Plain English with Derek Thompson - How to Be Happy and the Science of Cognitive Time Travel

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Laurie Santos is a superstar in the crowded field of happiness research. She is a cognitive scientist at Yale University whose course on the psychology of happiness was the most popular class in the school's history. She is the host of the immensely popular ‘Happiness Lab’ podcast. Today, she and Derek talk about her favorite lessons from modern happiness research, lessons on striving and anxiety from existential philosophy, our relationship to time, the science of cognitive time travel, temporal mind tricks to reduce anxiety like "psychological distancing," and more. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dr. Laurie Santos Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the fall of 2014, a group of hackers pulled off the biggest Hollywood heist of all time. They broke into computer servers belonging to Sony Pictures and released hundreds of thousands of top secret documents. The attack would cause an international incident, upbent thousands of lives, and changed the movie industry forever. From Spotify and the Ringer Podcast Network, I'm Brian Raftery, and this is the Hollywood Hack. Listen on the big picture feed, starting August 19th. Today we're taking a deep, long, and blessed break from the Helter Skelter News Cyclever to dabble in the philosophy of happiness and being alive. I have a folder on my computer called Books I'll Never Write. And one of the files in that folder has a weird, somewhat confusing, very new age guru five-word title.

Happiness is a time machine. I've come to think that most of the ways in which we are unhappy amount to a kind of temporal displacement. That is, we are least happy when we're lost in time. Think about regret. When we ruminate on the mistake we made at work, the stupid and accidentally offensive thing we said to a partner or a friend. The apology we meant to give but felt too ashamed to deliver.

We are lost in the past, and we are unhappy. Then there's anxiety. When we fixate on the future possibility that the plane we're about to board is going to crash, or we lie awake at 3 a.m., worried about a difficult conversation tomorrow with the boss, or we cannot stop thinking about the infinitude of dangers that the world poses to our young children, we are lost in the future, and we are unhappy. And then in addition to past regret and future anxiety, there is this thing that's hard to define

that I sometimes think of as sideways time. When we imagine ourselves in parallel universes, like railroad tracks running alongside the present, where we fix it on everything that we do, don't have, but might have had in some alternate multiverse. This form of temporal the displacement is very tricky to describe, but it's particularly important, and I love the way that James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, put it. He said, the fastest way to heaven is to think about everything you have.

And the fastest way to hell is to fixate on everything that you don't. So here you have these three arenas of our discontent, the past, the future, and the psychodrama of the life unlived. And the secret is they're all make-believe. The past is gone. The future never arrives. The life not lived might as well be dead. These are altogether the unreal corridors of time. And to be lost inside them is to be lost inside them is to be left.

lost inside a fantasy. And if you read or listen to philosophy, really any philosophy, whether it's stoicism or Buddhism or existentialism, modern positive psychology, you will find this very lesson recircled and recycled and restated. There are tens of thousands of pages of philosophy that you could usefully boil down to the advice. Stay away from the unreal corridors of time. Now, the obvious solution to this problem I've just described is that we should do everything we can to be here now. An overfamiliar phrase, if you've ever trafficked in the genre of self-help. Be here now. Focus on the present. Cherish the moment. And this is where I have to confess, if you haven't figured it out already.

I hate these phrases. An ardvark can be here now. a hummingbird can be here now. I don't have the brain of an art vark. I don't aspire to the mere consciousness of a hummingbird. I want the richness, the messiness, the complexity afforded to me by the human brain and the consciousness of being a human being. And what makes us human, among other things,

is precisely our ability to perform this trick of cognitive time travel, to drive into the unreal corridors of time and learn from them. Why are we the most intelligent animal on the planet? It's certainly not because we have the ability to be here now, it's because we are uniquely good at, among other things, memorializing the past, analyzing our mistakes, learning from them.

What makes modern civilization modern is precisely our ability to envision the future and encode it in present law. You cannot have a system of debt or credit or taxation, much less a 401k or a 30-year mortgage, if you step outside of a profoundly future-obsessed society. Even at the very local level of personal psychology, our ability to take the perspective of the future can actually shake us loose from our deepest gloom, The psychologist, Ethan Cross, an experimental psychologist at the University of Michigan, and a former guest in the show, has done fascinating work in his lab on a principle he calls psychological distancing. Sometimes when we feel stuck in a rut, it's because we're failing to shake free of the moments shatter inside of our heads.

So, you know, here's a scenario. You can't stop replaying a conversation that you just had with a friend because they said something that they said something that, deeply wounded you that cut into your most profound insecurity and doubts about yourself. And now you're walking around your house or your street replaying these words, like on a loop, like an earworm from some demonic song that just won't leave you alone. And Ethan says the problem here is that you're not just stuck in the past. You're stuck inside of your own internal monologue. and it does no good to just be here now because what is here and now is this sickly, deep, hurt, and rumination.

And one clever way to break out of this rut is to take the perspective of your future self. What would Derek, one year from now, say to Derek today about moping around over something that he can't change? suddenly our ability to travel through time is not a detriment to make use of the time machine of our minds is suddenly profoundly therapeutic but only when we're in the driver's seat I was thinking a little bit about how to connect this to the problem of sideways time,

that misery that can come from thinking too much about the life unlived. I don't know that I've nailed it entirely, but I thought of this. Our ability to imagine a narrative unspooling after some what-if moment can make us anxious tellers of our own story. But it also is the very thing that makes us storytellers. What is a novel or a screenplay after all,

but a person sitting down to a table with a what-if prompt that unfolds into fiction? And when a person reads that novel or watches that movie, they're living inside their own unreal corridor of reality, riding a parallel train track all the way to the end of a story which leaves them with goosebumps or with tears. Right? What if?

What if? What if? Maybe the very mechanism that can drive us crazy by comparison is also the thing that makes us artistic. So this temporal displacement, this mental time travel, it's not just the fundamental source

of human misery, although it can be. It's also the first author of all our triumph, the ability to learn from the past, to imagine alternate presence, To sacrifice today for future reward, this is the formula for progress at a civilizational level. And the question of how to learn from past regret, how to plan for the future, and how to sometimes, yes, shut down these unreal worlds and just sit in quiet peace, that is the messy work of being a person.

Happiness is a time machine. It's just not a machine that we're very good at using. Today's guest is Laurie Santos. It's hard to imagine a better guest to wax philosophical and existential about the psychology of happiness and well-being. Laurie is a cognitive scientist at Yale. She hosts the very popular Happiness Lab podcast. The class she taught on the psychology of happiness at Yale was among the most popular

in that university's illustrious history, and her online classes at Coursera have been viewed by millions of people. Today, we talk about how to drive the time machine inside our heads. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Lari Santos, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. You have an incredibly rich professional portfolio. You are a scientist. You host the popular Happiness Lab podcast. Your lectures on the Psychology of Happiness are immensely popular, whether it's a course at Yale University or an online class, of course, Sarah, I wonder, of all the jobs that you do, and of all the tasks within those jobs, what makes you happiest? Like, if I hooked you up to some happiness guy your counter, as you went about the typical month in the life of Laurie Santos, happiness expert, what part of your job would I discover brings you the most pleasure? I think this is sort of an impossible question because there's so many parts of my job that I love.

I mean, I love kind of chatting with students and sort of talking with them about their goals. I really love the part of my podcast job where I get to kind of do interviews with people. It's so cool to learn about people's work and hear about their theories and stuff. A funny one that you might not expect is like, I really love the part of the podcasting that involves like listening to someone's interview and figuring out exactly the choice quote where they said it in this perfect way and then kind of scripting it together. I can do that for hours and hours and it gives me tremendous flow where like time is passing really quickly and I forget to go to the bathroom.

stuff like that. And so I'm lucky that I have a job where I have lots of the parts of it that are pretty good, but they wind up being parts that don't fit together in the way you might expect. This is an abidn of aside from what I want to talk to you about the most, but as someone who does a lot of writing for The Atlantic and has occasionally done edited podcasts with The Atlantic, this show is more of a talking podcast, but I always thought of a distinction. I wonder if this connects for you, between writing and editing podcasts as a distinction between painting and sculpting, With painting, you start with a blank canvas, and it's all about what you add to the canvas. Just as in writing, you start with a blank page, and it's all about the words that you add.

You can truly write anything. But with editing interview podcasts, you're not starting with anything blank. You're actually starting with the opposite, a huge, unwieldy chunk of marble. And there's a David hiding inside of it that you have to extricate with your sculpting prowess. And I love the kind of opposite challenges of writing and editing in that way. I don't know if that connects you. No, totally. I see this analogy perfectly. And it's so much fun to know that there's the David in there and to try to bring it out and to really listen carefully to people's quotes and stuff. When I got into podcasting, this absolutely was not part of podcasting that I thought would be like so much fun. But honestly, it's like if I could like just pick one thing to do on some random rainy Thursday afternoon, it would be sculpting these beautiful audio type of files that we have into the perfect David. It's so much fun.

I've always been frustrated by the language that we have in this category. There's something ephemeral and unsatisfying about the concept of happiness that I think might connect with its etymology. The idea that the word happiness, like the word happens or happening, has this old English root hap, meaning chance or luck, which is inherently fleeting. Some people prefer to talk about flourishing, or they're talking about well-being or contentment. I think one of my favorite treatments of the language here is your distinction. between happiness in your life versus happiness for your life. What is this distinction and what work is this distinction doing for us? Yeah. So to be fair, this is a lovely distinction that I've stolen from the psychologist, Sonia Lubramerski. You know, she kind of defines happiness as having these two parts.

Kind of happiness in your life is kind of what it feels like to be you right now. So this is the fact that you're hopefully experiencing lots of positive emotions, you know, joy and laughter and so on. And you've got to decent ratio of those with negative emotions, right? Note that that doesn't mean you want no negative emotions. I think good life involves a little bit of both, but hopefully you've got a ratio such that the, you know, positive emotions are kind of weighing out against the negative ones. That's kind of being happy in your life. But there's also the second part of being happy kind of, you know, with your life or sort of for your life, right? This is the sense that we have kind of a satisfaction with our life. It's sort of how we think our life is going. That's another way to frame the distinction,

kind of how you feel in your life versus how you think your life is going. And of course, that matters too, right? We want to be satisfied with our lives. We want to think that things are going well. We want to feel like we have some meaning. And I like this distinction as kind of pulling them both together because it kind of encompasses, I think, what the lay notion of happiness is, right? That there is something fleeting. It's kind of about being happy in your life about how it's going right now. But a true definition of happiness or a true definition of like living a good life would involve the kind of second part too, where you really think you your life is going well. And that gets closer to what I think, you know, a lot of the ancients, for example, thought about when they thought about happiness concepts like Aristotle's eudaimonia and so on are kind of more about this, you know, feeling like your life is going well. How am I distorting the concept of happiness in your life versus happiness for your life to say that essentially what we're talking about here is pleasure and purpose? And it's lovely to have pleasure to be drinking a wonderful glass of wine. And it's lovely to have purpose to be doing work that you think has meaning in the world. But the real sweet spot of happiness is a kind of three-dimensional

stacking of pleasure and purpose to end a day where you feel like you've done work that has extraordinary meaning in the world and to have a dinner party with friends who make you laugh. And just as you finish laughing, you're having a sip of your favorite Cabernet Sauvignon. And you're feeling in that moment a kind of stacking of in the moment pleasure and broader, you're having a Dymony. Udiamonic. I don't know why I even attempted to say a Greek adjective there, but a broader sense of purpose in your life.

How am I flattening this concept, if at all, by saying what you're talking about is pleasure and purpose? Yeah, I mean, I think that sort of captures a lot of what we're talking about there. I mean, I think the issue is that when we think about being happy in our life, pleasure kind of conveys maybe too narrow a view of what we want to be doing in our lives, right? I mean, we want emotions that are maybe nostalgic or bittersweet or these kinds or, you know, a kind of, for example, pleasure that comes not from the moment, but the idea that like I'm pushing myself, right? Like a really hard run or a really hard yoga session might be that kind of being happy in your life ultimately, even though it's not like pure pleasure in the moment.

And so, but I think overall, if you kind of expand the notion of pleasure to include more complicated forms of pleasure, then I think, yeah, you're kind of capturing it with this sort of joint idea of pleasure and purpose. I think a really important implication of this distinction between happiness in our life versus with our life is that expectations that we have about our experiences are often just as significant or even more significant than the qualia of the experiences themselves. On the Sam Harris show, you and Sam, a few years ago, I think, in 2020, talked briefly about the experience of climbing Everest, where on a second to second basis, this is a kind of physiological torture, but it is torture in service to glory, right? Which makes it something that people will spend tens of thousands of dollars to do rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars to avoid. And at a much more prosaic level, I'll testify that being a parent of a small and once colicky and gratefully no longer colicky baby, this experience involves several moments that do seem lifted from a CIA handbook on psychological abuse. I mean, constant loud screaming in your ear, check, a sudden end to social habits like getting

drinks with friends, check, sleep deprivation, check. But again, this is torture in service to glory. And it seems like one implication of the in our life versus with our life distinction is that even in moments of stress, incredible stress, we have access to an expectation reframing device in our mind that says, I may not be happy in this moment. But in time, I might learn to be happy with this moment. How powerful is this expectation reframing device when it comes to the kind of happiness that truly counts? Yeah, I mean, I think it's really incredibly important, right? I mean, we do so many things that give us, you know, very little pleasure in the moment, or as you're pointing out, you know, could be defined as CIA torture in the moment with with the idea that we're building up to something, you know, much greater. You know, whether that's like, you know, studying for finals in the college students that I work with or being a parent, you know, in any young parent who's dealing with the colicky baby or, you know, half the,

time when we're pursuing big dreams that we have, whether that's to run a marathon or to do some big project at work. The in the moment time is sometimes, you know, pretty sucky when you get right down to it. But having that expectation that things are going, that what we're doing right now is going to lead to a sense of purpose, lead to a goal that we have that's bigger, it can really push us to enjoy it and sometimes even can translate to in the moment sort of enjoying it too. You know, I've heard parents like kind of reframing when they're bouncing the colloquy baby to have this moment of realizing like, oh my gosh, this stage is not going to last very long. I have to have immense gratitude for it or just kind of really be present to kind of pay attention, you know, because even the

screaming and stuff is going to go away. And so I think that, yeah, it's really that idea that we can not necessarily see things just as being happy in the moment, but really focus on happiness in the future winds up really being important for building a life that's quite good. And our minds are actually quite good at that. I actually think if you had to pick one of those ratios being good, you'd want the kind of not so happy in the life, but kind of living a life of purpose. We've all heard of people who experience the opposite, who have lives that may be filled with like every hedonic pleasure at your flying first class and drinking the really nice wine and so on, but you lack a sense of purpose, you lack this satisfaction.

And I think that that leads to deeper kind of psychological discontent on the whole. There's something kind of interesting, and this connects not only maybe to modern psychology, but also to existential philosophy, that there's something special about the human need to struggle a bit. I mean, Dostoevsky was very despondent about this idea. He wrote in Notes from the Underground that you could give someone infinite joys in life.

You could give them nothing but cakes, and they would find some way to struggle against the life that is nothing but the eating of cakes. That's maybe a more dour Russian version of an idea that I'd say, I think is very true that to your point, there is something special and ironically contentment giving about denying yourself a certain amount of contentment in the present and telling yourself that this is in service to some larger story. And do you think this is something that's truly

just fundamental to a lot of people's sense of identity and happiness and self? Oh, definitely. I mean, I think this is something fundamental to being human. My former colleague at Yale, who's now a professor at Toronto, Paul Bloom, has a whole book about pleasure where he talks about this. And the idea is like, pleasure's complicated, man. Like, the true pleasure comes from deferring pleasure or painful kinds of pleasure, right?

Or these goals that we might not even achieve over time and we kind of push ourselves with the hope that we might get there. And I do think that that's something like fundamental about being human is that what kind of allows us to experience a good life is much more complicated than you might think, you know, at first glance. Yeah. This even connects back with,

you mentioned the concept of flow. And I think Mihay Shiks and Mihai's concept of flow is one of the better ways that I think I remember it being described in that book is people love losing themselves in an achievable challenge, right? And so there's something very subtle but lovely there about the idea that we want challenge. We need challenge. But what creates these moments of ecstatic flow is having a sense in the moment that the challenge is achievable, that we are on the hero's journey and not in the middle of our own personal tragedy. I want to connect this with one of my favorite topics in happiness research, which is our relationship to time

and the ways in which being a content person is often about being good at using our capacities of mental time travel well. We had Ethan Cross in the show a few years ago, and he studied a principle that he calls psychological distancing, which is essentially using our relationship with our future selves in order to make our current selves feel really. richer and happier. And I would love you to tell us a little bit about how you understand psychological distancing and how thinking about events from the perspective of our future self

can make us happier in the present. Yeah, well, I think the first place to start is just to notice how often we are not thinking in the present moment, right? You know, if you were to kind of like, you know, stick me in an fMRI and look at what the kinds of things I was thinking about at any moment, right, at any kind of idle moment, it probably wouldn't just be like what it feels like to be sitting in my chair right now or what it feels like to be breathing there. No, I'd be worrying about things that happened in the past, thinking about what could be right now. Maybe I'm not sitting in this chair. Maybe I'm on a beach in Miami right now, right? I'd be fantasizing about the future or even ruminating about the future and sort of thinking about where it's going and, you know, the kind of things that

might not go well. We exist as beings not in the present moment. We exist as beings that are kind of everywhere in time. And that raises this kind of question is like, okay, well, what, you know, what's the happiest kind of place to be temporarily to kind of be in time well. And what I love about Ethan's work is it shows that sometimes we can harness the way we think about our future selves to do well in the present moment, right? Sometimes we're kind of caught ruminating and thinking like, oh, I'm really worried about, say, this upcoming test I have, again, if you're one of my college students. But then you can sort of take a step back and say, wait, hang on, how would 10 years from now me be thinking about this test? And I'm like, well, it's not really a big deal, right? I can

kind of protect myself from sort of present worries or like super coming up really soon worries if I sort of fast forward myself into the future. And that's sort of psychological distancing. That's psychological distancing in the temporal domain. Ethan and just lay people do this a lot in other domains too, another form of psychological distancing that I love is just pretending that you're somebody else. So what would Beyonce do is a really fun way to think about this, right? Like, well, if I was Beyonce, I wouldn't be worried about this thing coming up. I'd just kind of be a badass and go on. That's just a quick way to get out of my own current psychology to try to think about the world in a different way. And so, yeah, Eason's work about psychological

distancing is a way to harness ourselves in time and even ourselves in space and in our own identity in different ways to kind of navigate the worries that we're facing now in a way that feels a little healthier. I want to hold for a bit longer on this subject of our relationship to this time-space landscape that you're describing, our relationship to our future selves. In a recent episode of your podcast, an episode entitled, Does the U of Today Hate the You of Tomorrow? You talk to UCLA's Hal Herschfield, who's done several studies on how engaging our future selves changes our behavior in the present. And in one experiment, Hal brought people into a lab to write a letter to their future selves in three months versus in 20 years time. So you write a letter to yourself in three months versus writing a letter to yourself in 20 years.

And then he looked at how the act of future self-writing changed their present behavior. Can you tell us a little bit about this study and what Hal found? Yeah, I mean, the amazing thing was what Hal was really interested in is not necessarily what people wrote, but how the act of writing really changed people's behavior in the future. And what he was trying to get at was people's sort of future-oriented behaviors, right? There's stuff I can do in the present moment that may not feel awesome right now, but it's going to help my future self out, right? I could save for retirement.

I could, like, get my butt to the gym. I'm like, you know, I could do all these things now that, you know, may or not feel perfect right now, but are going to help me in the future. And in this study, one of the things that Howell looked at was people's exercising, right? If you're really thinking about yourself 20 years from now, you're going to want your knees to be good. You're going to want your heart to be good. Exercising would be a pretty good thing to do. And what he finds is that when people write to themselves many years off in the future, they wind up exercising more in the weeks following that writing exercise than when they write to themselves, you know, just a month or now. And I find that really profound.

It's just a simple act of sort of doing a little bit of perspective taking, thinking about something from my future self's perspective, winds up making me really good at doing the stuff that would benefit that future self. You know, it's interesting that we can change our experience of the present by imagining our future selves. We can also change our experience of the past, too, in a strange way. And I apologize for listeners who didn't think they were getting something as persistently existential as this. But I am so interested in thinking about life this way. I had this experience a few years ago where I went to Northwestern University as an undergraduate,

and I returned maybe 10, 15 years later. And I remember walking around South Campus by Allison Hall where I lived as a sophomore and near where I lived as a junior. And I was listening to a playlist of music from my junior year, which I suppose is music from 2010, 2011. and excuse me from 2007. And as I was listening to this music, I was feeling very nostalgic about my time as a college junior. And as I reflected on that later, I thought that was very strange

because my actual experience of being a college junior wasn't very positive. I had really bad insomnia that year. I really didn't like my classes as much. I had just a lot of health issues my junior year. And it was strange to think that 10, 11 years later, I could go back to that very same place and listen to the same music I was listening to and merely pull out the nostalgia for my junior year rather than the suffering of that year. And it made me think that even in moments that we are really suffering, there is a kind of secret nostalgia buried within the present that we can only really excavate as the memorializing archaeologists of the future.

And it's kind of interesting to play with time in that way and think even when, God, you are hating this episode of your podcast that you're editing, or I'm hating this article that I'm writing, or I'm going through a really, tough time with something else in my life, to stand back and remember, I will be nostalgic for this moment too. It's just kind of a funny exercise to do with yourself, and it causes you to have this immediate and necessary reframe of, well, what will I be nostalgic for? It's like a forcing function for gratitude. And I don't know if there's a question at the end of this monologue here, but it's just, I wonder if you ever find yourself sort of playing with time in this way as well. Totally. And this is an effect that psychologists talk about a lot. Usually memory researchers, not happiness researchers, but it's a phenomenon that researchers call rosy retrospection. One of my favorite studies that looked at this, did some research with folks who were about to go on a really hardcore cycling trip. And so they surveyed the cyclist before the trip. And they're like, how awesome is this trip going to be in the cyclist? She's like, this is going to be awesome. This is going to be amazing. You know, like, I don't know, like 10 out of 10, right? Then the cyclists go on the trip. And it's actually kind of miserable, right? Because your butt hurts and you're got sunburned and it's terrible. And so people are actually rating the trip at every point in the

trip. You know, this is a three out of ten. You know, this is a four out of ten, whatever. Then they get to the end of the trip. They're on the plane back home. They do one more survey. How is a trip? And what you find is that people's retrospective evaluation of the trip was higher at that moment than at every single moment in the trip, right? Even if we were taking a ticker tape of every single moment we were experiencing, immediately after our retrospection is a little bit higher. And I think that nostalgic rosy retrospection gets even higher, you know, as the years go by when we're looking back at, you know, what was happening in our 20s and so on. And so this is just kind of how memory works, which I think is an interesting philosophical puzzle for memories, right? Like who was actually having those experiences?

Was it crappy and your butt was hurting? Or was it this great, wonderful thing that you achieved? But I think that you're right that when you have this moment where you realize, you know, I could look back at this in a fond way, all of us. sudden it does kind of start increasing your gratitude even when you're suffering in the moment, right? Again, take a parent with a colicky baby. if you have the moment of like, hey, this is a one year period, two year period, like soon I'm never going to get these cry. I'll never hear these cries again, right? All of a sudden, your gratitude kind of immediately kicks in. And this gets to another psychological phenomenon that when we think about a particular phenomenon as being kind of short-lived, that, you know, it's kind

of time-locked, we're never going to get back there. Even if the experience is kind of crappy, just recognizing that it's short winds up making it feel better. There's another study that I love that surveyed college seniors and made them believe, hey, either you have a bunch of time left, you know, your senior year before you graduate, or kind of framed it to be like, it's not that much time left. It's only a couple months. You don't have much time. What they find is that the students who had their time left framed as really short wound up saying that they were happier after graduation. They wound up enjoying their time more. And it's in part because they changed how they behave. When the students thought that time was short, they wound up putting in more fun

activities. They wound up kind of adding in the stuff that they really wanted to get done during college to make sure it was great. And so I think this idea of remembering rosy retrospection and even kind of remembering that experiences are short can be all these little many time travel ways that we wind up making the present experience better, even when the present experience itself might be kind of objectively kind of crappy. Everything you just said makes me wonder what you think about the saying, the cliche, the finding that happiness equals expectations. minus reality. I've heard this in a thousand different places, and I've always hated this phrase.

I've hated it not because I don't understand it. I understand the idea that if someone has very high expectations of their life and their life is merely okay, they'll live their life in a state of permanent disappointment, and that permanent disappointment will register as the same kind of unhappiness that they might have experienced if their reality was much worse, but their expectations were lower. I do get it. But there's two problems that I have with this idea that happiness is the delta between our expectations and reality. One is that it seems to imply that we should have low expectations. It seems to imply that, for example, when the Boston Celtics win the NBA championship, we should pity them because now their expectations for the future have been lifted

to impossible heights, and we should say, oh my God, the poor Boston Celtics having won the NBA championship are now doomed to a life of misery because now their expectations are permanently higher. We don't actually think like that. And it seems to violate something profoundly reasonable about we shouldn't pity winners as much as the saying suggests we should. The other wrinkle to this formula, happiness being the delta between expectations and reality, that I just thought of as you were talking, is that to a certain extent happiness requires a certain kind of facility that we have with optimism, where we have like an on-off toggle switch with hope and optimism, where we can say in moments of real suffering, I can imagine a world in which this suffering is actually in

service to a positive end, in which my raising of a colicky baby ends with me having like a happy child, in which this suffering at low oxygen altitude will lead to me climbing Mount Everest. Those sort of high expectation stories that we tell are really important to pull happiness into the present in order to get us through the hard moments that are just inherently a part of life. So I wonder how, you know, you must have heard this saying a thousand times happiness being the delta between expectations and reality. It does seem like some things that you're saying suggest that this is not quite as simple a formula as it sometimes presented. Yeah, I think it's definitely not quite as simple a formula as is often presented.

But that said, I might disagree with you a little bit on the winners thing. I actually think that the Boston Celtics have something to worry about, right? Like, you know, if you're a J. C. Tatum, you know, now you're done. Like, the next one is not going to be as good as the first one now, right? Like, you know, the next time, like the confetti comes down and he gets to hug deuce, it's going to, yeah, it's just same as before, right? One of the jokes I make in my class where I teach undergrad at Yale is I play that DJ college song, all I do is win. And I point out that this would be a terrible life because if all you did was win, you would stop getting each kind of happiness increase. that comes from the winds, now that would be expected. And God forbid you do what normal people do, which is lose occasionally. Now you feel really terrible. And so it's not so much that expectations, you know, minus reality. Like that's the whole thing about happiness.

But it actually matters. And what I think it doesn't capture is the fact that you can change those expectations around a lot, right? You know, Jason Tatum could then say, all right, like, let me think back to what high school me would feel about this moment, right? Like we can reset our reference points, so we can reset what is the expectation pretty easily with some intention. And that's why I think it's kind of not so simple. I think we can move the equation around. Like we have much more intentional control over what the expectation is or what the reference point is.

But that reference point does wind up shaping a lot more stuff than we think. Yeah. The other aspect of this is that fear of future failure doesn't capture. another reality, which is resilience. We're incredibly resilient in the face of failure, even failure that we spend, and our entire life fearing happening to us. I'm reading a book right now called Far From the Tree,

which is a book that Andrew Solomon, now it's psychologist, I think at Columbia, but previously a journalist with New York Times Magazine, wrote about children who are different from their parents, either because their death and their parents weren't, or their transgender in their parents' word, or their prodigies and their parents weren't. And in the first chapter, he has this observation.

Maybe you know this study that suggests that people looked at folks who had won the lottery and compared their self-described happiness to people who would become double or quadruple amputees and found that there was only a small difference in how happy they said they were at that time, at the time that that question was asked. And you think how much people look forward. to becoming a millionaire versus how much money people would spend to avoid the fate of becoming an amputee. And it turns out that because of maybe some sense of homeostatic happiness or maybe some sense of resilience, it turns out that both groups, after a certain amount of time,

have roughly the same amount of self-described contentment. It does at least suggest that we should be afraid of future failure a little bit less and lean on. or expect future success to make us happy a little bit less. Yeah, this is what researcher Dan Gilbert calls the impact bias. So the impact of both good and bad events will kind of hit us in a less magnitude than we expect and for less of a long duration than we expect. The good news about the impact bias is that it turns out it's actually bigger for negative events. So if you win the lottery, you're not going to be as happy as you expect and you're not

going to be happy for as long as you expect. But if you became paraplegic, that mismatch between what you're predicting and what actually happens is even worse. So it's not going to be as bad as you think. And that Dan Gilbert argues means that we have tremendous resilience that we don't expect, right? It means that like the worst possible thing could happen. And it's not going to be as bad as you think, which is quite remarkable. It also means that we shouldn't put our fantasies in this, you know, the kind of things that we do want to happen in some sort of glory land. I think we need to kind of think a little bit more accurately about what that's going to look like. And one of the ways he suggests you can do that,

especially if you want to say, you know, hey, if I apply to law school and get in, is that going to make me happy? If I become a millionaire, is it going to make me happy? One way to get a more accurate perception rather than using your own predictions is to talk to people who've actually had that happen. And often what you'll find is like, they're not actually that happy, right? So we shouldn't put our dreams kind of in this heavenly state. It won't kind of build up our happiness as much as we think. One thing I love from your show on our relationship, to our future selves, as you talked about balancing the dangers of myopia, nearsightedness, focusing too much on the present versus a word I was not familiar with, hyperopia,

which is focusing too much on the future. And whereas a classic example of myopia would be spending too much money now and failing to save for your future self, I guess a classic example of hyperopoeia would be saying yes, yes, yes, to a bunch of work requests, always telling yourself, you know, I'll rest later, I'll sleep when I'm dead. I need to be giving myself more and more tasks. And then later you realize you spent your entire life planning for a future that you've never spent fully living. I'd love you to talk a little bit about this balance between myopia and hyperopia. Maybe you can tell us, do you think you suffer more from myopic or hyperopic thinking? Yeah, yeah. Well, when I started the episode,

it was funny. I was really much more focused on the sort of myopic cases. And these are the ones that psychologists talk about a lot, right? We don't eat healthy. And then we wind up with age-related disease later, you know, we don't save enough for retirement, right? It seems like many of the cases where our present self is going wrong is because it's kind of screwing over the future self to do something in the present that feels quite fun. This is like standard procrastination kinds of things, right? And so when I looked at my own life, I initially saw lots of cases of my op here, right? You know, I really don't get to the gym as much as I'm supposed to. In fact, I was supposed to go right after this podcast and I called my trainer. I'm like, how about we push it to tomorrow?

Right? I'm just like mortgaging Future Laurie's Day, right? You know, things in the savings domain, right? So I saw all these cases where like, you know, future Lori is going to be stuck doing all the stuff that current Lori is not really thinking about what she wants the best. But after talking with Hal Herschfield and sort of doing the show, I started realizing there are all these other cases of my hyperopoeia. You know, a big one for me that Hal pointed out is these cases where I have some resource that I could spend now. But like in my brain, I think like, oh, I'll just use that in the future. Right, you know, I get this nice bottle of wine that a friend gave me, and I'm not going to, like, pop it open with lunch today. I'm like, oh, I'm going to save it for, like, a really good time. But then that time kind of, like, never comes, right? You know, this might be a little bit more girly than you can relate to, but, you know, I have all these, like, bath bombs and, like, spa products that I spend all this money on that I'm like, I could use them tonight, you know, when I take a shower, but I'm not going to use it. I'm going to wait for kind of a good time. Another classic case is sort of frequent flyer miles, right? Like a lot of us bank these things if you travel a lot and you think, oh, someday I'm going to take that beach vacation, but it sort of never comes around.

And all these cases are cases where like our future self wouldn't want our frequent flyer miles to expire or like, you know, for us to kind of never have enjoyment now. If anything, our future self wants to look back with rosy retrospection to think, oh my gosh, that was such a great time that you use these things. And so these are cases of hyperopia where, you know, just we're making these decisions in the present thinking out of a goal of. productivity or some sort of idea that our future self will have more time and more freedom, we make these decisions now that are kind of screwing over our present self, but that our future self wouldn't be that happy with either. And so the interesting thing about the episode was I kind came around to like, okay, yeah, my opia. I should probably get to the gym. President Lori should, you know, like actually start working out. But I should also start doing the fun things that I'm

putting off for later too. Those matter too. I thought it was so interesting to think that when we consider the concept of procrastination, we typically think about procrastinating on work, procrastinating on exercise, procrastinating on diet. But we can also procrastinate on pleasure. Some of us can, at least. And it was interesting hearing you talk about wine, both here and on the episode,

because my wife and I both love wine. And I have a couple expensive bottles that I've been gifted by friends for birthdays or Hanukkah. And a couple years ago, I found that we just kept pushing off and pushing off and pushing off drinking these wines to the point where the wines were now past the date when people were suggesting that we drink them. And my wife and I developed this new catchphrase at home, which is drink the wine. And drink the wine just means if it's a Tuesday night and you're feeling fantastic and you've both had a great day and the baby isn't squealing, even she's happy. and it just feels like a day to celebrate, but there's nothing to actually celebrate.

There's no birthday, there's no anniversary, there's no actual work accomplishment that feels like a once and every five years event. You should still celebrate that moment. You should still drink the wine. And so I do love this idea that we can procrastinate on work, but we can also procrastinate on pleasure.

And there's no formula here, but it's just useful to be aware of our complexity, tendency to do both. One more point on our relationship to time that I thought was really interesting is you talk a little bit about the concept of time affluence, this lovely feeling that we have enough time to get done what we need to get done and feel unrushed through it. If you look at federal government data, the American time you survey, it seems like we have more time, more leisure time than we did 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago.

But if you ask any individual, do you have more free time now than you did 10 years ago? Everyone says, no, I feel like I'm completely run ragged. I have no time affluence whatsoever. I am time impoverished. What's your explanation for why people feel so harried in a world where there at least seems to be some official data that people are not as harried as they used to.

to be. Yeah, well, I think there's a bunch of factors here, both structural and psychological, but one interesting kind of structural one has to do with the way the time we have now is broken up, right? It is true that we have objectively more time than we have had in the past, but if you look at people's time usage surveys, the chunks of time we have are much smaller, right? It's 10 minutes when your kid falls a steep or 15 minutes when that Zoom meeting ends early. Our time is kind of broken up into tinier pieces. And this is what the journalist Bridgett Schult has christened, time confetti. We have these little pieces of time here and there, and we assume that they don't really add up to much, right? You know, so I get that 10 minutes when, you know, this, if the podcast

interview ends early, and I'm like, oh, it's just 10 minutes. I'll check my email. I'll scroll through Reddit. I'll, like, look at something stupid on Instagram, right? We don't actually use that time well. And because time affluence is really our subjective sense of how much time we have, when we kind of blow that time, we kind of feel like we didn't have any. And so the idea is that are we do have more objective time, but because it's broken up in stupid ways. And as a consequence of that, we use it in really dumb ways. We kind of just blow it off, like looking at something stupid on our phone. Now we wind up feeling more time impoverished. And so one strategy for kind of dealing with that is just to make a good use of your time confetti. Um, Harvard Business School professor

Ashley Willans, who studies time affluence a lot, recommends making a time confetti wish list or it's kind of a to do list, but not a work to do list. You know, maybe that's when you do, you know, scribble in your gratitude journal or take a deep breath or text a friend or I don't know maybe like bust into that bottle of wine and you have a ton of 10 minute wine delicious wine break or something two to two 15 in the afternoon two 50 exactly that's a five o'clock somewhere right but but the idea is that if we use those tiny chunks well then they can kind of allow us to feel like we've had a little bit more time i don't know if this book exists surely it must exist but i would love to have at my desk a self-help book for making better use of my time confetti. A book that's like, maybe the title is

something like, this will only take five minutes. And it's just like a 100 page book, a short little book that's just like, here are a hundred things that are really good for you, none of which takes more than 10 minutes. And it can just, whoops, slip right in there to fill this little time chunk, this little time confetti, right? It's like, here's why flossing is really important. Here's why doing like 50 pushups in the middle of the day might be like really beneficial to you. If you do it every single day. Just like a handful of these ideas for making just slightly better use of my time confetti. Like I don't want to be like humanoid robot man who's like optimizing every single 30 second chunk of my day. But just having a little, a few of these things I actually think would be very useful.

Yeah. I think making your own list can be a little bit helpful because then it's like on your, I'm about to go to my phone to like look at Reddit. I'm like, oh, I should look at the list. And then you can kind of build these things in. I did this one of the moments where I have this is in between meetings. You know, the sad thing about being a podcaster professor is I spent a lot of time on screen like this is we are talking, looking at Zoom, and you often get these like five-minute chunks in between. And so I added to my bookmarks these little five-minute, like, kind of chair yoga things. It sounds so silly, but it's basically just to like stretch in your chair. And I can't tell you how helpful it's been to just make me a little bit more embodied in these

moments that I was just going to blow away or to kind of make me feel like I use that time well. And so I, too, if there's some, if there's some, you know, kind of innovative journalist out there who wants to give us the time confetti, you know, to do list book, I'm all ears. But making your own list from things you kind of remember are useful for you can be helpful too. I know. I love that. Right. Like five minutes or 10 minutes between Zoom calls. It's like just listen to a little bit of like Marcus Aurelius meditations, do a little bit of yoga. And you will be wiser and more limber than you will have ever hoped to be in the next six months. I want to talk, we've been talking a lot about things that. living inside of our own minds. And I love this discussion, but I do think that one thing it's missed, which is absolutely my own fault and not yours, is the presence of other people.

And something I've been thinking a lot recently about since we've had Robert Waldinger and Mark Schultz on the show is this concept of social fitness, this idea that we should care for the quality of our relationships, the same way that we care for the quality of our bodies. And I've become convinced that the 21st century is a kind of full-on assault on social fitness, in part because it's become so easy to move through life without suffering the inconvenience

of other people. And I will confess right now, I do not like talking to strangers. I don't really engage my Uber drivers. I don't like talking to people on planes. I don't want to come off like a dick, but I don't like short, brief encounters with strangers in the world, I would just prefer not to. Is there empirical evidence

that a different approach to being in the world would make me happier? Yeah, I mean, I will say that just to update what you're saying, you're saying, I don't like talking to strangers and I would change that to, I predict that I don't like talking to strangers.

I bet you have not done careful ABAB testing of when you talk to the Uber driver drive versus you don't talk to the Uber Drive drive. Luckily, there's psychologists who have done these, kind of randomized control trials of forcing people to talk to strangers. And interestingly, what they often find is that when you take time to talk to a stranger, you wind up feeling happier.

One of my favorite studies on this came from the psychologist Nick Epley, who's at the University of Chicago. He has people on the L train kind of commuting in Chicago predict how would it feel to spend, you know, your train ride just enjoying your solitude versus talking to a stranger. And people predict like talking to a stranger is going to be awkward and miserable. it's going to like actively reduce my happiness. But then he has a different group of subjects actually do this. And what he finds is that at the end of the train ride, the people who talked to the stranger wound up feeling happier than those that didn't. And interestingly,

this is true for both introverts and extroverts. You get the same magnitude of happiness that comes from talking to a stranger in introverts and extroverts, which I find shocking, but this is replicated now a few times. The difference is in the prediction. The extroverts are like, it'll be a little awkward to talk to a stranger. But the introverts are like, it would be, you know, like defcon zero like 2000 terrible like it's like there's no scale that will capture how terrible like talking to the stranger will be and so I think that's an interesting message right which is that we make predictions about what we should be doing socially based on these expectations we're expecting talking to a stranger is going to feel crappy so we don't do it that means we

never practice it so we never get to kind of disconfirm our expectations but it also means we kind of get out of practice doing this I think so many of us especially kind of post-COVID are like even worse at this than we were before. You know, I was never like exactly the person who was like, oh my gosh, let's go to this huge party and talk to people. But now kind of being out of practice doing that for two years, you know, in my house and my fuzzy socks, I think it becomes even harder. But again, that's just my expectation about it being harder. Like when I actually get out there and try it out, it's probably going to feel better than I think. I'm still stuck in the very first thing that you said. You said something like, Derek, you say you don't like talking to strangers,

but actually you might just be wrongly predicting that you don't like talking to strangers and in fact there is a latent you who does like talking to strangers that you have not allowed to come out and play. It's really interesting to think that most descriptions of our own personalities are actually just predictions

about our personality, that we are when we describe ourselves to a partner, to a friend, to a therapist, not in fact describing ourselves but making predictions about ourselves that haven't been tested. And it suggests that maybe we should spend a lot more time in our life pretending to be other people to see if those predictions are accurate. Like if you're introverted, and I'm mildly introverted.

I don't think there's a binary. I think it's probably a normal distribution of introversion to extroversion, but mildly introverted, maybe I'd just be happy. You're pretending to be an extrovert. And in fact, researcher Sonia Lubramerski has done these studies where she's basically brought extroverts in and said, hey, extroverts, why don't you act introverted for two weeks? Or, hey, introvert, why don't you act introverted for two weeks? And what she finds is that the introverts who wind up acting extroverted wind up happier in the two weeks they do this. We have another episode of this podcast where we interviewed this lovely journalist, Jessica Pan, hardcore introvert, who wrote a book called,

sorry I'm late, I didn't want to come, colon, an introverts year of extroverting. And so she did one of these like social experiments that journalists often do where she spent a year trying to be as extroverted as possible. And she went incredibly hardcore. Like she joined like a comedy club and like went to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and performed and did all these networking events. And, you know, she still thinks she's an introvert. She still has the prediction that it's not going to be fun.

But she knows from her experimentation that it actually does make her feel better. And she knows from her experimentation that it's a lot easier now that she's allowed herself some experience with it than she expected. And so, yeah, we get a lot of, when we put that episode out, we get a lot of hate mail. I get a lot of introverts being like, okay, maybe for that chick, but like not for me. It's going to be really miserable for me to talk to the stranger on the train. In fact, what's funny is that when we do shows about social connection, that's the ones where we get the most hate mail. It's not politics or climate or anything. It's really talk to a stranger.

It won't be that bad. it's like it unleashes the full kind of crack and fury of the internet saying that I'm wrong. But the data are really clear here. You know, study after study just shows our predictions about social connection are wrong. And even introverts would be happier if they got a little bit more extroverted. I just think about this all the time because it seems like so many different aspects of modern life, modern economics, modern technology, simply make it convenient to act like an introvert. There's obvious examples, and I wrote an article early this year where I went through American Time Use Survey and found that the average amount of time that people spend in face-to-face socializing, overall, it's declined 25% in the last 20 years. Among teenagers, it's declined 45% in the last 20 years. And this isn't just because people are spending more time on their phones. I think it's also because different aspects of the economy make it more convenient to simply spend time inside of our houses. In the last,

10 years, the restaurant industry has evolved to a place where off-premise spending is now higher overall in American restaurants than on-premise spending. That is to say that the larger business for American restaurants now is takeaway bags rather than tables. There's all sorts of 21st century customs and technologies that might be creating a kind of mass delusion of introversion that is actually a kind of false prediction of who we are,

that it has become so easy to act as if we were introverted that we are deluding ourselves from recognizing that we'd be happier if we acted as if we are extroverted. I don't know, just kind of like a weird combination

of psychology and economic development. Yeah, and I think the same thing, is something that people have pointed out. All the way back in our first season of the podcast, we had the musician David Byrne from The Talking Heads on. And he wrote this really interesting MIT tech article called Elimidating the Human, where he made the point that you're basically making where he said, if you look at pretty much any big technological development over the last couple of decades, it is one that eliminates the human, right? You've talked about, you know,

the kind of like food delivery type services, right? Everybody's taking takeout and things. But even stuff like Uber, right? I can just plug it. in where I'm going, I don't even have to tell my address to the driver. You could look at things like, you know, online music sharing services, right? You know, we used to have to, like, walk into somebody's house and there'd be a big wall of CDs. You're younger than me, so maybe you don't remember this, but like there used to be, Derek, a wall of CDs when you went into people's house. Now, like, nobody can talk to you about your music because it's hidden on your phone, right? You kind of can't see it. Even bookstores, right? We used to go browse in a bookstore and kind of walk around and see people

and talk about books now, they just kind of arrive via the internet onto our iPad. And so Burn goes through all these, even online learning, for example, right? And this is something that, you know, I'm participating in. We put our happiness class online and millions of people have taken it, but they haven't chatted with me about happiness, right? We haven't had an educational system where we ask each other questions and meet in person. And so I think so many technological developments are moving us away from human interaction with the assumption that that's good, or at least it reduces friction or maybe it's like faster, but there could be real psychological consequences to this. In the episode we had David Burn on, we talked to another kind of interesting pioneer of an

eliminating human technology. We talked to Don Wetzel, who's the inventor of the ATM. He's in his 90s now. I'm really getting up there. But what I love about Don's story is, you know, he had the intuition that many of us had that like, you know, back in the pre-atim, back in the day, you'd have to wait in bank line, you know, talk to the teller, get the money, just so much. much more frictionless if you could just have a machine do it. But what's funny about Dawn's story is that his wife, Eleanor, is embarrassed that her husband made the ATM. She insists on continuing to go to the teller because she likes chatting with them and having chit chat. And so she kind of like, even in their story, she kind of figured out that this would be a problem for people, that would

be something that we're missing. We're gaining something maybe in speed and reducing friction, but we might be losing something really human. That's so interesting. I'm not a Luddite. I think all these technologies are wondrous in so many ways. I love ATMs, but it is interesting to think that there is this subtle negative externality to a lot of technologies that can, as David Burns said, eliminate the human. I want to close by tying two threats together.

We've talked about temporal displacement and thinking of ourselves as beings in time and how a certain facility with thinking about ourselves living in time can make us happier in the present. We've talked a little bit about technology. Folding these things together, I'm interested in the fact that when we lose ourselves, we can lose ourselves in past regret, we can lose ourselves in future anxiety, but you can also be temporally displaced in the present, too, if your mind is just elsewhere, right? You're sitting down to dinner with your partner, and they're talking, and you are just not listening to them. Your mind is just a loud, self-talk narrative about something that's happening somewhere else in the world.

I think about this in relationship to our cell phones a lot. You mentioned in the episode that we've referenced a few times that psychologist Liz Dunn has done some work on how the presence of smartphones, just their sheer presence in our visual field, can change the way that we relate to people around us. Can you summarize her work and why you find it significant? Yeah, I mean, Liz had this lovely analogy that she used in the podcast, which is, you know, imagine you're sitting down to dinner, you know, with your partner. And instead of having your cell phone out, you had a big wheelbarrow. And in the wheelbarrow was like printouts of everything every politician has said in the last three years. You know, like actual like binders with your emails in it, you know, huge photo albums of every photo you've taken before. Like, you know, DVDs of every cat video and porn, you know, show on the internet. It's like huge rising into the sky. You know, CDs. filled with music of every song you've ever listened to since the early 2000s, Liz was like, if you were sitting next to that wheelbarrow, it would be hard to pay attention. You'd be like, oh, I just want to look at the photos from that, you know, like that wedding or something. And Liz

points out, like, your brain isn't stupid. Your brain knows that on the other side of your smartphone is all that stuff and much, much, much more. And so what she points out is that the kind of distraction that you'd get from the wheelbarrow is ever so subtly happening all the time. And she and her research is finding ways to kind of pull this out. For example, she has some data showing that if you're sitting in a waiting room with a stranger and you have your cell phone with you, not even out and that you're looking at it, but just with you, you wind up smiling 30% less at the other people in that room because, you know, their presence has kind of detracted a little bit because you're kind of thinking about and paying attention to this other really distracting

thing around you. And so there's lots of hints that it's not even just when we really kind of, I think the word is fubbing people, right? When we're actually on our phones, when other people are around, even when it's just near us, it's kind of ever so subtly stealing our attention in ways that are problematic. And it's one of the reason, if you look at some studies on various forms of concentration, a lot of these are done with college students who are taking some exam, like just putting your phone out of sight and even better out of the room winds up allowing you to concentrate better. So students do better, for example, on a memory test or a decision-making test, just having their phone a little bit further away. And it's kind of

protecting you from that mini attentional cost that's going on all the time. Well, we've succeeded in my goal of ending every single episode I do this year with commentary on the downside of our smartphone. So I'm going to end it right there. Laurie Santos, thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Boraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays.

We'll see you next week.