting in January with productivity, February, optimizing the body. March was optimizing the brain, then relations, then spirituality, then sex, enjoyment, money, creativity, morality, vanity, and then finally trying to work out what

this deeper or wide implications of this project was. So that was the kind of optimization project which took place in 2016 starting in January and ending by the end of December. What was that like living that year? Well, I think now it's like you're in your photos and look back to your 20s and thinking that that was probably fun but there's no way I would have ever do it again. But there were some things which were quite interesting, I think, on a more fundamental level, what it means to start playing with your life and start experimenting with various aspects of your life, which really allows you to do things

which you would normally not do. And I think also for us doing this thing together really helped because we pushed ourselves to do things. We would never have dreamt of doing otherwise. And it was also something strangely comforting, waking up every morning and knowing exactly what it was that you were supposed to do. And some people said that one month was a very, it's a very short period or time and there's no way you could optimize an airing one month time which is true but also you realize when you do that how long a month is. I don't think you know during many of these months it felt as though

they would never never end. So of all of the areas that you moved through which one was the most trying or which one did you find to be the most difficult or most uncomfortable? Yes, sex, definitely. And I'm pretty sure Andrew would have said sex as well. But that was really the most difficult one. And also since we're both married, we have to try and find alternative routes to go down. And for me, it was to try and optimize masturbation,

which, you know, sounds absolutely outrageous. But of course, it turns out that there's a whole body of literature and gurus and, you know, professional wankers who would tell you how to optimize. I'm pretty certain that I've worked with some professional wankers in my time actually. Yeah and you know it's fascinating when you begin listening to them because they would really see life as being sort of pre and post you know learning to become as sort of sexual kung fu master which means that you could master multiple orgasms and reject on a metaphysical level almost the ejaculation and instead of embrace orgasms, this very powerful energy that is opposed to.

Greater than the physical manifestation that it is itself. So I need to, I want to ask a question that I'm sure a lot of girlfriends and wives at home are thinking, which is what did your girlfriends or wives, what did they think about the, the year that you were doing? Were they just sort of turning over in bed at night and hoping that you weren't going to wake them up to something else mental in the morning or what was the sentiment? Yeah, I think my wife's more than anything was really tied up over and over again. I think the most testing bit really was people around asking, how do you feel about this? What I tried to do was to, you know, when you put yourself through a year-long experiment of this kind, you need to be very

careful about the things you're ready to sacrifice and the things you don't want to sacrifice. And I think in my case, the family was very important. So I tried to keep the project and the experiments whenever possible within working or office hours. So you can keep the family life insulated so to speak from the from the experiment. I tried to of course I didn't. A little bit of overspill here and there. I'm gonna guess. Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked about one of the the lower points of the journey. What was some of the the real highlights that you took from it? Can you tell us can you tell us anything that you thought was really, really good that you went through? Yeah, yeah, I mean, a lot of it. I mean, okay, so I mean, one of the things that really worked was

maximizing productivity. So the book that you were supposed to interview me about, the happiness fantasy, it's a book that that was the book that I had to write in one mom's time. So this was the first test, was to see if we could finish an academic book in the period of one month. From scratch. Well, I had, when starting, I had about, I think, one chapter finished and had to finish five chapters. So I think pretty much, well, say 80% of the book I had to write. Plus then, of course, I can go back through it all again.

Yeah, I mean, I did send it off to the publisher, which I had, which was on the contract. And, you know, this is just going to ruin the whole story now, but they rejected the rejected manuscript when it's so... Oh, no. But, but, and then I was just, and an interesting thing is, okay, so this is what happens. I wake up at January 1 and I know that in 31 days I need to write this freaking book and there's really no time to lose. And so what I do is I meet that productivity coach and he gives me a

series of really helpful advice. I think the advice I would really recommend to everyone, especially if they work with writing or many other creative tasks is the Commodore technique, which may sound very simple, almost silly, but it's really fantastic. And I would say, if there's one thing that really came out of this year, which I still use on a daily basis, it is the Pomodoro technique, which very simply means that you sit down and work in a very concentrated fashion for 25 minutes. And then there's a small beak from your app or whatever, or if you use just an egg clock and an up-shrug timer.

And then you take a five minute break. And the rule, which I think is very important to follow, is that when you take the break, you should do nothing. Ideally, just stare out the window or on a boiling kettle and as soon as the fire minute break is over you sit down again and this may sound really counterintuitive let's say you're in the middle of a sentence you know crafting a sentence and things are going really really well and then the beep

goes of course you know you would think that I should sit here and you know let this little creative flow continue. But I think if you just stand up, take the break, and then after five minutes go back again, exactly where to start. And then you can recuperate enough so you could keep going. And it's interesting if you do this over the course of a day because I think the first five or six promotoros you think that, okay, I don't really need to take a break now, but it really gives you the stamina to carry on working for a much longer period of time and still in a concentrated fashion. So that and also the addition of some medications, which I was experimenting with, which worked really well, but

of some medications, which I was experimenting with, which worked really well, but that was really the key to getting the book done, even though it's fairly short. And it was rejected by the first publisher. But the finished product, the one I've sent to you has worked over last autumn anyway. But so yeah, I think if I had to single out one thing that really worked over the course of that year, I'd say productivity. Well, that's the Pomodoro technique is a common theme.

I promise to the listeners at home that we're not sponsored by the Pomodoro technique, but there seems to be, it definitely seems to be a tool of choice for writers and creative types. Dr. Ewan Lawson, who I did a podcast with, that was a lot to do with the ergonomics of your desk environment, your general working environment, he said that he could go back through 150 Pomodoros that he did and he could track absolutely everything he'd done during his contribution to the book that he wrote which he co-opened and he could go back through and he actually came up with, it's interesting that you touched on looking out of the window because he came up with a rule called the 2020-20

rule, which I guess with a Pomodoro will be the 25-20-20. But what you talk about is refocusing the eyes on an object which is 20 feet away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. And one of the reasons for this is to reset the ocular muscles within the eye, to reduce eye strain, reduce tension headaches and a few of the bits and pieces. But I, since that and over the last six months have tried to implement the Pomodoro technique as much as I can. And for anyone who is listening, they will know that we are a massive fan of the Pomodoro technique for productivity. I think time-boxing anything. That Parkinson's law is just...

It's like gravity, right? I think for a lot of people, it's just something that you cannot get around, work expands to fill the time given for it. And when you give yourself that countdown clock in the corner of the screen, or the little turning away egg timer, or whatever it is, it just reminds you, it usually reminds you

how much fucking time you're wasting. I think. Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean, it was really remarkable because for every chapter I was writing, I was just in the app, you could choose what activity you're going to spend that Pomodora on. So I could see when the book was done that I had spent almost exactly the same amount of Pomodoro's on each chapter, which is really quite strange when you think about it, but it means there really is some kind of, I think, sort of intuitive process that really works

if you just make sure to sit in front of the computer and don't actually do actually do your fucking work That's right So getting onto the larger topic of Optimization overall at the moment Have you have you managed to come to a conclusion about why there is a modern day obsession with optimization? Yeah, I mean, I think is a modern day obsession with optimization? Yeah, I mean, I think by the end of the desperately seeking book, I kind of, I was left with sort of three theories. And the first one is that there is a deeply, there's a deep human desire to be someone else or somewhere else, basically just to

escape the confines of who you are. And I think everyone is born with multiple dreams of what you could become. And I think that's just something deeply human. So of course, with the optimization or self-help for that matter, promises, and that is really powerful is that you could live a different life. I mean, your life could be different from how it looks now.

So I think that's a very strong, deeply human impulse. And then the second theory is that really now we live in a time where we're expected to do these things. I mean, I think we do live in a culture which is very individualized. And we are being trained at an early age in school and elsewhere to begin to think of ourselves in terms of what we can do in relationship to this sort of the market economy. I mean, what are we going to do when we grow up? How are we going to make money? And not only in terms of what are you going to become in terms of your trade or occupation, but what are the kind of creative and innovative ways that you could think about, to remaking yourself as valuable commodities.

So I think there's a kind of commodification of life and where we're really expected to. That's a really good way to put it. The commodification of life. Yeah, really expect it to. That's a really good way to put it. The commoditification of life. Yeah, you're totally right. Yeah, and we're really so indoctrinated to think thinking about what can produce value, and where there's really no distinction between the work that we do in the person that we are and it's not only working on other things but working on ourselves. I think the whole sort of optimization

culture is very strongly linked to that kind of competitive element of modern day capitalism. So that's this second theory. And then the third theory is also a very classic one which I think is escape from death. Really? And I mean, I don't say that in a so faciecious way or that there's something wrong with escaping death, I think, we're all trying to escape. Nobody wants to die. Nobody wants to die. But there are different ways, obviously, to escape death. But I mean, if you take one of the more radical things I did during the year of optimization, it was to have plastic surgery.

So this was a month where I was going to spend every day and all the money I had to try and become as beautiful as possible. So I went to one of these clinics where you get injections, you know, it's called Restylane, these sort of filler injections. Okay. So I was going to get as a broader and sort of sharper jawline. jawline, that's right, a sharper jawline. And you know, when when I come in there, there's this woman in a white robe and she looks at me and I tell her I want to be as beautiful as possible and you know she looks at me and you know for her that's a perfectly

normal question and she moves me over to the mirror and I look in the mirror. So well you have a slightly boyish look so maybe we could try and make you look a little bit more like George Clooney. And I've been thinking more of something like Cristiano Ronaldo or Justin Bieber. But I thought George Clooney sounds great. So I went for the for the big picture like the full George Clooney maker. The full George Clooney maker. But I mean, if you're going to a clinic like that and also this woman who I met, it was absolutely impossible to say how old she was because you couldn't see a wrinkle anywhere in her face or any other people I met in that clinic.

And obviously that's a way of escaping death. I mean, you could see how different forms of exercise I was going to a CrossFit gym membership, which lasted until just a few months ago. It was getting too expensive, but that is also a place where you meet 40, 50, sometimes 60-year-old people who really believe that they are going to be younger. I mean, they take all of these different fitness tests, which will tell them that, you know, from a bodily perspective, physical perspective, they're only 20 or 25. I think again, that is a way of trying to escape death. And so I think all of these different activities of optimization, I think even when it comes to in part,

optimizing productivity, you really want to be able to do all of these things in life before life is over. So that's a form of escaping death. Again, I'd say those sort of three broad models I could think of, and then my friend Andres, when we had a discussion about this by the end of the year, he thought it was also about escaping, especially if you're a middle-aged person, as we are with families. So for him, it was also a way of escaping the family, it was a way of escaping yourself as well. That normality of human life almost. That's right. The normality of human life and also the stress and the anxiety that a lot of

people feel in those, you know, everyday life situations. So you've touched on something. I promised to the listeners at home that we haven't shared notes before we did this, but you've touched on something I really wanted to get to. Do you think that optimization is people searching for meaning in life through progression, that overcoming an obstacle and chasing down a task is a good way of artificially inseminating a feeling of meaning in your life, because when you reach the goal, it's the same as I want to get the bigger house, I want to have the bigger car, I want to do

X, Y and Z. I train in CrossFit gyms all the time and a lot of the people that are there, they want that 200 kilo deadlift, they want that 120 kilo cleaning jerk. And you're like, okay, well when you get there, all that you're doing is moving your PB up by five kilos and going for it again. There's got to be a broader question about what makes life worth living. And is it these little, the little intermediary targets, or are people using that as an escapism mechanism to forget the fact that the overarching, a lot of the time for a lot of people is suffering? What's your take on that? That's a great question. I think we need to put this in perspective of how we are being brought up today in school and especially when it comes to the point when you're in your

early 20s and you need to start thinking about what you should do with your life. And we really brought up, you know, through commercials and through our kind of business type thinking that we need to progress. In some ways, our lives should be like that sort of toothpaste commercial when you see how wonderfully rich and healthy your teeth become after using a toothpaste or your hair become after using alhamshan poo. And again, when it comes to work and reading any kind of business related literature, I'm from a business school which is also part of what I'm interested in this, but how we really been taught and trained in the thinking that everything need to progress.

But then we find ourselves in a situation today where people who either are looking for jobs and doing everything they can to sell whatever resources they have, the sort of human resources on the market that is usually quite cold and you don't really know what to do in order to progress and to make it. And also for people who do have work, they may be working in marketing or sales and they may be working there as of and still by the end of the day, they're not really sure where their effort really paid off or not. But then, when it comes to the gym, now, you step into a CrossFit gym, and you're there, and you struggle, and you fight, and you sweat, and you're really put in all of the hard labor, and it pays off. I think it's really one of the few areas in life today where you can see progress.

You've got a much more direct line of causation between your efforts put in and the results that come out the other end. Totally right. Exactly. You need to navigate the office politics. You need to grease the right shoulders, and there's a lot more hurdles to get over. I think for some people,

that's why CrossFit is incredibly liberating because people who may be aren't at the top of their game in terms of societal values for what their particular job is, can go in, and if they've been working their arse off, and you as a successful businessman have been being lazy, they're gonna wipe the floor with you in the workout today. And it evens the playing field in an incredibly fair way.

But I think one of the things that you touched on was really, really interesting was about this, the fact that someone's progression and they're almost inseparable from their job, right? I mean, one of the first things when you meet somebody, hi, what's your name? What do you do? You know, you, you are your job. That's right. You are your job, and then at the same time, you, we also know that most people find their jobs, essentially meaningless. So you have David Grayberry came out with a bullshit jobs, and this was based on an essay he wrote a few years ago

So a bullshit job is a job that is not only meaningless for you But you consider the job to be meaningless on a more fundamental social political level In other words, if that job would exist, the world would either be better off for as good, at least the same. Right. And they followed up after this essay, they made a survey, a U-go survey, which showed that something like 37% of UK workers

find their jobs to people to. And I think this is hugely relevant when understanding the commitment and the addiction that a lot of people have to gym culture, that we're supposed to find meaning and again at progression. We're supposed to be able to display that progression and show people that we are progressing. We're supposed to be able to display that progression and show people that we are progressed and we're supposed to do that in our working lives, but it's just really, really difficult for those people to be able to do that. I mean, if you do find yourself in a so-called bullshit job, how are you going to be able to do that? And I think this is a great frustration for a lot of people. And that tells us a lot about how our culture is shaped today, where work

is so essential. I mean, the only way to really be able to convincingly tell someone else that you have a meaningful life is to say that you do this meaningful work, that you are your work in some respect. Yeah, you're totally correct there. I think what's really insidious about it is that someone's positioned within a hierarchical structure or how their job is regarded by society at large, becomes conflated with their value to society. Like I know an awful lot of people, and I'm sure that you do as well, who are commercially incredibly successful,

but I don't think that they add an awful lot to society. I don't think they have a massive amount of value to add. However, I've also got some friends who are struggling students or singers who can't make it, haven't made a break yet, but that I add so much value to my life. I think they're fantastic, fantastic members of society and their value in quotation marks is in my eyes significantly higher. And it's this conflation of value of job status with value in society that seems,

that seems we should treat that with a lot of trepidation, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think one of the other things that's interesting to kind of book and the optimization bit, coming out from the other angle, you're a professor of business and in business, the way that companies have become better or more effective over the years is that you try an approach, you look at what works, remodel that, you refine it, and then rinse and repeat over time.

That it's split testing, right? It's a way of the commercial world essentially emulating what happens in the evolutionary world. And to one degree, there must be more effective ways and less effective ways to operate within the world. There must be good ways to exist as a human and there must be bad ways or there must be better ways and worse ways

are probably a more effective way of saying it. So is this optimization movement a bit of a bastardization of that somehow? Is it where that's kind of become twisted? Well, so one thing that really came out of the optimization project is that there are I think clear limitations on what can be optimized and what areas allow themselves to become optimized. So obviously when it comes to say productivity

or making money or anything that would be of a more kind of practical or instrumental nature, you could optimize. But as soon as it comes to raising deeper philosophical question of what it means to be a human being. What does it mean to be an ethical human being? What does it mean to connect in a loving way with other human beings? Then all of a sudden you see the algorithms, the apps, all of these different operating systems to crash down. They all break down.

They would have very little to offer us. I think as much as we could find useful advice to help us through the day, I think the danger, I mean, the great danger of optimization culture, is that we begin losing sight of those deeper questions of what it means to be human and what it is that we want to do with our lives because obviously, and this is kind of how you phrase your question previously, is that as soon as you reach this target or save up a bit of time by having implemented a new technique, then you use time that you've

saved up to find more ways, more techniques to save up more time. And then all of a sudden you have no freaking clue what to do with that time. And so I think that's that that really is a great danger of applying these mechanisms to all areas of life. Now, I deeply believe there are things and very important things. I'd say the most essential things in life are really so outside scope, outside the reach of optimization. That's interesting. So, you've touched on something now that I wanted to talk about as we move into the discussion on your new book to do with happiness. talk about as we move into the discussion on your new book to do with happiness. Is halfway between the two, is the optimization movement, is it to do with individual sovereignty versus more of a collective kind of altruistic community, society approached, desire to move everyone forward together, is it the isolation of

I-product of the 21st century and capitalism do you think? Sorry, you meant the optimization movement would be one of these two alternatives. No, but the optimization movement, are people obsessing over the optimization movement because they no longer have that sense of community anymore? Okay, yeah. I get you, sorry. Yeah, I think clearly, I mean, this is what a lot of sociologists would say,

and usually you would date this back to the 1970s, and you have some key reference points, like Christophe Lash writing in the Culture of Narcissism, you have Philip Reef a little bit earlier than that speaking in the triumph of the therapeutic that really today we have lost a faith in these very institutions that used to give us meaning in life and those institutions would be the family, would be church typically, would be work, all of these different social institutions that shapes and gave a sense of meaning to our lives, just crush down. And instead, we are supposed to find out by ourselves

what the meaning in life is. And you really see how this sort of the movement of the 1960s, which really had more of a kind of collective and political flavor to it, turned into something different in the 1970s. Now these are very sort of generalized remarks that I do here, but they would be true at least when looking at this development of the self-help movement and in particular the many kind of these huge seminar trainings that popped out and became very

popular in the 1970s, where really the new emphasis was on the self and the authentic self. and the authentic self and the best one could do is to look inside and to forget about the world and the injustices that may exist elsewhere because now when you're here with yourself it's only the cosmic universe and yourself that that matters. And this was the kind of stuff that was being trained at a very famous seminar that I write about in a book called Est called Earhard seminar training where I can't remember now, but something like 700,000 people I believe went there between 1971 and 1984. And really the message that people would receive during these very intensive week and long trainings is that there are no victims in the world. That was a very, very

crucial point. And that nothing in your life is decided, everything could be changed, and there would be no excuses for anything. So this was like a new kind of, it was a new version that sort of became a sort of global or at least a national in the US phenomenon. This of course, brought to many other countries as well, but which had the kind of the same message that you find in the self-help books of the 1930s, you know, Norman Vincent Peel, how to influence people, thinking grow rich by Napoleon Hill, which also interest, but the kind of interesting parallel there is that they came out at the back of the

Great Depression and this was a time when people really had to believe that there was some kind of hope, you know, in the face of a very sort of dark and depressing feeling of hopelessness, but interestingly in the 1970s and this is after a time of three decades of economic growth. You have a new generation or relatively wealthy middle class people and there's a wonderful essay written by Tom Wolf that came out in 1976 that said that what all of these people did when they finally get a little bit of money was to take them and run and went off to places like the SL and Institute and S to have what you call a loop job for the soul. So the only thing that really mattered was me, myself and I and I kind of lifting up and hailing the selfishness and being egocentric was

all of a sudden a very true rather than a rise. Isn't it weird that oddly a byproduct of liberation has become isolation? Yes. Yes. It seems here one of the things that you've come across there is that individual agency and freedom to make your own decisions and this limitless, bottomless, sideless, topless world that you can create for yourself makes you the master of your own fate. But it also means that all of your failures and successes are entirely yours to bear. And as we all know,

look and environment play a huge part in everything that goes on. If you were born in Rwanda in a terrible period during the 90s when there's a massacre going on, that's not your fault. Like, you're not the master of your own fate there, you haven't died murdered by bandits on the back of Jeeps because You weren't sufficiently well educated or something you're doing it because that's what the situation The situation occurred is what was going on So I guess that leads us very nicely into the next topic which is to do with happiness so is is it a crisis of a lack of meaning that's leading to happiness being almost replaced with progression and optimization at the moment?

Could you see a time, a paradigm or a spectrum, so to speak, between the two books? Well, I mean, first of all, I don't believe in happiness. I mean, in the sense that there's a true definition of happiness, so that you could measure happiness in any clear or scientific way. And if you look at it historically, there's a really rich and If you look at it historically, there's a really rich and strange conceptual development. You can see how history, you can see how happiness has meant all different kinds of things in different areas. How so? Well, I mean, if you take the in-engine grays, for example, and if you take the way Aristotle understood happiness,

it was very strongly connected to developing a set of virtues. It could be to become more courageous and to become brave or to become a better human being. But very fundamental to the belief of happiness at that time, was that true and complete happiness could only be enjoyed by the gods, not by human beings. The best of human beings could do would be to strive for happiness, but never to attain happiness. And that notion of happiness remains for a very, very long time. I mean, it remains during the middle ages, at which point happiness did not really exist at all in the life and earth, but only in the afterlife in heaven. So true and complete happiness was again something that was beyond what the

human could achieve. And in the Renaissance, that was the first time that happiness started to become seen as something that humans could not fully grasp, but something that they could glimpse at. And then it's in the enlightenment. And with interestingly philosophers like my kid Assad, but also a Rousseau and others, where happiness becomes not only something that you could achieve, but something that you should achieve. So now all of a sudden happiness is something that is something that we need to achieve. An interesting

thing, the first thing that happens is that that itself creates a lot of trouble and a lot of misery because when happiness is supposed to be there, supposed to be something that you could hold on to and live, then people started to feel miserable because they could not achieve. But this, they say that true agony is the person you are meeting, the person you could have been, right? That's, that's, that's the worst kind of hell. And then rolling back to our last point when we were going through optimization, this individual agency making you the master of your own fate, what does that mean?

That means you are not happy, therefore you are unhappy, and it's your fucking fault. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But I mean, but if you carry on, it's, I mean, even into the 20th century, I mean, the dominant understanding of happiness is that this is something that man, and this is what Freud said, man, the human being,

is not particularly well designed to achieve or be able to handle happiness. We really good at unhappiness. Unhappiness comes from everywhere. It comes from our body, it comes frominess. Unhappiness comes from everywhere. It comes from our body, it comes from our surrounding, it comes from everywhere. Happiness on the other hand is very fleeting, it's very difficult to know where it comes from. When it comes, you know, you can't really hold on to it. So the human being and happiness were never really a couple made for each other. Do you agree with that? I think I do agree. I mean, I'm not always in

bed with Freud, but I think when it comes to... I wouldn't ever want to be in bed with Freud. He had some very modern ideas about what happens in bed. Yeah, yeah, I'm not jumping in bed with him. But what's interesting is that in the 1920s, and this is what I write about in the happiness book, the happiness fantasy, that there's this other psychoanalyst who's really young at the time called Wilhelm Reich. And he makes a great impression on Freud, for it believes he's great, but there's a very strong

disagreement between the two, which becomes very obvious after a while. And that is how they see the relationship between happiness and the self and also the relationship to society. So for Freud, as I just said, the human being is not really cut out for happiness. And society's role is to keep the human being under control. I mean, so we don't go berserk and do, go around and slaughter people.

That's his view and why society is important. Right on the other hand, thought that society would really repress the human being. And it was society's fault with all its rules and regulations and norms that people could not be as happy as they had the potential to be. And he thought that true happiness was about becoming liberated as a human being. It was to become authentic, it was to become yourself and very, crucial to that process to become yourself is also to free yourself sexually. and for him it was to find your orgasmic potency. In other words, be able to have multiple orgasms or at least in a more abstract way to be free from various forms of sexual inhibitions. Is that partnered with being polyamorous as well? Was he advocating multiple sexual partners?

Yeah, I mean, he would be in favour of that and he hated family. He thought the family was a disease. He called this a disease and called it a family-letus. But this was a really strange But this was a really strange guy who was really worth to look into. And he became more and more obsessed with his theories of this orgasmic energy and started to design what is called organ accumulator, which is this wooden box. Oh my god. Like one of these, sort of looking like one of these old telephone booths and they were made out of wood and then coated with some metals and you were supposed to stand inside of these organ accumulators and then receive the organ energy. And this then supposedly was going to heal you, make your whole, make you

authentic, and make you sexual. And all of this may sound not but sounds like Scientology. Well, I mean, it sounds not like Scientology. But the interesting thing is that Wilhelm Wright becomes extraordinarily influential in places like Big Sur in California in the 1940s with the kind of early beat generation. Like Sir Henry Miller is one of the first people to really pick up Wilhelm Reichin to find him as a guru and an inspiration for the new kind of Bohemian lifestyle that was beginning to take form. And when the Estonian Institute started in 1961, Wilhelm Reich was one of the key people that they were influenced by. So much of what we see from that point onwards and here,

in this time, you know, the 1950s, 1960s, is really the first time where happiness becomes something that everyone is supposed to achieve. Is that an artifact of Wilham's work, do you think? Not only, but I think the notion of happiness that we subscribe to today is to a very large extent shaved by some of those ideas that Wilham Reich developed in his work. And because if you think about happiness, which I do in this book as being something that changes over time, but really what it does is that it mirrors a set of values

that happen to be endorsed by that society in that particular time, then really what is being favored today and this sort of goes back to our previous conversation is to be authentic, right? You need to be yourself, you need to develop your own individual, so a unique core of who you are. I mean, that's really the essential thing of being human today. The second thing is we need to live a life which is filled with pleasure. And I mean, the entire consumer capitalism is, I mean, the moral and cultural foundation for consumer capitalism. It's hedonism. It is that we should be able to enjoy ourselves. And then finally, I think the third value,

which is really key to understand how we are, to how we think about happiness today is work. And whether or not we are successful through our work, we're able to achieve ourself through this work. So it's really there at the S-Lein Institute in the 1960s, which Wilhelm Reich helped inspire, that you had new ideas as just the human potential movement, that what we should do in order to become true to ourselves

and fully happy is to find that untapped potential within ourselves and to fully develop our inner potential. And that is really the kind of notion of happiness that we subscribe to still today. But now, in the era of living now, which is very different from how it was in the 1960s, the happiness fantasy consisting of these values is used. I believe more often than not as a way of exploiting people or even, you know, as a euphemism for making us do things which we know is bad for us. I just, you know, just work more or and then, you know, brainwash ourselves and say that this is really what I want to do. Well, I think it's interesting that you touched on capitalism earlier on that as soon as you have a desire for anything,

inevitably that opens up a market for it. I recently did a podcast with Dan Harris, his co-writer, Jeff Warren, and on that podcast, we discussed the fact that meditation and mindfulness practice are supposed to be this. It's the dissolving of the ego, right? It's complete openness, et cetera, et cetera. But as there's a move towards mindfulness on a societal level, that also means that there's the option for people to make money.

And as soon as this is the option for people to make money off it, Charlottes and Peer, and people who want to exploit others, who want that in their life and think that it's going to give them meaning. So people chasing happiness, the demand, if the demand is there for something, the supply will not shoot shortly afterwards, follow, surely. Yeah.

I mean, I think just one sort of short example or illustration of how ludicrous it has become today to think about, where you would find instances of happiness or even authentic happiness is a preta man's share, which you know about obviously living in the UK, the first food chain, where as part of their work culture, the employees are supposed not just to be happy, you know, smile and greet the customers and take them on and give them a sandwich,

they also need to do that authentically. And that is when you begin to see how these values, when they were first developed, you know, in this case then with Willalm Reich in the 1920s, how they have been transformed through market capitalism, through corporations, which very cunningly have been using these words, but then twisted them and made use of them for the Ron ends. That's really quite disturbing, isn't it? That you've got someone who is saying that you need to be authentically happy. And by the way, the happiness that we're talking about is narrowly defined within the last hundred years or so. So of all of the definitions of happiness that you've come across, have you

got one which you have found to be closest to what you think happiness is? Of all of the years, that several thousand years or without it, it seems to be a fairly despondent barren wasteland where this happiness word is almost useless? Not at all. I think you could live a life without happiness. I think, okay, so my best definition of happiness is not really a definition, but this sort of back and forth between Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. And I think this is really a great illustration of what happened to him. So I think it's Vladimir who goes first to Esragon, or the other way around.

Anyway, he goes, say that you're happy. Why? Just say that you're happy. Okay, I am happy. Say like an I am happy. Okay, we are happy. And then they say we are happy. And then extra going goes, what should we do now? Now that we're happy. And I love that line because I mean, I think that really, you know, if we become happy, the question is, okay, what do we do now?

the question is, okay, what do we do now? I'm not happy. And I think it points to kind of the, I mean, it's such a powerful concept because, and it really, I think it's really a guiding principle for how we live our lives. And in that sense, I mean, I think it's important because it really constitutes the templates for what would be considered to be a good life as opposed to a bad life, which of course is contingent on the culture we live in. But I believe you could live without a clear definition of happiness. And instead use other words, such as meaning,

or you could use words such as love or friendship. I mean I think we do have enough concepts to guide us in our pursuit to live meaningful, good, fulfilling lives in whatever way we like to do that. But for happiness, it's just such a broad and vague abstract term that is now, I think, used and have been for a long time by politicians and corporations in very cunning and disingenuous ways. So I mean, I'm quite tempted to think

that happiness is something we could leave to the people working on the next advertisement for a soft drink or some fast food and then the rest of us could live happily. Yeah, whatever form that is. It's interesting that you talk about this kind of metaterm of happiness and it sounds to me an awful lot like someone saying, you need to be good at sports and in no way does me telling you that you need to be good at sports, help you become a good runner or become a good cyclist because sports and the achievement of being good at sports is created by a much more granular set of effect that build up towards that. And I think, yeah, it's a very interesting view to have that. I mean, I'm sure everybody who is listening and probably you

yourself at some point on social media will have seen the quote, happiness is the path not the destination. And to in a one of this weird twists of fate that this incredibly Instagram worthy, it sounds like the sort of thing that you could buy at Ikea. Quote, actually, isn't a million miles away, if what I'm to take that you've said today is true, happiness is a set of guiding principles. In fact, to a degree, happiness is almost the the optimizer, it's the pinnacle of the optimisation strategy and you aim your trajectory towards that and along the way you pick up the appropriate prerequisites to meet happiness and as long as you don't expect it to ever arrive what actually happens is you find fulfillment in the small tasks that you accomplish along the way. Yeah, I mean, I think that could be one way of doing it, definitely. But I think happiness or I mean, another term which some people prefer to use and I would

agree with them is joy, where joy is something that could arrive in a more spontaneous way. I think some people have argued and Pascal Bruchner is one, Lynne Siegel is another, I agree with both of them that what we need to be able to do is to be open to and not push happiness or joy away, but at the same time being quite careful with how happiness and immersing yourself, you know, doing everything you can to achieve happiness is also in many ways dangerous because it could lead you astray. I mean, because there's so many people who will tell you what a happy life is. I mean, I think another definition of this, of course,

is from a feminist movement. How a happy woman has been very closely bound up with how a woman should be like. You know, it's their happy housewife and her happiness is bound up with how a woman should be like. You know, it's the happy housewife, and her happiness is bound up exclusively with making sure that the family's happy, that the man would have his dinner on the table. Iroh, dinner on the table.

And there's really no happiness at all for that housewife. I mean, if you go back and read the stats about how housewife felt in the 1950s, I mean, it felt anything, but happiness, but still, they were really that model of happiness. I mean, another example would be gay people, and sorry, for all this name dropping, but it's just Sarah Amid wrote this book, The Promise of Happiness, and she makes a really good point, I think, where some parents would speak to the gay people that, well, you know, I just want you to be happy, which is a euphemism for just please keep your sexual identity to yourself, live normal and heterosexual life. So this decided to be happy and followed the root of happiness could also be extraordinarily

constraining because we have so specific ideas of what it means to be happy. And our sort of happiness fantasies, as I call it in this book tend to be very regulating and you could be happy in a number of different ways but not too many different ways. You need to act it out according to an accepted formula. So in that sense, and this is interesting if you look at the feminist movement because they were very rarely speak about happiness, but rather about freedom. And for them, it would even be, if you take the housewife example, freedom from happiness, because happiness to them, or the kind of happiness fantasies that they were being trapped inside, were just miserable, they just produced misery. And so I think, you know, it might come a day where I will embrace happiness fully again. But for now, I think,

you know, I'm still waiting and keenly. So to see new happiness fantasies to arrive of new templates of what a meaningful life look like, which are less individualistic than they are at the moment, which are less focused on competitiveness, which are less focused on self-mastery, and instead more focused, I think, on vulnerability, on love, on precariousness, I mean, how we really are deeply dependent on each other, and a more communal and collective idea of how we want to live together. I mean, that to me is what, hopefully, future happiness fantasy would look like.

What, whose feet do you think this falls at in terms of us planting the flag on what proper happiness or your potential remodeling of happiness there could be. Is it a top down? Is it governments? Is it education? Is it the individual's responsibility to realize this?

Do you understand what I mean? This movement needs to come from somewhere. In exactly the same way as it was potentially led astray by some ideas that have occurred within the last couple of hundred years, the same thing needs to happen again to send it back in the right direction. Have you got an idea of where that trajectory could come from? Well, I think that's the very basic question of sociology and social and political change and even though there would be no definite account of how those changes emerge, they're always going to be an interplay of a huge number of actors. I wouldn't be able to speculate exactly how I wouldn't be able to speculate exactly how such phenomenon is going to manifest itself. Yeah.

No, but I mean, I just think that the kind of happiness fantasy we have now, which I trace back to the 1920s in this figure of Will and Roy, and really comes to fruition in the 1960s and 1970s have now developed in the age of Trump, who's also someone who really endures these values of our present day happiness fantasy. It's really come to a point where we need other templates for happy lives.

And of course there are other templates out there, but I think the one that have been so dominant in the last part of the 20th century and up to today would really need to be challenged in a more radical way than it has. And we'll see where that may come from, or if it won't come from anywhere. Oh, may not. Yeah. So, Carl, I've absolutely loved this. I like how we can see the trajectory from the wellness syndrome then moving into what you did with the optimization and then it does seem like there's an awful lot. Can you see if you'd said in advance that these three books have all got an awful lot in common, I would have probably struggled to to to work out where it would go, but it does sound like there's certainly a story arc to what you're looking at or what you've been researching over the last few years.

Very nicely tied together. Well, thank you. I mean, I think that this has been an occupation and happiness and health and self-help culture and how central they are to our present day culture and finding ways to just understand it a little bit better. I understand completely. Would you be able to tell the listeners at home where they can find you online? Well, yeah, I mean, I'm kind of on Twitter, that's it really.

I mean, apart from that, I'm not very present online. You're a ghost. You're a ghost in the dark. That's what you are. Yeah. I'm out there. I guess. So I'll make sure that the link to your Twitter is in the show notes. When is the happiness fantasy being released? Because I've got a manuscript version on my Kindle of the Moment, I'm gonna guess it's not that one that's going out. I think, I mean, I just got an advanced copy a few days ago,

so I think it's coming out in a couple of weeks, probably. Fantastic. Well, I will make sure that the, will there be a pre-order link up on Amazon? Yeah, there should be something like that. Fantastic. I'll make sure you can kill it. You can kill the publishers if not. I will make sure that the link to desperately seeking self-improvement, the wellness syndrome and the happiness fantasy, or potentially the email address of your publishers so everyone can send them an nasty email is going to make

your notes. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. It's been an absolute blast, Carl. I've really enjoyed all of the insights. And good luck with whatever you move on to next. I'm sure it's going to be very interesting. Thank you, Chris. Really enjoyed.

Time. Cheers. OK. Cheers. Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah