Modern Wisdom - #657 - Erik Angner - An Economist’s Guide To A Happy Life

Episode Date: July 22, 2023

Erik Angner is a professor of philosophy at King's College London, researcher, and author. Economists are usually concerned with macro trends. Money, finances. But they also have data-driven insights into what makes a happy, fulfilling life. Plus Erik is also a philosopher, so he manages to blend two murky worlds into a very usable life approach. Expect to learn what economics says are the 4 pillars of living a good life, why everyone hates philosophers, whether all old Japanese people should kill themselves, why economists get such a bad wrap, how to maximise your happiness from an economic perspective, whether there is a difference between men and women's happiness, how to break your addiction to material possessions and much more... Sponsors: Get 20% discount on Bubs Naturals at https://www.bubsnaturals.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on your first order from Collars&Co at https://collarsandco.com/ (use code: MW15) Get 15% discount on Mud/Wtr at http://mudwtr.com/mw (use code MODERNWISDOM)  Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Eric Agner. He's a professor of philosophy at King's College London, a researcher, and an author. Economists are usually concerned with macro trends, money, finances, but they also have data-driven insights into what makes a happy, fulfilling life. Plus, Eric is a philosopher,

so he manages to blend two murky worlds into a very usable approach. Expect to learn what economics say is the four pillars of living a good life, why everyone hates philosophers, whether all old Japanese people should kill themselves, why economists get such a bad rap, how to maximize your happiness from an economic perspective, whether there is a difference between men's and women's happiness, how to break your addiction to material possessions, and much more. This Monday I'm announcing another huge cinema production episode with a massive guest I

recorded with yesterday in LA, and this guy has been on my Mount Rushmore of podcast guests ever since I started, so I absolutely cannot wait to get this one out. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Bubs Naturals. I am a massive fan of collagen protein. It is something I relied on super heavily when I was recovering from my full Achilles detachment three years ago. One of the key supplements that I was told I needed to take every single day, and I did absolutely religiously, was collagen because it is so fundamental as a building block for

your joints, for your ligaments, for your tendons, and for your muscles as well. Bubs Natural's collagen is the purist form of collagen that you will find. It's all made with one single ingredient. You get 20 grams of high quality collagen protein per scoop, and it's sustainably sourced from grass-fed and pasteurized cows in South Brazil. Also, they donate 10% of all of their profits to charity in honour of the company's namesake, Foreman Navy Seal, Glenn Bubdockity. So, if you're recovering from an injury, if you're trying to improve your hair, your skin, your nails, this is a fantastic product that I've used myself

for a very long time. And you should too. Head to bobsnaturals.com and use the code modern wisdom for 20% off at checkout. That's bubsnaturB-S, naturalz.com, and modern wisdom. A checkout. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Colors and Co. If you are a gentleman who has to go into work, dressed smartly, and you wear a shirt under a blazer, or a sweater, or a quarter zip, you will know the discomfort that you are put through

because your shirt is stiff and it gets bundled up underneath the long sleeves. This is a problem that Colors and Co has found a solution to and it's called the Dress Colour Polo. It's a four-way stretch performance fabric polo but the top has a firm dress collar on it. So it gives you a dress shirt look but with an extremely comfortable polo feel, they come in a variety of styles and colours and design to look great by themselves. You can wear them to dress up or dress down, you can wear them under a blazer or with shorts at the beach, they are super versatile. And best of all, if you're a guy who goes to the gym, you are no longer paying a price in terms of how awful you feel throughout the day because your shirt is stiff. You too can basically be wearing not, it's the equivalent of wearing nothing,

it's like being naked, but acceptable. Head to colours and Co and use the code MW15 for 15% off your first order. That's collarsandco.com and MW15. A checkout. And in final news, this episode is brought to you by Mudwater. Mudwater is a coffee alternative with adaptogenic mushrooms and iavadic herbs. It provides energy without the anxiety, jitters or crash of coffee. The blending includes a line's main for alertness, cordyceps for physical performance, charger and rishi for immune support, turmeric for soreness and cinnamon for antioxidants. It's whole 30 approved 100% USDA organic, non-GMO gluten-free vegan and kosher certified. It's got anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties that can improve brain function

and reduce the risk of chronic disease. Best of all, mudwater encourages a morning ritual of meditation and reflection to start the day whilst you're making your drink. It's a little oasis of peace and calm before the chaos of the day comes and sideswipes you. And you can get 15% off everything sight-wide by going to mudwtr.com slash mw and using the code mw15 for 15% off a checkout that's mudwtr.com slash mw and mw15 a checkout. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Eric Angler. Why is economics not any sexier than it is? I think economics has the disadvantage of being associated with lots of very uncool people.

You know numbers, data, models, in the formal sense, these are not things that attract our attention, but it's a shame because economics is actually pretty cool. Now I may not be the best person to pitch that idea, but it is. And I wish more people saw that. What is it that people misunderstand about what economics contains then? So one thing that people might not get is just how broad it is. So so many people think of economics in terms of stock markets, housing markets, inflation rates and things. And that is part of economics.

That is one of the things, or some of the things that economists study. But economics is so much broader than that. It's about anything and everything connected to human well-being, any choice that you make that has any implications for the way you live your life and the way things turn out. So that means you can do economics and study crime, child rearing, climate change, family formation, whatever you like, there's likely to be an economic angle to it. And in fact, if you think about the big problems, like whichever problem you're thinking about, I bet there's an economic angle to that as well, right? There's going to be some economic implications or some economic

perspective. And in many cases, some economic tool that you can use to address it. What do you mean when you say an economic angle? Like, what are you referring to? What is the toolkit of the world view or the paradigm through which economics looks at these sorts of things? What I'm thinking about primarily is a way of looking at human decisions. And basically everything is a result of human decisions, right? Everything's social. And even if it isn't, the solution to whatever problem you're thinking about is going to involve human behavior. And when economists think about that, what they think about is the various values that are at stake. Oftentimes we have to make choices,

right? Because there's a limited amount of whatever we care about. And what that means that we have to strike a balance between the different things. We have to give up a little bit of this in order to get a little bit of that. Now, some people out there want everything always said once, right? That's childish. Once you see that the world isn't designed like that, you've got to think about the ways in which things come at a cost.

And that's the core of what economics has to offer, a way of looking at decisions that brings to the fore the values that are at stake, the costs involved, but also the benefits that you can get from making the best available decision. Speaking of making economics a little bit sexier, a Yale economics professor has some ideas for how to deal with the burdens of Japan's rapidly aging society. The only solution he said is mass suicide of the elderly, including ritual disembowelment. I've noticed that you shared this article with a massive face palm about

what your Japanese colleagues are doing. In interviews and public appearances, you see Kina Rita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan's rapidly aging society. I feel like the only solution is pretty clear, you said, during the online news program in late 2021. In the end, isn't it mass suicide and mass sepuku of the elderly? Sepuku is an act of ritual disembowement that was a code among dis-dis-unid samurai in the 19th century. Mass sepuku, or throwing yourself off a cliff like in mid-Summer, he suggested a little bit later. With all respect to my colleagues at Yale, I think that's a fundamentally un-economic way of looking at the world. Right? Any time somebody says, this is the only way, this is the only solution.

That means that they're not recognizing the trade-offs involved. I think if we're going to think about aging populations and the sort of burdens that that's going to come with and the benefits as well, we've got to look at the full range of costs and benefits. At the end of the day, the economist is not going to be best situated to say, well, this is the right option, right? Given all the costs and benefits, because that's a question about values at the end of the day. And that's not really what we do. What we do as economists is to think about, well, if we want to attain this goal, what do we have to sacrifice in order to get there? And if we want to avoid math suicide, right, which we do, then we as economists can say things like,

well, here are the options, right? We can go down this path, we can go down that path, and now you people decide, you people meaning voters and you know, fellow citizens out there. What are some of the potential advantages of an aging population? This isn't really my area, so I hesitate to sort of speak out of line, but there are benefits with older populations. Clearly, you can see it in the workplace, right? We have, we have, as well speaking as one of the older people, we have experience and knowledge and things that it's got to be possible to take advantage of. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I think the difference between an aging population and an elderly

population is probably pretty important. We sort of were talking about is a larger cohort of people that can contribute in terms of innovation, in terms of being part of the workforce, driving GDP, etc., etc. But as is told, demography is destiny, which means that that aged workforce population will eventually end up becoming the elderly population. You can end up with an inverted pyramid, which is not necessarily fun. So what I think is interesting about your perspective is that you've got the economics wing and you've got the philosophy wing as well. You're also a philosopher by training, but philosophers also not exactly renowned for being well-liked

and well respected. They're often disliked and disrespected. And now you're telling me? I'm not saying that it's you, Eric, that's causing this to happen, but what is it do you think about philosophy as well? It seems like there's a branding problem. There's a PR nightmare that's occurred with both economics and with philosophy. What's your post-mortem on the brand positioning of philosophy and philosophers? I worry what it might say about me,

the fact that I sit at the intersection. The common denominator. Two are the common denominator. Such a bad reputation. I don't know. I think we are, for one thing, terrible at explaining to people what we do. So, philosophy and economics are both sort of abstract. They're done in a language that's inaccessible.

We use mathematics and philosophy as well as in economics, right? And this means that the average Joe can't pick up one of our journals and get something out of it. But that doesn't mean that the stuff we're doing isn't relevant to the people on the street. In fact, it's immediately and directly relevant to many of the things that we're thinking about, the ways in which we live our lives and whatever. We just don't translate it into a language that's comprehensible to people. And much of that is a function, I think, of professional norms. So we care about each other's approval, right? We talk to each other.

We care about what other people care about, think about us. We don't pay enough attention to the people out there and the various ways in which they might want to engage in conversation. The fact is, it wouldn't just be good for them. It would be good for us as well. When we talk about big decisions, for example, we need stakeholder involvement. Economics can't provide the values.

We need people out there telling us what matters to them, what they think of as the big problems, and what sort of constrained supply to the solutions that we develop. So I think there's a lot of, there would be a lot of benefits to be had from actually talking to each other, which, you know, we don't do, in part because of this terrible reputation that you identified. Okay, so you did a fantastic lecture that I really enjoyed to do with happiness

and how it's worked into a whole host of different factors. Just taking a broad view as someone at the intersection of philosophy and economics, what do you think common misunderstandings about happiness miss? What is it that people don't fully conceptualize when they're just considering happiness overall? So the central thing that I like to underscore is the difference between happiness and well-being. So well-being, as I think of it, as philosophers think of it, is what we have when our lives are going well, when our things are in place, when we're flourishing and so on. Happiness is what we have when we're in the certain mental state, a mental state that feels good, that that that's sometimes

psychologists refer to as as positive affect. And it's true that historically people have thought of these two things as very tightly, as intertwined, but I think it makes a lot of sense to think of them as slightly separate. Sure, a good life is a life that includes a great deal of happiness. It would be weird to think of your life going well if you're miserably unhappy. But there are situations when these things come apart. So there are values in life, there are goals in life that are important to us, even if they don't come with an additional dose of happiness, and even if they come at the cost of happiness. I like to think about children actually falling in this category. There is a lot of evidence from the science of happiness,

suggesting that having children makes you less happy than not having children. And that if you're a parent, when you're spending time with your kids, you're less happy than when you're doing many other things, like hanging out with your friends or chilling in front of the television or something. But never mind, having a child can still be a good thing for you, right? Even if it comes at a cost. So that's got your philosophy angle, right? But it's got your economics angle as well.

And this is a really important thing to appreciate. Some things are good for us, even if they don't make us happier. What is the way that having children does contribute to the improvement of our lives, whether that be through wellbeing or meaning or whatever? There is a fair amount of evidence suggesting that people with kids have more meaning in their lives. They feel part of a bigger hole.

They feel like they're part of the shifts of the generations. They give satisfaction to their parents and so on. Non-financial satisfaction, as people say, increases when you become a parent. The problem is that other kinds of satisfaction go down. Notably, financial satisfaction. So having a child costs a ton of money, right now the estimates suggest they cost like $300,000 before college, right, up to the age 18 or something, and then you stack college costs on top of that. It's a lot of money. And what that means is that when you have a child, unless you suddenly become

you know, $300,000 richer, you're going to have to make sacrifices. And those sacrifices are going to cost you in terms of you know happiness among other things. I've had a lot of conversations on the podcast about declining birth rates, crises of fertility, and then crises of mating overall. People just getting into relationships and not saying that they are going their own way or retreating into much more siloed atomized lifestyle. And one of the things that I've considered, which you've touched on now, which is pretty interesting, is an over prioritization of the immediate. And because we live in a world which is hyper convenient, the immediacy, I said to you

before I got started, it's 39 degrees here in Austin, Texas, but I'm cool. I'm cool because I've got air conditioning. I don't have to wait for the air conditioning to come on because it's on a timer. So the immediacy of our comfort and the immediacy of any discomfort has never been more acutely felt. And I get the sense that with declining religiosity, which is sort of a lack of awe and dread, a lack of sort of connection to the grander plan, the more meaning making, also the more community-based activities that we would have done previously,

what people see when they look at childhood, having children and the sort of ensuing $300,000 prison sentence, is that it's an awful lot of non-immediate happiness. Look at all of the things that I'm going to have to pay a price for upfront. There's a famous TikTok that a girl released called The Girl With A List and she printed off 300 and something reasons why not to have a kid. And they included things like, I can't go to brunch with the girls, no longer able to wear cute heels. So you know, people really are, it's kind of tongue in cheek, but also people are really optimizing for this stuff on the front end.

What you're saying is that overall, the meaning-making machine that children are is perhaps a net positive, but it does require you to pay a cost up front with regards to freedom and in the moment happiness continuously as well. If it's 3 a.m. in the morning and this is the second time that your baby has put in its diaper, it is not going to be an enjoyable, happy experience. You know, you will accrue meaning across the period of your life, but current culture pedestalizes happiness in the moment and absolutely hates any detraction away from that so much that I think we have a culture which is essentially un-conjuusive to meaning-making and given that children are mostly meaning-making machines,

I think that that explains at least part of what's going on. What do you think about my bro science hypothesis there? Yeah, no, absolutely. So, one off, like, first off, recognizing that having children is awfully hard is really important, right? You have these nights when you cannot sleep at all because they're screaming, because they're First off, recognizing that having children is awfully hard is really important. Right? You have these nights when you cannot sleep at all because they're screaming, because they're sick or whatever.

Sleeplessness is terrible. It's terrible for your thinking, for your affect, for your ability, right? It's terrible for your immune system. There's just so much evidence suggesting that that's bad for a person and hard. It's also true that we tend to focus on short-term gains to a very great extent. There's a ton of evidence on hyperbolic discounting as they call it. If you're standing, if you have the choice between a remote benefit, a remote good, like, you know, adoring children or something, or going to branch with your friends, going to branch is going to seem like such a good idea when it's right in front of you,

even if when you reflect on it, you recognize that adoring children is a much bigger value to you. So that's really important. And then I think in certain ways parenting has gotten harder, right? There have been other ways it's gotten better, but we live, there, in other ways, it's gotten better, but we live, we're lonelyer now in a sense. We live, especially in America, very far from our families. We can live thousands of miles, obviously, from our families. In other times and in other places,

you would live closer to your family. You would have parents, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts, and uncles, some of whom wouldn't have their own children who might really benefit from hanging out with yours. And then racing a child is a more communal endeavor, which is really, really important. Now we live alone very far from family. We're expected to do all this on our own. At the same time as we're working, maybe 60 hours a week, right? 80 in the worst case. If you're a young person, you're trying to build a career.

You need an apartment. You have payments in your car, right? You can't just stay home with a kid. If you also have to make ends meet. And so we're putting an awful lot of, awful, awfully heavy burden on the shoulders of young people who might otherwise want to have kids. Now it's true that not everybody does, right? Probably not everyone ought to have kids. But many people do. And the obstacles very tall. Yeah, it seems that the biggest disparity between desired and realized fertility. So the people who wanted, the number of kids that they have compared to the number of kids

that they wanted is the biggest are educated women and the more educated and the more smart you are, the bigger that disparity. And I don't know whether there is a correlation between desire to have children and IQ or whatever in women, but I can imagine that if you are somebody who is quite smart and quite well educated, the bottom line is that you've just spent lots of time in school. That's lots of time being poor and relying on student loans and probably living away from your parents and all of the support structures and not having kids yet. So even aside from the motivations, you just

don't have the time as much. I will say that constraints differ across countries. So this is one thing that pops up in the happiness data. If you look at Gall Gallup data, for example, which comes out of basically every country across the world, the effects of having a child varies by location. There are a couple of things going on there, I think. So some of it might have to do with culture, right? In some cultures, you're more family oriented, you can depend on your relatives to much greater extent than you can in others. Development matters if there's more money to go around in a country that makes it easier to be a parent there than if you're in a place with very little resources.

But also, some places offer public policies that make life easier for parents. So things like parental leave, like allowing you to spend the year, maybe with your kid, with a salary, and then being able to return to the workplace, right? That cushions you against some of the financial strain that you might feel otherwise. Health care, right? So having a child isn't just expensive, it's also unpredictable. Like people have kids are always healthy and happy. They know what they cost is not too bad. But other kids have very large needs and need a lot of additional resources. If you can depend on support for those sorts of of needs, well, then that's going to make your life a lot easier.

So there are things that some places do for people that make it easier to have kids and that make happiness if not go up, at least not go down by as much as it does in the US. Continental Europe looks better from this perspective than the US and the UK, for example. And the suggestion is that it has to do with public policy and the conditions that new parents in particular are facing. America is ruthless. You get three and a half days off and you're expected to be back in the office answering

emails while they're still cutting the umbilical cord. Right. And healthcare is tied to your employer to a very great extent, right? So if you want to be home, you risk getting fired, you would also lose your health insurance, right? It's a very... During a period of time where you're physically more vulnerable, perhaps, than you would have been previously. Exactly. And every new parent worries about their kids, right? Even if they're perfectly healthy, there are so many things you're going to worry about. And having access to

medical care is obviously critical. I never thought about that. I never thought about the essential ransom that new parents are held to in America by the fact that their medical cover is covered by their employer. Yeah, that's very interesting. We're going back to the money and happiness relationship. What is the answer to whether or not money

can buy happiness in your goal? It can. It can. It can. So there's this slightly bizarre conversation going on, but people have been doing happiness research for literally a hundred years, and there's never been any doubt about the fact that more money makes at least some people happier. So if you look at poor people, people at the bottom end of the income scale, everyone has found that giving them more

money on the average will make them happier. The conversation, the scholarly conversation that's been going on for some time has to do with what happens on the other side of the income distribution. So if you look at the very rich, does the curve become flat, meaning there's no additional benefit from making more money after a certain point, or does it continue to rise? And right now, it seems like a consensus is emerging, which says that happiness increases at every level of income, but it increases less and less the more money you make. So economists talk about diminishing marginal returns, right?

And that's what we seem to find in the happiness data. Now, it matters what you have to give up in order to get that additional chunk of cash. It's not always gonna be the case that you should try to make more money if you wanna be happier because you might have to sacrifice leisure, right? Goal thing, time with friends, time with family,

time with your kids, things like that. So you shouldn't sort of infer that you should always try to maximize your income. There's a point at which you would be better off not. But all things equal, getting more money seems to be making you happier, no matter where you are in the distribution. getting more money seems to be making you happier, no matter where you are in the distribution. What is the relationship between money and life satisfaction, well-being, meaning, happiness? Where are we accruing the biggest gains? Where are we paying the biggest prices? Well, so those things are all correlated, right? Meaning happiness, satisfaction, money, they're they're correlated at the

national level and at the individual individual level. They do seem to come apart in certain places. So if you look at a very rich, there's evidence that satisfaction keeps rising faster than happiness, meaning sort of the way you feel, positive affect. So if you ask somebody like how satisfy they feel with their lives, like that, the response to that keeps increasing, even if like your happiness tapers off. Why do you think that's the case? That I don't, I don't know. A judgment tends to respond to a slightly different factors in your life than your affect are feelings are a little weird sometimes, right? They respond to things that might rationally not make such a big difference.

So one thing about happiness is that it seems to respond quite strongly to expectations and whatever you're used to or whatever. It's possible that happiness is more responsive to things like expectations and aspirations and things than judgments of satisfaction. But here I'm just guessing on the basis of the data that I've seen. Yeah, talk about the role of aspiration. What's the name of that guy, the dude who tried to beat the railway machine? John Henry. Thank you. What's the story of him? So African American folk hero, right?

tragic hero. He was a railroad man. He built railroads at a time when people started producing machines to compete with humans. He, John Henry, thought he was going to be better than the machine he went into a competition with a machine. He's a tragic hero because he won, he was right, but he died in victory. This is interesting to me and to some other people because you can think of a personality characteristic along these lines. Some people are just more like John Henry than others, right? Some have ambition, goals in life, you know, they set, they have aspirations, they don't give up easily and so on. Other people are more like couch potatoes, they don't really have goals and so on.

They don't have very high expectations or aspirations. And there's a certain amount of evidence suggesting that how happy you are is a function both of what you attain and how much you aspired for, what you were hoping for. In such a way that the more you get, the happier you are, but the more you aspire, the less, the more you aspire to, the less happy you are. And I've worked a little bit on this and what you expect to find in the data is exactly what you find. People with very high goals in life may attain a little more than others, but they look less happy than other people. I feel like I see this in class, right? I teach college. Some students come in, they got to be on the exam, they hate it. They're so upset because they expected an A, right?

Other people come in, they got a D, they're going to go partying, they're so pleased because they were sure they were going to fail. And so how happy you are with your performance is going to reflect not just the score you get on the exam or whatever, but your expectation, right? And a slightly sort of scary thing about this is that what this might suggest is that in order to be happy, you should just like lower your standards, right? Lower your goals. Never try to pursue anything. Never go for anything. Always give up if you run into trouble or whatever, but that would be the wrong conclusion to draw, right? Precisely because happiness and well-being don't always go together, right?

There are things that you can do that will leave you better off, even though you're less happy. Having kids would count for me at least, but also accomplishing things like running a marathon or climbing a mountain, things like that, you know, might make you feel miserable, sailing, might make you feel awful, but nonetheless, if you set yourself a goal, you attain it, right? You have reason to be

proud of yourself. You're living a good life for you, in spite of the fact that you're miserable, because you're cold and whatever. Yes, no one's ever been happy whilst running a marathon, but afterward many people that complete it will probably say, yeah, that was very meaningful or whatever my sense of well-being. Have you ever seen any interventions that are able to decrease expectations whilst not decreasing aspiration? I am not sure about that.

I can't think of any intervention that I'm aware of. That would be the magic pill. Yeah, maybe you should work on one. Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting, the standard thing, right? And language is some messy here because what people are talking about, they're often conflating lots of different things together, you know, falling short of what it is that you wanted to do makes you feel bad. But we also know that there is a degree of good that comes along with the achievement overall. So we're talking about expectation and well-being and happiness and aspiration. All kind of gets bundled up together.

But it's a nice conception to think about the fact that, you know, in the ideal scenario, you would regularly beat your expectations. I suppose the problem is that your expectations and your aspirations are going to be quite tightly tied together, which suggests that the more you expect of yourself, the more you aspire to, the higher your goals, the closer you get to achieving some things, the people that consistently over achieve, like ridiculously over achieve, over and over and over again, that doesn't happen by accident. They're not just doing this. Like, oh, there we go again, the king of the world for the third time in a row or whatever, like it's just, it doesn't happen. It's people

purposefully, neurotically going out of their way to very carefully designer system that creates this outcome, a one that's very similar to it. I think, well, actually, how have you given this sort of knowledge that you have around where satisfaction comes from happiness, aspiration, expectation, how have you adjusted your own approach to your life to try and integrate this to maximize your sense of well-being and happiness. Now, I don't want to hold up myself as a model in this regard at all, but I did read up on a literature on goal regulation. There's a whole psychology of goal regulation, which is precisely about this, like how do you select goals in life to motivate you to accomplish things, you know, to live the best life that you can

without tripping yourself up, right? So we agree that you need some goals to perform, right? We ought to have goals. They make life worth living. They structure our existence and so on. But at the same time, there are limits to the goals that you should set for yourself. And I'll say that one of the things that I've done quite successfully is to be satisfied with being mediocre in almost everything. If it comes to like sports, all sorts of activities, music, I sometimes enjoy engaging in these activities, but I'm perfectly happy being mediocre. And then there are a couple of things that I do in my work. I want to do the best possible work. Like the best work I can do, the best work that that anyone can do. I fail, right?

And all sorts of ways. But that's my goal. But then this very narrow little domain in my subsub, subsub discipline of the academic world or whatever. But being happy with mediocrity, I think, is really great. And it's something that more people should try. That's very interesting, because there would be an argument to be made that how you do anything is how you do everything, that setting yourself high standards is advantageous,

and it will begin to bleed. You know, if you make your bed and your pajamas are always folded and the kitchen counter is always cleaned and so on and so forth, that this is just going to seep into all of the other areas of your life and the reverse as well. That if you don't do those things, you're just going to become a lazy piece of shit in your academic career. Now, I don't disagree with you. I mean, maybe that works for somebody else, right? But what's worked for me is just settling in like almost every domain except the ones that I really care about

and then I focus on. Yeah. So I have to talk about comparative advantage, right? Is the focusing where you do best relative to what others are up to, and this is an application of that idea. Yeah, I would not be the best at house cleaning or whatever, which is why we've got a maid. I've ever made the comes round and she does a house, so I've sacrificed some of the things that I am good at, which is making money for something that she's good at, which is cleaning the house.

One of my friends has a coach of some kind, and he told me a few months ago that this coach has got him, he made him take up a hobby, and he had to not care about how good he was at the hobby. And I think the hobby that he took up was something to do with art. It was some kind of watercolor painting or drawing or some sort of something, maybe it was even in a class, still life class or something. And there is a part of him, he's quite a hard charging type A type guy. And there was a bit of him that just wanted to, right, I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna watch all of the YouTube videos about how to become better at my art style

and I'm gonna get all of the best pencils and I'm gonna do extra work outside. And his coach said, you are forgetting the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of the exercise is to do a thing simply for doing a thing. Do you enjoy it when you go and you try this thing? It's like, yeah, I'd enjoy it more if I was better and she's like, that's not the point. The point is for you to be able to let go over the desire to be better at this thing.

It's a very, very interesting, like intersection or vector that we're talking about which is in a world where everybody applauds growth and development. And I do too. It's one of the things that I've taken an unbelievable amount of joy from in my life. How do you draw? Is it possible to draw boundaries around that beyond which you can let go, which actually teaches you lessons of where to which hills to stand on with a flag and then start swinging a sword. And which hills to say looks like the cleaner is going to get this one or looks like I'm going to be shit as an artist. Or do you know what

I mean? Because I do think I do think that there's an associated psychological suffering that comes with holding yourself to an incredibly high standard across the board. And, and this is the, I suppose, the behavioral economics element of this or the behaviorist element of this, it's unrealistic. Like, you know, you know that if expectations, as soon as you posit an expectation for yourself and you fall short of it, that's going to create a degree of suffering, the fewer expectations that you have an expectation for yourself and you fall short of it, that's going to create a degree of suffering. The fewer expectations that you have, especially the ones that you do not need to have, does it matter about how straight the bed is? Does it really matter?

Or would it be better? Let's imagine a world in which you could silo off, compartmentalize the different elements of things that you have to be good at in your life. Okay, well, if I could be great at academia and not give a shit about how the beds made, I would no longer need to make the bed. So it's almost like our expectation of this global, how you do anything, how you do is how you do everything movement is become self-fulfilling in a way and inescapable and maybe not actually that advantageous. This isn't exactly an answer to your question, but so often it seems to me that we should focus more on consistent practice than on outcomes. If I wanted to become a marathon runner and

I measured my performance by reference to the best marathon runner out there, I would feel short every day, right? I would feel awful about myself every time I went out there. I would feel short every day, right? I would feel awful about myself every time I went out there. So the key to becoming a runner is to commit to a certain training schedule. You go out there, you train every day, or whatever, and if you keep it up, even if the only thing you care about is the outcome, you're better off focusing on consistent practice than constantly trying to measure up your performance against some effectively unattainable yardstick. And I think that it applies in lots of domains.

I had a phase in college when I wrote poetry. I sat down and I wrote a poem. I compared it to the best poem of whoever I was reading at the time, Learned Cohen. And then I said, look, this is not as good as he's and I tossed it and I stopped. That's a sure path to failure. If I really wanted to become a poet, I would have had stick with it independently of how good it was. To some extent, we need to select which hill we're going to climb, to stick with your metaphor, and then just do it.

Which climb should you attempt? Well, that's going to depend on your values. It might depend on like what you have a natural talent for and so on. For sure, it might depend on things like what your friends are up to. Sometimes it's more fun to climb in the presence of of your friends, but at the end of the day, that's going to be a matter of values. But once you've committed, the best way forward is probably to commit to a plan not to constantly assess your performance. Yes. So it's got me thinking about something I used to do in my old business. I ran nightclubs for a long time and when you do that,

you get a guest list of people that are sent through. And this was a period where we were the biggest events company in the city by an absolute mile. This Saturday party that we had was a monster, thousands and thousands of kids would turn up every week. So we would just have hundreds and hundreds of groups of people. And it would be submitted as a first name, second name, plus group size, right? So it would be John Smith plus five, Chris Williams and plus three, whatever. I remember that there was a long period of probably six months to a year where I went through and meticulously moved the plus number into a separate column so that all of the numbers were completely aligned straight up and now.

Let's not forget that this was a club night that was making like thousands and thousands of pounds of profit a week. And I was spending my time in the build up to the event, moving individual numbers that had been texted in by 18-year-olds that were pre-gaming, battered, absolute, most of them wouldn't even show up, right? You know, 50% more of the guest list wasn't even going to show. But I had convinced myself that this was one of the important things that needed to be done.

And this is why I think a degree of reflexive, reflective practice. Okay, what are the things that I'm doing? Does this contribute to the particular hill that I'm supposed to go up? No, it doesn't. You're spending 90 minutes a week dicking about with an Excel spreadsheet. Perhaps you could spend that doing anything, even if it was just watching TV or chilling out or exercising.

I guess many very successful people have this insane attention to detail, right? In architecture, design, or movie making, or whatever, you find that. But in order to be great at something, you have to pay attention to the right details, right? And if the orientation of the pluses or whatever really has no effect on the outcome of the event, then, you know, the opportunity cost is overwhelming. What role does inequality have in happiness? So, we've spoken about the fact that there is a relationship, although it does taper off to do with money and happiness. It continues to go up. So, this number beyond which $70,000 a year happiness doesn't increase. I'd already

heard that that was mostly ball-ex. Dominishing returns seems to make sense. But I would imagine that the curve is different if you are living on a street filled with millionaires, so there has to be inequality and the keeping up with the Jones is comparison that we have in our brains must mediate our happiness with regards to wealth. Yeah, I mean there's a lot to be said about happiness and inequality. First off, there are ways in which at least some inequality is good for total happiness. So some inequalities reflect preferences, for example. Maybe I just want to lay in bed read a book.

Maybe you want a ton of money in order to travel the world and play golf or something, right? Then a maximally happy society where both of us get to do what we want to do, requires a certain degree, or entails a certain degree of inequality. So some inequality is probably good for happiness. There are other effects as well. But then there are various ways in which an inequality or inequality can harm total happiness. So for example, if you're desperately poor and I'm super rich, an additional dollar would make a much bigger difference for you than for me, if you're desperately poor and I'm super rich and an additional dollar would make a much bigger difference for you than for me. Like you can imagine scenarios where some degree of redistribution would make a difference.

And then the keeping up with the Joneses is really important, I think, when we assess how well we're doing in life, very often we don't look at some objective yardstick because those things really don't look at some objective yardstick because those things really don't exist. What we do is we compare ourselves to somebody around us like what's a nice car. What do I know? Right? I look at the other people in my office and see what they're driving. What's a nice watch? What's, you know, reasonable salary or whatever. And to the extent that we spend a lot of time comparing ourselves to others, we might get involved in these very harmful arms races where I try to make a little more to have

a shinier car or whatever than you. And you respond by working a little more to have a shinier car than me. At the end of the day, we're the same, right? But both of us work a lot more and we're applying money into, you know, capital goods that neither one of us really wanted. And so I think one key to happiness is sort of opting out on this process when it makes sense, right? I want the shiniest new iPhone. Many of my friends get the latest iPhone and I feel the urge to buy one too, but I succeed in talking myself out of that and I save a lot of money that way that I can spend on things that give me more happiness. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot.

I don't have much materialism. Like I'm not a very keeping up with the Joneses person with regards to what I own or what I wear or anything. I feel quite fortunate. I don't know everything's heritable, right? You know, whatever, everything that you are psychologically is on average 50% heritable. So I guess I have my parents to thank for it. But I would love to know what that is, a materialism set point or something or a comparative set point, what psychological dimension that sits upon, and what interventions we could use to nudge people away from that.

Because I do think that it's a very low cost way to improve people's quality of life. Like you get more bang from your book because you are not spending your books on things that you don't need to spend them on. Right. I mean, we're living in a world where one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy is like storage, right? People have so many things, so many things that they become a problem for them, psychological problem. People seek therapy to deal with the quantities of stuff that they've accumulated. So I think there's a lot of evidence both from the science and from everyday experience to suggest that we tend to favor material belongings to a

greater extent than we probably should if we wanted to be happy. So many people love going camping, right? Their best moments is when they're in the tent somewhere in front of a campfire and they've got a guitar and a couple of beers. Right? That's the spirit. Like, some of us really want quite simple things. And if we can see that and favor those sorts of things, we can make ourselves happier. Now, of course, camping can be super expensive, right?

Depending on where you go and what sort of gear you bring. So this is not like a solution that's going to work for everyone. But I think the general insight is true, right? As a result of external pressure or upbringing or whatever, we tend to give too much weight to material belongings, when there are other things that are cheaper and better for us. One of the things I was considering to do with the level of inequality that you could have within a society or within a country, you could have a correlation between high GDP and high happiness, but that could be skewed

with high earners because high GDP is contributed to overall by everyone. And like I say, that you have a country which has captured some non- insignificant percentage of the world's billionaires. Okay, the GDP is increasing and there would be a way that that could skew the relationship between GDP and happiness. So if you ever looked at this, if you looked at happiness versus inequality and GDP and how all of that folds in. Yeah, so I haven't looked at it myself,

but I think the general point is true. In the sense that like GDP is an average, right? It takes all the stuff that gets produced in a country and you divide it by the number of people, GDP doesn't say anything at all about how it's distributed. And the happiness data seems to respond to the ways in which various resources are distributed.

Is there one guy who owns everything or a thing sort of distributed in a different way? People who need things, do they get things and so on? So you can modify, as it were, the relationship between happiness and GDP by distributing it in various ways. And it's worthwhile thinking about that, I think. Is there a sex difference in happiness? I don't think there are any major sex differences to my knowledge. It's not a major factor anyway in the literature that to my to my knowledge.

Yeah, because we have increasing rates of depression and anxiety in young girls. I think that females overall got a higher risk for depression and anxiety, but I think white men between the ages of 40 and 45 are at the highest risk for suicide at the moment. So there's a ushaped curve to life satisfaction, which I'm sure that you'll have seen, and it seems to bottom out at around about like 44 or something like that. Yeah, these sorts of things that you're talking about ought to be visible. It seems to me in the happiness data. I just haven't looked at it. Like there is evidence, as you said, that happiness over the course of the life cycle is like you shape. You're pretty happy when you're young, you're pretty happy when you're old, you're miserable in the middle. But then it turns out like where I am, right? I'd be at

the trough there. But then it matters what you control for. So, you know, do you control for whether you have kids or not? Well, many people have like teenage kids in in in middle age and having teenage kids is awful, right? They're super expensive. They stab you in the back like every day. So much there's a lot. Treasurus. And what treasurus bastards that they are. Right. And so the phenomenon like what it looks like is going to depend on to a great extent, like what you control for. And then these are averages, right? It doesn't apply to each and every individual worth.

Yeah. This is one of the things I was having a conversation about. What was I talking about? I was talking about the differences, what is it talking about? I was talking about the differences in the pains that people feel within the dating market, that the problems that women have and the problems that men have, and how many men that can't grow any taller is worth a woman that can't afford a boob job, basically. If we were to talk about trying to create an equivalency

between the challenges that presenting both men and women have for increasing their visual make value. And it's not, you can't compare these two things. There is no currency exchange between these two things. And I think that the conversation here as well about, you know, our men or women happier on average, well, women have got a predisposition toward depression and anxiety and young girls, whatever, 60% of them say they've got persistent feelings of hopelessness or listlessness or something, but men in the 40 to 45 range

that are killing themselves at unprecedented rates, these aren't the same things. And I think that trying to fold them into happiness, this is one of the reasons why I appreciate guys like you breaking down happiness, well-being, into component parts, because I do think that there is a lot that can't be captured when we just use happiness to talk about how's life going overall. It's just not sufficiently precise.

Yeah, no, I think that's a very important point. So you mentioned depression, right? And of course, there's a correlation between depression and the opposite of happiness, but they're not as correlated as you might think. Some people report laughing a lot, and they also score high on depression. These things can come apart. So I guess mental health or well-being is a multi-dimensional thing. If you want to grasp what's really going on in your life, for society, you have to pay attention to these various things. When it comes to unhappy people on the dating market, I wouldn't know myself, but to some extent this has got to involve aspirations. If you're

alone at home in your bedroom and you're thinking, oh, the woman or the man of my dreams, it's going to look like this. It's going to have this profession. It's going to make this much money, whatever. You're bound to be disappointed, right? It would make so much sense to go for somebody who's kind and generous and caring,

and who shows up when you need them to, and whatnot, then the one with a certain height or a certain you know process or whatever you write aspirations matter in all domains probably. What about race differences in happiness? Have you ever detected any of those? I have not looked at that. I haven't. So I has a data. So the reason that I think it's interesting is religion, religiosity, seems to be of connection to something beyond just you. You know, we talked about sort of meaning and this sense of awe and dread, which I do think is really, really important. But you will have racial disparities in religiosity. So I totally spitballed this and maybe get it wrong. Mexicans on average may be more religious

than whites in America, let's say, right? So if you have people from Mexico and that would show a race to difference to central Americans in terms of happiness, but where's it actually coming from? Maybe it's actually coming from something else that's hiding within that. So the three or the four big things that seem to be indicative

of happiness, poverty, unemployment, poor health, and religiosity, those seem to be the big four. Is that right? You're quite right about religiosity. So that's something that people have studied extensively and people who are religious seem to be on the average significantly happier than atheists. This is kind of interesting. It's not quite clear to me where that comes from.

So people who go to church regularly, for example, have more companionship. They see people, they have up, they're in touch with people, they belong to a community, and those things are also known to be conducive to happiness. So that might be part of it. Now an interesting or sort of curious thing about this result is that conservatives have argued for a while that this proves that we were right all along, right, that being religious, living a religious life, going to church or temple or whatnot is good for a person. And they might be right about that. They might be sort of causal connection between these two things.

But somebody else who might have been right was Marx. So when Marx talked about religion being opium for the people, what he meant was not that religion allows you to go out and get high or whatever, what he meant was that it has a soothing effect, much like opium or anesthesia might. So it makes you feel less bad if you live under awful conditions. And that might be true too, right? So there's a sensing which both the conservatives and Marxists were right about religion. Wow. The Hoshu theory comes back to bite everybody in the ass again. It's that sort of thing, yeah.

What about unemployment distinct from its effect on wealth and poverty? Yeah, so unemployment is a huge predictor of unhappiness. Obviously, part of getting unemployed is that you lose the source of income. So people who are unemployed should have make less money than people who are employed. And that matters. But unemployment seems to matter beyond the loss in income. And the obvious suggestion there is that when you lose a job, it has effects like it makes you feel redundant, it makes you feel

unappreciated, it makes you feel useless. You lose contact with maybe your friends. Many people socialize more with their friends or with colleagues at work than with anybody else in their lives, right? You lose contact with that. And so having a decent job to go to seems to be really important for human happiness, even beyond the consequences for your income. So that thing about companionship again, right? That's one of the things that people talk about in this literature seems to be really important and it might be involved both in like the unemployment effect and in the religiosity effect. unemployment effect and in the religiosity effect. Have you ever looked at relative happiness between only children and children with siblings?

I haven't. Do you have siblings? No, I'm an only child, which is why I'm miserable. No. It makes me think we, I know this from a million conversations on the show to do with the importance of having community, the importance of having friends. But if that's true, not everybody gets on with their brothers and sisters, but you have a degree of connectedness and community. And we've already said that kids tend to move away from their parents more quickly. 18 years old, 19 years old, I'm off to university. That's maybe the last time that you're going to live with your parents. That was how it worked for me. 18 years old, that was it. And I never once thought, oh wow, like this is, that's it. Now, probably 97% of the time that I'm going to spend with my parents during my entire life is now over. Holy fuck.

But it's wild. When you think about that, when you think about the fact that 18 years old you've hit some unbelievable proportion of the amount of time that you're going to spend with your parents, it's kind of sad in a way. And parents talk about wanting to make the most of the time with their children, but children never think about having to make the most of the time with their children, but children never think about having to make the most of the time with their parents. And yet it's something that all children should be taught. And yet they don't have any perspective at all because you're 15.

So what do you care? You just don't want to be grounded or you want to go out and play with your friends. So I wonder what sort of impact it does have on happiness, whether or not someone who, because if you're going to move away and you go to Manchester University and your brother or sister goes to Newcastle University, you're not together anymore in any case, right? So is there a sense, is there a way in which just knowing that there is someone out there that is a sibling that kind of has your back so to speak, does that act as a, a, a salve or an, an anesthetic somehow to life's vicissitudes as it, as it sort of wobbles around? I wonder, that'll be, that'll be an interesting one to look at.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's true that people's relationships with their siblings vary a lot, right? Some are really, really functional and some really aren't. And then there is in fact where if you're a single child living with your parents, you might have more adult contact, right? If you have seven siblings, your parents are going to have less time for you than if you're an only child. And so you had the benefit of getting your parents attention to much greater extent than you would have if there were six other crises. Yeah, very good point. That depends on how likable you are as a child though, as a chronically unlikable child. So I wonder whether that offset it a little bit. And then the final one, the fourth sort of horseman of this happiness apocalypse is poor health.

Yeah, so, so health, right? Now there's one thing about health, which is that we have a certain degree a certain ability to adapt to it. So getting symptoms is terrible, like getting a diagnosis is terrible, adapting to a new condition is terrible, but when it comes to so many conditions, we have an ability to live a pretty good life nonetheless. This is often surprising to people, but somebody who would not have been surprised is Adam Smith. So Adam Smith talked about a man who gets a wooden leg. He loses a leg in an accident. He cries like a baby, he thinks his life is over, he's never going to have any fun again. And then as time passes, the man realizes that he can enjoy what Adam Smith called pleasures of solitude

and society. You can still play chess, you can still talk, you can still go drink any of your friends, you might be able to go horseback riding, right? And as you realize that things aren't so bad, your happiness might return, not quite to baseline maybe, but it's going to get better. So health matters, but it depends on the extent to which it affects your ability to enjoy the pleasures of solitude and society. And that in turn is going to depend on conditions. So my vision is terrible, right? But the fact that my vision is terrible has effectively no consequences for the way I live my life. I live in... Theropera glasses on and now everything's raised a shop again.

Technology, I can afford it, right? I have a profession that allows me to wear glasses. Some people even think glasses are kind of stylish, right? So given these conditions, having poor eyesight makes like no difference to my life. In a different era, even just a couple of hundred years ago, I would have been dead, like, you know, four decades ago. I would have been eaten by a bear or a lion or something. And this is important, I think, because something similar

applies to many other conditions as well. You're in a wheelchair, well, depending on what society is set up like, it might not make that much of a difference to your quality of life, or it might have a huge difference, right? If you live in the mountains of Nepal or somewhere. If you can't get out of your house, because there's are snow banks or the doorways to narrow or something, of course, it's going to have a massive effect on your quality of life, but it need not. So for many of these conditions, having the condition doesn't doom you to low happiness, a lot is going to depend on the sort of conditions under which you live, which is a decision.

It's a political decision to build a world that can accommodate people with poor vision, wheelchairs, or whatever. Is this adaptation, is this what's going on, where people are becoming acclimatized to their new level of health? I think that that's a serious hypothesis. We have a huge ability to adapt much like we adapt to different levels of light in a room, our eyes adapt and we feel much the same, independently of what the level of lighting is, we have an ability to adapt to conditions around us to a very great extent. To some extent, that might be functional. If you end up in jail unjustly accused of some awful crime, you might adapt to conditions and end up being okay even though you're imprisoned. So there are conditions when it's good.

But then we also have an ability and a tendency to adapt to things that are quite good. We all know people who are like constantly whining, right? Objectively speaking, if you live in the US or the UK right now, you're one of the richest people who've ever walked the face of the earth, right? Unless you desperately pour, right now most of us are hugely affluent by comparison to almost everybody who's ever lived, and yet some people do nothing but complain, right? And the story has got to be that they've adapted to the riches. They probably have genuine concerns and genuine things to be upset about, but some people don't, right?

And that's certainly a sure way to make yourself unhappy unnecessarily. Fascinating insight. Yeah, the the hell thing is is a particular interest to me because I ruptured my Achilles two and a half years ago. So full detachment, which is a serious injury. It's a 12 month rehabilitation process. It's not good. You go through surgery. It's very painful too, isn't it? So I didn't feel anything. Apart from I knew that something had snapped and it sounded a little bit like a gun went off, wouldn't advise it.

But I remember I was in the car. The first time I'd started playing cricket again. My dad and me would do this thing. It was the sport I played obsessively throughout my sort of from 10 to 19. It was all that I did. Mum and dad would come to the games, especially dad. He was a fan of the sport and then he used to come. And I thought to the back end of COVID while I was still in the UK, I might end up going

away to America. This would be an amazing thing for me and dad to rebond over. It would also be cool for me. It's probably good to get fresh air. COVID kept me in the house for ages. What I'm going to play some cricket first game, having a great time playing great. And, uh, thing, yeah, don't take a sport back up at the age of 32 and think that you're just going to be able to do it. The number of people that I've got friends of that started playing basketball again. They were basketball players at the age of 14 to 21,

and then they leave university. They don't play, and they play a game of pickup at 36, and they rupture an ACL, because the body is not conditioned to this. And then men are aged, tend to not warm up properly and stuff, we didn't take the new tears for the fight. We were fighting last time, so. Yeah, the last time I played two decades ago,

I didn't need to warm up. So anyway, my point being that at the time, it was quite distressing, I'm very big into my health and fitness. I wasn't able to do the things physically that I wanted to. And it's so immediate that the inconvenience is so rapid with its onset.

I remember I was late there there the day happened, the day happened or the day after it happened and I was just laid up, I can't do anything until I get the surgery so I'm not even on the road to improvement at this point. I just have a foot which is essentially not attached to the rest of my leg. I'm just laid up, just feeling sorry for myself and feeling like shit. And yeah, it felt pretty sort of destitute. And I was kind of despondent, but I knew that I was working toward his the next date and his the next date. And this was probably one of the most interesting things that I've learned from your work, which was the difference between somebody who is dealing with chronic pain and somebody who is dealing with a malady that they are able to adapt to. Can you explain the difference between those

two? Yeah, so chronic pain is awful, right? Chronic pain interferes with basically everything you try to do during your day, right? It's constant reminder that you're ill and it's an obstacle in no matter what you're trying to do. That means that it's very hard to adapt to something like chronic pain. You're unlikely to see a scenario where over time you adapt to baseline. Other sorts of conditions might be easier to adapt to. So something like a prostate problem. Like many men develop prostate cancer at some point in their lives, like getting a diagnosis is terrible, right? Nobody wants cancer

and so on. But in so many cases, doctors will suggest, I guess they call it, watchful waiting, where you know, you're monitoring things. And if you're lucky, the cancer will develop so slowly that you can die from something else. You get killed by something else before the cancer gets. And then you might be able to live your ordinary life in much the same way that you did before, you got the cancer. And so that sort of thing might be quite easy to adapt to, relatively speaking, right? So different, the conditions aren't the same as what I'm saying. Some are easier to adapt to, and the ones that are easier to adapt to are not going to harm your

happiness quite as much over time as the others do. Yeah, it's really interesting to think. What was the other thing? There was another example. It wasn't just chronic pain. There was something else you gave as an example of a type of of So in one study that I did, we found that incontinence was a similar, had a similar effect. So people who have incontinence will tell you that it affects every domain of their life. It affects their dating life. It affects whether they want to hang out with their friends.

It affects their ability to go to the movies and things like that. It's a problem that makes itself known throughout the day, presumably, you know, when you wouldn't want it to, right? And that sort of condition is then going to be hard to adapt to, and you would expect to see what we found, which is a lasting effect on happiness levels. For all of the people who are not living with chronic pain or incontinence, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief. Eric Agner, ladies and gentlemen, Eric, I really appreciate you. I love the insight in this intersection of economics and philosophy. If people want to check out more of the stuff that you do, where should they go?

I have a book called How Economics Can Save the World, which I recommend to everyone. There, look, and maybe you'll learn something. Thank you so much, Chris. It was great talking to you. I enjoyed it. you