SOLVED with Mark Manson - How To Finally Let Yourself Be Happy, Solved

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Everyone’s obsessed with being happy—but what if that obsession is the very thing making us miserable? Drew and I explore what actually makes us feel good—and why most of us are chasing it in all the wrong ways. We unpack what philosophers like Aristotle and the Buddha got right thousands of years ago—and how modern science is just now catching up. We talk about hedonic vs. eudaimonic happiness, why more money and status don’t necessarily move the needle, and why most self-help advice completely misses the point. Happiness isn’t something you get. It’s a side effect of doing the right things for the right reasons. So, if you're tired of chasing "more" and ready to actually feel a little less miserable, this one’s for you. We also put together a free companion guide for this episode with all the takeaways, references, and tools to help you get your sh*t together once and for all. Download it here: https://solvedpodcast.com/happiness Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁠⁠ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get 7 days free at ⁠⁠⁠https://www.purpose.app⁠⁠⁠ Chapters: 10:42 CHAPTER 1: The Origins of Human Happiness 29:30 CHAPTER 2: The WEIRD Problem: When Happiness Research Goes West 40:47 CHAPTER 3: The Three Components of Happiness 59:53 CHAPTER 4: What Does—and Doesn't—Make Us Happy 1:52:53 CHAPTER 5: Baseline vs. Circumstantial vs. Intentional Happiness 2:24:21 CHAPTER 6: Don't Pursue Happiness; Remove Unhappiness 2:34:19 CHAPTER 7: How Happiness Changes Across the Lifespan 2:51:44 CHAPTER 8: Happiness Myths 3:04:47 CHAPTER 9: The 80/20 Guide to Happiness Follow Mark Mark’s IG: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson Solved IG: https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/ Twitter: https://x.com/markmanson LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction.

So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose. Dot app. Happiness has been done and redone and redone again many, many, many times over on many podcasts. There are like hundreds of books on it at this point, popular psychology books. Our goal with this is to synthesize and compress as much of the usable information as possible

into something that is actually practical for you to use and take away. Some of the things that we're going to be covering in the episode include how to escape the happiness trap that keeps 90% of people chasing the wrong things in their life. The ancient secret that Aristotle and the Buddha understood that goes against the vast majority of self-help advice that you see online, how to break free of the treadmill of I'll be happy when X happens that keeps you postponing the joy in your life instead of just experiencing it now. How to stop fighting against your own mind, how to stop resisting reality around you and the effect that this has on your day-to-day well-being.

We'll talk about the three definitions of happiness in the scientific literature and how they are different and how they can be achieved, both separately and together. We'll be discovering the true relationship between happiness and things like money, sex, where you live, who you're with, how old you are. All those age-old questions will be covering eight of the most common myths that people have about happiness. what you should understand instead. And finally, we will be giving you over a dozen practical takeaways that you can use in your life to be a little bit more happier. Because honestly, Drew, it's not about being like capital H happy. It's really just about being a little bit happier than yesterday. A little less miserable. Yeah. A little less. Actually, that statement is going to end up being much more accurate. Sorry to point for you. Yeah. Yeah. Much more accurate than

I think people realize. So without further ado, this is happiness solved. So I want to start with a story about a philosopher who is one of the most associated people in history with happiness and the concept of happiness. And this is John Stuart Mill. He was an English philosopher from the 19th century. And he is, I guess, considered the primary proponent of a school of thought called utilitarianism. Now, utilitarianism for people who aren't caught up on their ethical philosophy, utilitarianism is the idea that we should all strive to create the most happiness for the most amount of people. So any decision you're making, any policy by government, any way that we structure organized society, it should all be based what brings

the most happiness to the most amount of people. Now what's interesting about John Stuart Mill, he didn't invent utilitarianism. It was actually his father and his father's colleague, Jeremy Bentham, who came up with utilitarianism. His father was a man named James Mill. And James, when he had John Stuart Mill as a child, decided to conduct a little experiment with an end of one. When John Stuart Mill was born, James Mill said, you know what, I'm going to raise my child, myself. I'm going to homeschool him. I'm going to dedicate all of my time and energy to him.

And I'm going to raise him to become the most virtuous, rational, and happy person in the world. I'm going to take everything I understand about science and philosophy and... human flourishing, and I'm going to channel it into my child, and he is going to become a perfect human. Typical, you know, parental narcissism for everybody listening, except the difference was that James Mill was actually an incredibly brilliant scholar and philosopher. So he approached things in a very interesting way. And sure enough, pretty early on, he got incredible results for John Stuart Mill. So John Stuart Mill, he learned to read not only in English, but in Latin by age three.

He was fluent in ancient Greek by age eight. I think by the time he was a teenager, he spoke like eight or nine different languages. He'd read all of the old classics in their own languages and dialects. I think he had already like translated the Bible from its like original Aramaic. Like crazy, crazy stuff. Like this kid was a prodigy, essentially.

And the entire time that James Mill was raising him, not only was he raising him as an intellectual prodigy, but he was instilling these values and beliefs in him of like pursuing the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. That everything you do, all this studying, all this reasoning,

all this understanding that you're developing, it's so that you can go into the world and promote the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people. Now, do you want to guess what happened to John Stewart Mill? I've heard this story before, I think. Not just with him,

but like it's a common story throughout history, but why don't you go ahead and tell us, yeah? He had a mental breakdown. Yeah, yeah. The man who was raised to be, the happiest person on earth by the philosopher who spent his entire life studying happiness, had a complete mental breakdown by age 20 and became suicidal. Yeah, the experts got it wrong once again.

Shocker. Yeah. Absolutely shocking. So John Stuart Mill had this existential crisis, complete breakdown. He becomes an adult. Obviously, he's like realizing that all the stuff that he's doing is like not really working, that he was essentially raised on all these faulty assumptions, and he just has this complete meltdown at a certain point.

And he wrote something really interesting in his journal around this time, which is he said, ask yourself whether you are happy and you will immediately cease to be so. He proceeded to go through a thought experiment, which he asked himself, he said, if I could snap my finger and everything in my life immediately reverted to the ideal version of what I want. Like, society became exactly what I wanted.

All my relationships became what I wanted. All my problems went away. If I could snap my finger and that would happen, would I be happy? And the conclusion he came to was no. And that really, I think, fucked with him and really messed with him. But I think I like the story of John Stuart Mill

because it's almost like a hyperbolic version of what the rest of us go through. I think most of us grow up with a naive understanding of happiness. This idea that like, well, if I could just get the job I wanted, then I'd be happy. If I could just marry this type of person, then I'd be happy. If I could just make this amount of money, then I'd be happy. And sure enough, the more we tend to focus on those things, the more we tend to focus on happiness, the further removed we become from it. and the more miserable and anxious and depressed we get.

And I think this is particularly appropriate because there's a little bit of a paradox in the 21st century in that today the population is better informed, has more access to mental health care, has more experience with therapy than any other generation before, yet rates of depression are at all-time highs, one and three people suffer from some degree of anxiety disorder, like the list of mental health ailments goes on and on and on. So it kind of raises this question of, are we approaching happiness in the wrong way to begin with?

And if we are, how should we be approaching it? Now, I think John Stuart Mill is ultimately representative of how our intuitions around happiness go wrong, right? We tend to assume that happiness is a feeling that you should be able to summon at will. There was a thing that went viral maybe five or six years ago, I think from novel Ravikant, where he said it's like, happiness is just a choice. You can just decide to be happy. There's not a whole lot of evidence supporting that.

We'll get into whether that's true or not. A lot of people assume that happiness is a reward that you experience for achieving something in your life, for attaining something in your life, for having certain experiences. Is that true? Or is it just a side effect of something else that is going on? We're going to discover that later on as well. A lot of people, especially people with certain upbringings, assume that happiness is the result of deserving it from working hard enough or doing the right things. Happiness is like, it's almost like you have to be like pre-qualified for happiness as if it's like a fucking insurance rate or something.

A lot of people assume that happiness can be solved with the right techniques or tactics. You know, it's like I think these are kind of like the morning routine people. You know, it's like, well, if I get up an hour earlier, the data says I'll be happier because that's what happier people wake up earlier. It's like, is that true? Not necessarily. And then finally, a lot of people assume that happiness, if you figure everything out in your life, happiness should be a constant state that you're in perpetually in any given

moment. And once again, I think that's kind of a naive and childish way of looking at it. In some ways, yes, happiness can be ever present in any given moment, but I don't think that's a realistic way of looking at it. And when we get into the three versions of happiness later and what they are and how they're different, I don't even know if you would necessarily want to feel happy all the time. So ultimately, what we're going to discover is that happiness isn't really something that you pursue in and of itself.

It is the side effect and the byproduct of pursuing something else. Do you have any comments or qualms or moral dilemmas before we move on, Drew? You are staring at me with a... Yeah, a dead blank stare. How happy are you right now from a scale of one that dead? One question I would add to is like, is happiness even the point, right? You're kind of getting at that. But just like, maybe keep that question in mind through all this too.

Like how it's really, to me, I think it's kind of bullshit for one. not a good, it's definitely not a good goal to have, as we'll see, in and of itself. And I'm just not, I think it's just, it's way overrated. It's way overrated. I don't even know if we should be spending a full episode on happiness. Honestly, that's what, that's maybe a hot take. I don't know. Spicy, spicy take from Drew Barney. Just keep that question in the back of your mind. Okay. Maybe we'll return to that at the end. Like, is happiness overrated? I think that's a good, a good question to ask ourselves when we're done with this. I would argue that this episode is probably necessary, if anything, to simply convince people of that point.

Yeah. Yeah. That like, this actually might be something you shouldn't think a ton about. Right. Which is going to sound crazy to a lot of people, I think. But hopefully we can convince you that it's maybe not all that's cracked up to be. All right. So let's lay some philosophical groundwork because theories about human happiness have been around

for 2,500 years, 3,000 years. And in this case, like, the ancient world and the ancient traditions, like really, went into happiness pretty thoroughly. And in my personal opinion, it hasn't changed a whole lot, as we'll see. So we'll start with the Greeks, as we usually do. Probably the most popular and practical and to this day used framework around happiness comes from Aristotle. It's his framework of hedonia versus eudaemonia. We talked about this quite a bit in our episode on values, but I'll just, I'll review it very briefly. So Hidonia is basically. Basically, worldly pleasures, things that feel good.

You know, eating a really good pizza is hedonic. Having sex is hedonic. Making some money is hedonic. It's like temporary, exciting, pleasurable, feels good stuff that like passes relatively quickly. The problem with pursuing hedonic happiness is that transitory nature of it. You know, it's like you eat pizza and have sex tonight and you're happy tonight, but then you wake up tomorrow and you're like, well, now I need.

something else to be happy. And so you kind of end up on what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill where you are just constantly chasing the next high, the next exciting thing, the next exciting thing that's going to make you feel good. And so it's not a stable or reliable way to base your happiness. You might be very happy in that single moment, but over the long span of your life or over multiple months or years, your happiness is more like a roller coaster. It goes up and down and up and down and the waves and crashes are quite dramatic and unsettling. This is as opposed to eudaimonia, which Aristotle defined as, it loosely means kind of like a fulfillment or satisfaction in oneself.

It's the idea that like your actions are valuable and meaningful and that you are doing the right thing with your limited amount of time on earth. It's a much deeper and more philosophical version of happiness. And what's interesting about hedonia versus eudaimonia is that you can be experiencing quite a bit of displeasure, but still be experiencing eudaimonic happiness. An example would be like changing a baby's diaper. It's like nobody likes changing a baby's diaper, but if you're a parent, you probably take a lot of pride and satisfaction of taking care of your kids. So that would be an example of having eudaimonic happiness, but not hedonic happiness. but not hedonic happiness.

Now the nice thing about eudaimonic happiness is that it is sustainable. It lasts over a long period of time. Generally, if you do something that feels very meaningful and useful and profound in your life, you will still derive satisfaction from that many, many years later

and you look back and feel good about yourself for doing the thing. So in Aristotle's framework, he argued that generally we should pursue eudaimonic happiness and just let hedonic happiness happen. If it happens great, if it doesn't, that's fine too. And in his framework, eudaimonic happiness was achieved by living virtuously. So Aristotle had a series of, I think, is 17 or 19 virtues,

things like courage, wisdom, temperance. Basically, if you were able to live up to those virtues, those virtues would give you a life of satisfaction and meaning, and then that would create kind of this long-term sustaining happiness that would carry you through the ups and downs that are inevitable in anybody's life. So it's already here very early on that we're finding this pattern that we're going to see a lot that happiness isn't something that you pursue or find itself. In fact, pursuing happiness, pursuing what you think is going to make you happy in the short term is likely going to backfire at some point. But it's actually by pursuing some sort of other meaningful action that has nothing to do with happiness will generate happiness as a byproduct.

So Aristotle's argument would be that if you act virtuously, if you say, I don't know, stand up for a cause you believe in or support your friends and neighbors and need, that's a virtuous action and that the byproduct of acting virtuously is that you will develop a strong eudaimonic happiness. You'll be satisfied with yourself. You will feel that your life is full of meaning and so on and so forth. Now, there was another framework from ancient Greeks that I think is also worth talking about. It's much less talked about, or I would actually say it's probably the most misunderstood framework from ancient Greece, which is Epicureanism.

Now, generally, anytime Epicurus comes up, it's mostly because people shit on him. And it's because, like, the really simplified version of his argument is that he said life's about pleasure. Life's about feeling good. And pretty much anything you do, you should just try to maximize feeling good as much as possible. There are some things that when they get compressed to the size of a tweet, like don't really, like they lose most of their signal.

And I would say Epicureanism is like a prime example of this. Like the tweet version of Epicureanism sounds ridiculous. It's like, okay, clearly that's not a good way to live your life, just maximizing your pleasure. If you actually dig in to Epicurus and what he wrote and what he thought, lot. It's way more nuanced than that. So basically, Epicure is distinguished between two types of pleasures. There are kinetic pleasures, and then there are catastomatic pleasures. Say that three times fast. Catast what is it? Catastomatic. Catastomatic. Okay. Okay. And I may not even be

saying that correctly. So kinetic pleasures, in this case, kinesis means movement, right? These are very similar to the hedonic pleasures, right? So these are the active pleasures that move in and out of your life very quickly, things like eating and sex and playing games and, you know, being entertained. Whereas catastrophic pleasures are static pleasures. They are durable, long-lasting pleasures. So things like friendship, things like gaining knowledge, you know, reading, learning about something, having a sense of peace in your life, contentment. You know, these are all catastrophic pleasures that, I guess in Aristotle's framework, you would kind of associate those more with eudaimonia, but for Epicurus, those were,

he considered those pleasures as well, right? It's like, it is pleasurable to just be a good friend or, you know, read a good book. Now, similar to Aristotle, Epicurus argued that because kinetic pleasures were so temporary, one should focus more on the catastomatic pleasures. And he kind of, the thing that differentiated him from Aristotle is he did a little bit of a mental jujitsu that we're going to see also come up quite a bit. He made the connection that catastomatic pleasures or those long-lasting pleasures, they actually have less to do with doing something or having something more.

more than they do removing pain or discomfort. And so Epicurus actually argued that happiness is not gaining or acquiring anything. It's removing things that bar you. Basically, happiness is kind of the natural state. And then our goal is to actually just remove the unhappiness from our life. So it's remove any pain that we might be feeling. remove stress, remove discomfort, remove bad relationships, conflict. It's like, don't strive towards things that will make you feel good. It's just remove the things that make you feel bad.

And then that catastrophic pleasure will naturally result. Whatever's left over will just naturally be very pleasurable. And this state of having a lack of stress in one's life, he called Adiraxia, which was basically a kind of a calmness or a serenity that you strive for as a result of removing all the things that impede it. Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because it's very similar to the Buddhist approach to happiness. Right. So in Buddhism, life is defined by its suffering, and that suffering is defined by what Buddhists call Dukha, which is an attachment to, you know, all of our desires and cravings in life.

In Buddhism, the practice is about removing those cravings, removing those desires. So, you know, letting go of the need to be right or the need to indulge yourself or the need to feel a sense of status or whatever. And so in a very similar vein, it's happiness isn't defined, isn't like a positive thing that you necessarily like chase or achieve. Happiness is the byproduct of simply removing or in the Buddhist case letting go. of all the things that are preventing it. Okay, I do have a question here.

Go. Okay, so Epicurious, if I remember right, like even the modern hedonist, because hedonism is still somewhat of a philosophical framework that people use even today. And Epicurius often uses some of the foundational work to hedonism, right? But the hedonists, even, too, they think that the removal of those things, removal of pain, removal of suffering from your life, obviously, that gets you towards some form of happiness. but even things like what Aristotle would call eutamonic happiness or eutomotic activities at least that would add to your long-term happiness, those even have a hedonist or hedonic value to them too, right?

Like that's sometimes, yeah. Modern, like they say, okay, oh, you're volunteering at a shelter or something like that, and it's obviously not like a enjoyable thing necessarily. But the hedonist would ever even that, you get some sort of hedonic value. You feel good about that at some level, right? Right, which Epicurus would say that that would be like a catastemic pleasure. Right, right. It's like an enduring satisfaction that you get from it.

A lot of this is just semantics. Right. I think, you know, Epicurus is often associated with hedonism. I've seen generally people who are defenders of Epicurus redefine his philosophy as Epicureanism because I think hedonism has just gotten such a bad There's a bad connotation. Yeah, yeah. Really bad connotation.

over the centuries. I do think one of the reasons he gets kind of skewered quite a bit is that like he really showed no, like generally speaking, all of the other schools of thought, both religious and philosophical, they kind of have this, there's almost this like aesthetic quality to them. And by aesthetic, I don't mean like visually appealing. I mean like self-flagellation. Right. You know, you should suffer for your happiness and satisfaction. Like you owe a pound of flesh to like live a life worth living. Whereas Epicurus, like, saw no reason for that. Right.

He was like, yeah, dude, if you just want to, like, drink wine and have orgies, like, and you're not hurting anybody, go for it. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. Right. Whereas Aristotle was like, whoa, you have to be virtuous. And Buddhists would be like, no, you're attached. You know, Epicurus was like, nah, dude, knock yourself out. So I do think his, it's not so much he, like, said that that was what created happiness.

It was just that, like, he had no qualms with it. Okay, okay. So putting all this together. We're already seen two common threads that I think we're just going to continue to see over and over again throughout this entire episode, which is the first of which is that happiness is not achieved in and of itself. Happiness is a byproduct of doing other things. And then the second thread is that happiness is probably more practically achieved, not by finding the right things to do, but by simply removing the impediments to having it. So it's actually, it's probably higher ROI of your effort to remove the stress in your life, then they'll like go find what's going to bring you eudaimonic happiness or catastrophic pleasure, right?

Instead of like worrying about the soup kitchen and how much you're volunteering, like it's, you're probably just going to get way more mileage of like deleting that toxic friend out of your life. Like that's the 80-20. I'm really getting ahead. Yeah. Yeah. But like, that's like up front. And I mean, we're going to come back to this later with a lot more depth. But like that really is kind of, you know, the long and short of it. I guess you could see it as a little bit of attention like this Eastern Western philosophy a little bit. You mentioned like in the East or the non attachment and Buddhism especially. And then there's like with Aristotle and the virtues, living virtuously versus the nonattachment in the East and West. Are those necessarily mutual? exclusive. The way I've actually tried to like kind of reconcile those in my own head is,

you know, strive to live virtuously and achieve the things you want to achieve, but don't be attached to the outcomes. Do you think that's, is that just my Western mind trying to, trying to like not be able to sit with paradox and just be able to reconcile that? Or is there something to that, do you think? I mean, I think that's a valid interpretation of it. You know, what's interesting, I went back for this episode, I went back and reviewed some some Buddhist stuff that like I hadn't really looked at in 10 or 20 years. And I'd actually forgotten that like, so the word duca that is like kind of associated with the first noble truth of Buddhism, which is that life is suffering.

What's interesting is like, duca doesn't have a direct translation in the English. And it actually, it's like, it's actually a metaphorical word. So duca actually literally means like the gap in a wheel that's turning like in a cart. And then I think the prefix do means like broken or off. And so the whole concept of Buddhist, of suffering in Buddhism is basically it's like a broken wheel that's still being driven on a cart. It's out of balance and out of harmony. And you see this in Confucianism as well. It's like everything in like kind of the whole moral order in Confucianism is like built around social harmony.

It's like all about balancing and being in like adding value to the people around you and not causing more problems than you then you solve. I mean, again, we talked about this, I think we talked about this last episode in the emotions episode, like in the research, they find that people from East Asia are like, are able to hold contradictory thoughts in their head. The dialectical thinking. Right. And I think, I think some of that is just because so much of their, the basis of their understanding of human happiness is about balance and tradeoffs and understanding that there's like, in any given experience, there's both pleasure and pain are going to be present. different proportions. The Western approach is like very individually focused and, and I guess kind of idealistic.

Yeah. There's this idea of like there is a right way to do everything. Whereas I think in the East, it's more, there's more of an understanding of like, no, like you're just, every situation is going to be challenging in a new way and you're just going to have to like keep adapting.

And you're definitely not the first person that kind of like create that overlap. And there definitely is a lot to be said about like doing things with, without expecting a certain outcome. Like, that is a good thing to do. But in terms of like the actual literature itself, like, I mean, that probably is a little bit of a westernized interpretation of Eastern philosophy. Right. I'm trying more to just kind of sit with that and be like, oh, okay, there's just these two things can exist at the same time and kind of be intention of that's okay.

The weird thing is, is like, and this has kind of been a more recent thought of mine, especially like, I mean, as you know, like Aristotle. just keeps coming up in this podcast over and over and over again. So at this point, I've, like, ended up going back and rereading a bunch of his stuff. And, like, to Aristotle, a virtue was an ideal that, like, you could approach and you could never embody, right? It's like, justice is a moving target. So it kind of ends up back at, like, that Buddhist concept of, like, you know, just finding balance and everything. You know, so Aristotle's like, you should pursue justice and temperance. Well, it's like justice and temperance are moving targets. And as you move through your life, they're going to mean different things to you based on what's going on

around you. So it's like the result is kind of the same. It's just the framing is completely different. So these two threads that we're talking about, right? The first one is that, you know, the best way to happiness is like by not pursuing happiness. And then the second one is that the highest ROI is to actually just instead of trying to be happy, remove unhappiness. And that's going to get you further. These show up quite a bit in the modern literature. The first 60 to 80 years of psychology was very much focused on alleviating suffering. You know, who's finding people who were deeply depressed or had some sort of mental illness and like figuring out what was going on and diagnosing them and trying to get them to like feel okay again. And it really wasn't

until, you know, Martin Seligman and a number of his colleagues, I believe in like the 70s or 80s, started asking you're like, what about making, taking people who are already feeling okay, but like just feeling even better? Like what if we could take on a scale from one to 10 instead of spending all of our time trying to get people who are a three and a four up to a seven, what if we took people who were out of seven and we found a way to get them up to eight and nine consistently? And it was at the time, it was a revolutionary. And so a lot of the early happiness research started in the 70s. And a lot of that early research is just like super cool, mind-blowing.

A lot of counterintuitive results came out of that. but by the 80s, especially with like Carol Riff and a couple of other people's work, like you kind of just end up back at Aristotle. It's like, oh, yeah, there's Hedonia and Eudaimonia. Okay, yeah, that's the thing. That's the whole, yeah, okay, we got it. And similarly, you know, it's when you look at, we're going to get into all the happiness research around things like sex and money and relationships and, you know, what area you live in

and material possessions and like all the different things. And it's, and again and again, what we're gonna find is like, it's not so much about like having the Lamborghini or the giant house. It's more just about like not being broke and not being alone. You know, it's like adding more doesn't bring more happiness. It's just, you just remove unhappiness to a point

where you're satisfied. And then like that's kind of the game. With that, I will turn it over to you, and we could start digging into some of the research. They did. We started studying this from more scientific point of view, right? And like you mentioned, the 70s and 80s, positive psychologists kind of started to become a thing. And they wanted to know what constitutes human thriving, right?

What influenced that? The problem with that, however, is what they call the weird problem in social sciences, right? Now, the weird is an acronym, okay? And it stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic populations. Okay. Now, if you take that, that's about 15% of the global population that lives in those societies, right? It's basically North America, Australia, New Zealand. Western Europe.

Yeah, for the most part. Yeah. That's about 15% of the world population. However, about 90% of the studies done in the social sciences has been done on those populations. Yeah. Okay. So our view of what constitutes something. like happiness, which is a complex psychological phenomenon, right, is based largely on about

one and six people throughout the world, based on the psychology or the social makeup of one and six people throughout the world. So we're ignoring a big part of the globe and making these grand generalizations. Now, it's become more and more apparent that this is what we've done, and we've tried, in recent years especially, we've tried to mitigate some of the problems with that. But with something like happiness or any other complex psychological phenomenon, Obviously, cultural influences are going to have a big impact on what makes someone happy. The cultural influences, the traditions, the history of a country, the genetic makeup of a population, all of those things contribute. And yet we've only studied a fairly small slice of those.

On top of that, too, a lot of times we only study college kids too. Right. Like, it's not even necessarily adults with fully grown prefrontal cortexes, right? Yeah. So that's kind of the weird problem in a nutshell. And so to illustrate, like, so in North America, in Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and these places, like we talked about in the Emotions episode, we tend to value these high arousal positive emotions, right?

And we kind of equate that with happiness, or we're more prone to equate that with happiness, right? When, if you look at a lot of different parts of the world, those things are not valued nearly as highly as we do. We talked about this in the Emotions episode as well. Just to give you an example, in East Asia, like in China and Japan, they, value much more calm states, balance, social harmony. Those are what they associate with happiness when they think of happiness just in general.

For example, in Japan there's this proverb that the nail that sticks out is the one that gets hammered down, right? Yeah. They also have this concept of Ikigai. I believe that's how they say it's kind of like loosely translated. It's like life purpose, but it's specifically a life purpose when you're fulfilling a social role, right? So you find happiness in doing your duty.

And it's not this ecstatic individual achievement that we place so high in the West. You know, if you think about China, too, I just saw a scholar talking about the difference between China and the U.S. And, you know, China has like a 5,000-year history. And it's just littered with famine, war, anarchy. There were times where there weren't even a government there. As you look at a lot of Western cultures, especially with colonial traditions like the United States, You show up in the new world and you stake out your plot of land and by next year you can be trading some crops for hard currency and everything just gets better every single year. In the United States especially, we've never like dealt with an invasion, like a large scale invasion of another country.

When things do go bad, we freak the fuck out. We do everything we can, right, to make sure they're not going bad anymore. It's a very different way of thinking about this. Whereas in China, you know, they've learned to deal with this 5,000 year history that's very checkered with these ideals around fans. family and social support, right? Your devotion to the clan. And so it's a very different way of thinking about the world. And yet what we studied mostly in the social sciences so far has been these weird populations. And so Russia is another example to you. Like, you know, especially in the West we think of Russians as it's just like cold, miserable people,

right? Sorry to the Russians out there. That's kind of wet. But they too have a very long history of, you know, being invaded and famine and like in World War II, right? They lost something like 25 to 30 million people. The United States lost 400,000. Just think about that. Like, there's a very different, you come out of an experience like that with a very different worldview.

Yeah. Okay, especially around things like happiness. And the Russians have some interesting sayings like laughter without reason is a sign of stupidity. I think if anybody knows a Russian, they would absolutely agree with that, right? I could totally see a Russian saying that.

If you laugh a lot, you'll cry a lot too. Like, there's just... And then in the Middle East, like exhibitions of being overly happy are often met with or often you're seen as you're trying to cause envy and other people so they're kind of kept down as well. Interesting. And then we've already talked about the Buddhist perspective too about the non-attachment. Happiness being one of those things if you're striving for it. That's a form of attachment you need to get away from.

So there's this like when we talk about the research, keep that in mind and we'll try to point that out when it does come up. But this idea of what happiness is, I think a lot of us think that it's a universal thing and what we're going to find out is very much not, right? I was struck in the research. We came across one of these cross-cultural studies. And in one of them, they asked the Japanese man, they said, how much do you think about happiness?

And he looked at the researcher and he was like, I've never thought about it once. Yeah, it's like, I've never even, what are you talking about? Right? Like, just not how I approach the world. But like a lot of cultures like in Japan, if there's social harmony within the group, then you're happy. You can't be happy alone. It has to be only experienced with the people around you that you love and care about.

Right. So there's that. And then, okay, so this also gets into things like the World Happiness Report. Like we see this every day. You already talk about this? Don't give you started. We see this every year the World Happiness Report comes out and they rank countries. Who's the happiest country?

And inevitably, it's always a Scandinavian country. Yeah. Lately it's been Finland the last several years, last decade. or so. It's like Finland has always been the top or near the top. Can I, can I get in here? What are you going to do a YouTube video on this? Yeah, yeah. And it never happened because it's, it's just Finland's a long way, wait. I wanted to do a video on this because, you know, Finland is one world's happiest country,

seven years in a row. And if you actually look at the way the world happiness report is compiled, they do it, what's the name of the ladder? The Cantrell ladder. The Cantrell ladder. So they do it, they use the thing called the Cantrell ladder, which is basically they go around the world and they ask people on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is your best ideal life and zero is your worst possible life,

where are you currently? And generally speaking, everybody kind of lands around 6 or 7. But Finland has consistently been at the top. It's been like 7.8 or 7.9. Now, what's really interesting is that if you actually go talk to Finnish people, they're all like, what are you talking about?

The rest of you must be miserable because we are not anywhere. Yeah. Have you been to Finland? But what's interesting, so I have a couple Finnish friends in my life and I talked to him about this and they said that in Finnish culture there is a strong ethos of not expecting too much out of life in general but out of yourself. Like there's like there's a lot of pride like people are it's a big part of the culture to be humble and to not just, you know, don't, don't dream too big.

You know, don't set yourself up for disappointment. You know, just keep things simple. They even have a phrase for it as hante lackey. Yeah, yeah. So they basically, if you take that cultural aspect and then you combine it with Cantrell's ladder, which is like you go from country to country and you say, on a scale from one to ten where 10 is the best possible life you can imagine for yourself, and you have a culture that has trained you to not imagine great things for yourself, then yeah, you're probably going to

look around and be like, yeah, I'm an eight or I'm a nine. Like, things are pretty good. And I look at stuff like that and I have so much skepticism of like, are we even measuring the same thing? Right. Like how do you, how do you even measure this stuff? Yeah. Just know again, I think this is an artifact of kind of the weird psychology that we talked about. And it's we, the people from these countries come up with these surveys and then they give them to everybody in the world and that's an artifact of it is that they're emphasizing just one little part of what they define as happiness and it turns out that it's kind of bullshit because if you do other surveys that say you know they they have more of an emphasis on the collectivist's culture around you the collective

happiness around you that changes it completely and it's more east asia and Latin America that gets to be they're happier than they are on the world happiness report so yeah whenever you see that take it with a grain of salt that's kind of the takeaway from that anyway. Yeah, yeah. And it's not to say that like where you live doesn't have an effect on your happiness. We'll get to that at some point, right? It's just that it's a lot more complicated than that. And there's just better ways of thinking about it rather than just asking people going around, are you happy? Are you happy? That's a terrible way to measure happiness for one. And yeah, yeah, we'll get to why that is a little bit too. Cool. So if you're listening to all of

this and you're wondering, how the hell do I actually implement any of this into my life? How do I actually become happier? Well, I've got good news for you. We've taken all the actionable advice in this episode. We've broken it down into a 30-day happiness challenge, and we have put it in the community. The community is called Momentum. It is a group of people who take action every single day to improve their lives. One of the reasons I made this community is because it's so easy to get overloaded with information and develop this false sense that you have to do these drastic, dramatic actions to actually move the needle in your life.

When actually what changes your life is small. consistent actions day after day after day, basically building that momentum over a long period of time. So that's exactly what we've done. We take every month, we take the solved episode, we break it up into 30 small exercises over 30 days, and then we just challenge the community to do those exercises. Do a small thing each and every day takes anywhere from 10 minutes to maybe 30 minutes at most. And if you just rack up those small winds and eventually you accumulate like a snowball of change in your life. So we've already seen a lot of incredible transformations in the community. I think we're up to a couple thousand people.

We just had our first meetups, which was a ton of fun. So it's a great group of people. Everybody's like very growth-oriented and growth-minded, and it's super easy to follow along. There's a 60-day money-back guarantee. So if you fucking hate it, we'll give you your money back. Go to findmomimum.com slash happiness to find out more. See you in there. versus taco truck salsa, whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one.

For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. Okay, so like you mentioned at the top here, Mark, there are kind of three types of happiness or three components, at least, to happiness that we want to go over. And you've mentioned a couple of them already. We're going to add another one. First, though, I want to talk about that we just went over kind of the science behind it. You know, there's a scientific approach.

It's very hard to measure something like this, though. Like what science is trying to do is trying to make this objective, but obviously happiness is a very subjective thing. and so it's very hard to get a grasp on like an objective measure of this. But we've done an okay job of it. I do think the framework that we've come up with from a scientific perspective is informed by a lot of these ancient traditions and everything like that. And I think we've kind of come to a pretty good definition of it and these three components of it anyway.

And so we'll kind of get into how we measure them and all the nuances around them. So the three main parts are affect, there's life satisfaction, and then there's meaning slash purpose, right? This kind of maps onto like the hedonia. That's the affective part, right? This is how you feel kind of on a day-to-day basis. Moment to moment to moment even to, yes, very much so. Whereas the life satisfaction is more like the eudaimonia. It's kind of when you step back and you think about, okay, how is my life going at this point? And then, of course, there's meaning and purpose. And we'll dive into each one of these. Okay. The meaning and purpose more about like your existential significance in the universe and the world around you. Okay. So we'll break those down. And

we'll talk about what influences each one, okay? So with the affect, again, that's the feeling part. Moment to moment, day-to-day existence, whether you feel good or bad. The affective side of happiness is it's more influenced by your circumstances around you or the environment or anything that's happening in any given moment, right? So it's very much, it's very volatile on a day-to-day basis, right? Contrast that with life satisfaction, the second component here, the eudaimonia, right? This is when you step back and somebody asking, you know, how is your life going? And you'll kind of step back and look at it from a big picture and say, am I satisfied with what I've achieved so far? Do I like how my life is going just on a, on a, on whatever terms that I have defined them as? Would I, would I change

anything? Do I, how much do I regret? Right. Kind of those bigger questions that we'll ask ourselves, that is much less influenced by kind of environmental changes or the day to day ups and downs that we experience. And it's a little bit more durable, a little bit longer term. It can go up and down, but it's more on the basis of like weeks or months or even years, as opposed to like the day the day fluctuations that we see in affect. We talked a little bit about this in the emotions episode as well. It's like there's kind of two components to your emotions as well. And then that kind of gets us into the third component, which I don't, I don't think is, it's not quite as as developed in the scientific literature, but they're, it's becoming more, which is the meaning

and the purpose. We talk about this a lot. You know, this came up when we talked to Arthur Brooks. Yeah. And I like it. I like that he kind of lumps this in with the other two, especially because when you look at the scientific literature on purpose, it does have such an outsized effect on mental health, psychological well-being, like all these like different measurements that we're talking about of our day-to-day effect, our life satisfaction. So it feels appropriate to me. he was actually the first person that I came across who like added that in.

And I really liked it when I talked to him. So and he he like explains it very well. So yeah, big fan of that. And as you know, like I'm like all about meaning and purpose. Like you know, life satisfaction is great. But like ultimately if you have a strong sense of meaning and purpose in your life, if you feel like you're like giving yourself to some greater cause or greater good, it makes all those other fluctuations feel manageable.

Right. Right. There's even evidence to suggest that like a sense of meaning and purpose in your life can be completely independent of whether you're satisfied with your life or whether you're feeling good or bad at the moment either. Totally. So this is the most durable out of all of those components of happiness. If you find something that's meaningful to you, it's very unlikely that that's going to change. There's obviously things that could change that in the long term. But, you know, like parents raising children, especially they've done some studies with parents who raise disabled children. And that is not a fun existence, obviously. Day to day, they experience a lot of negative emotions. They're probably not super satisfied with their lives. I get angry emails on that one. But they feel a strong sense of meaning.

Well, hold on, I've got a point to this. Okay. I'm getting to something here. Okay. They feel a very strong sense of meaning and purpose in their lives, which kind of like the rest of it doesn't matter at that point. Not that it doesn't matter, but that it's trivial compared to what they feel like they're doing, their daily purpose that they have.

The point you just raised, I think, is important, which is like, because what you run into with happiness research, and this has long been my problem with it too. It's like, it's, I guess it's the so what problem. You know, like, you can start digging into all these studies and find all this stuff like, oh, well, if you, you know, you have this many friendships, you'll be a little bit happier. And like, my reaction is usually just like, well, so what? Does that mean I should go, like, optimize how many friendships I have or, like, figure out, like, how many. social interactions I have per day. Like, so what? And even something like that, I think if you talk to parents who have raised, like,

struggled to raise a child with special needs, or if you've talked to somebody who's, like, overcome a lot of adversity in their life, and they, maybe they haven't experienced as much life satisfaction or they haven't been as happy as a lot of other people, there's still that, so what? I mean, this kind of comes back to the happiness is overrated piece, which is like, if you've lived a meaningful life and you've done things that are, feel incredibly impactful to you. Like, who cares?

Whether you were happy or not? Yeah. Why does that matter so much? Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. Each of these three levels or components of happiness, they are differentially kind of sensitive to hedonic adaptation.

Okay. And what's hedonic adaptation? So we've talked about hedonia and the hedonic treadmill, basically, is what we're talking about. So when you experience, say, a big gain in your life, you get more money or you're in a new relationship or, you know, you acquire something material and you enjoy it, you quickly adapt to that as your new reality. They call that hedonic adaptation.

So you get a new car, let's say, or a new house. And it's great at first and you love it. You're like, I love my life. Within a few months, you're like, ah, this fucking car, I got to go, you know, change the wheel again or it's, you know, it's broke again. You know, the new house you buy, it's great at first, too. But then you're like, eh, it's fine, whatever. But I wish I had a bigger house now.

Yeah, refrigerators leaking. Refrigerators leaking, yes, from personal experience. That's hedonic adaptation, okay? And each of these levels of happiness, each of the components of happiness are sensitive to it in different ways. The most sensitive one is your affect, obviously. You're gonna feel, your affect is the most volatile,

so it's gonna change to the quickest, right? So it's, I watched a movie last night. It was a great movie. It was really happy for an hour, and then today. Next morning you're- Don't care, whatever. Yeah. Whereas life satisfaction, you know, if you achieve an important goal or something along those lines, you're probably going to be satisfied for a little while about that.

That can last for a few months, maybe even a year. That's great. And then meaning and purpose is much less sensitive to fluctuations in these hedonic adaptations that we have. Okay. Because if you find something that's meaningful or purposeful in your life, it's just you don't really care about all the externalities around it as much, right? Yeah. I think a good way to think about it, it's like probably, and by the way, this is not in the literature. I'm just kind of spitballing this. You know, affect is probably measurable on minutes to days. Life satisfaction is probably measured in months to years and then purpose and meaning is probably measured in years to decades. Yes, I would agree with that too. My thing with this to though is I think most of us, I'm certainly guilty of this. We approach this backwards. We start with affect. We say, I want to feel better right now. Yeah. And so we look for ways to feel better right now, which there are plenty of those,

especially in modern society. There's plenty of ways to just feel better in the moment. And then we think, okay, if I can feel better, then at some point I'm going to achieve some sort of satisfaction about my life. And then I can finally find some meaning and purpose that I can pursue. I think we have that absolutely backwards. And I think that's the whole point of this episode actually is to point that out, is that you, I think it's a, better, more durable sense of satisfaction and happiness that you will achieve if you focus on finding meaningful pursuits first. Yeah.

And then you'll develop some sort of satisfaction around your life. Like, oh, this is all right. I've accomplished this thing. I feel good about myself. I feel good about my life. I feel good about what I've done for the people around me. And that brings on these nice emotions that we're trying to harvest. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And doing it that way, it almost like inoculates you towards. The downswings, the other things, right? So it's like if you're pursuing something very meaningful in your life and it doesn't quite, like, things aren't going great, you're having a bad month or a bad year or whatever, it's going to sustain you through that period. You're like, you know what, this really sucks. This is really hard now, but hey, it's worth it. This is worth doing.

And same thing with the negative affect. You know, it's like something goes wrong or, you know, your kids being a brat or, you know, whatever, the car breaks down again. It's like if you've got that higher meaning or purpose tethering you, you're just going to be more resilient in dealing with all the bullshit. Yeah, yeah, for sure. One kind of metaphor I came up with this for this too is that a lot of times we treat happiness like farming. Like we're planting little affect seeds so we can harvest happiness emotions at some point. When really what we should be doing is more looking at it like we're a builder, like we're construction worker of some sort. And we're building a building that has a solid foundation and it can weather the storm.

Yes, it still needs maintenance. Yes, you still have to keep it up and everything like that. But you're building a building that can withstand all the storms of life, whereas, like, you know, a field is just exposed and you're screwed. And it's going to have bad years and good years and bad days and good days and all that kind of thing. So I thought, I don't know, that's kind of one way to think about it anyway. Yeah. I'm just kind of thinking about, I mean, we're going to get into age later. But it's interesting because when I think about it, generally speaking,

I think young people over index on affect or hedonic happiness. They're kind of always looking for the next thrill. And I imagine middle age people are a little bit over indexed on life satisfaction. You know, when you think of somebody who's having a midlife crisis, they're probably having a crisis over, did I do enough? Did I accomplish what I wanted to? am I like, am I proud of myself? Could I have done more? And then, but really it's, I guess, you know,

and I guess it's older folks that like generally finally get around to the larger meaning and purpose. Yeah. Yeah. I think there is kind of a developmental aspect to it for sure. And we will get into this more. I have a whole section on how happiness can change throughout the lifespan and what you can do about that too. And kind of how you can match your life at whatever stage you're in to optimally. to optimizing for happiness.

Not that you should be optimizing for happiness, but it just kind of works that way. Sure. Is there anything you can do about that? I mean, sure, there is. At the same time, too, I don't know, when you're younger, you know, do you regret, like, party in a whole bunch and chasing girls and stuff like that?

I don't really, you know? I'm kind of glad I did it in some ways. There's things I wish I would have done differently, sure. Yeah. It's funny because I don't regret, I don't regret the, Hodonic stuff. I regret how much I prioritized it. And I think maybe this

is an interesting thing because when I look back at my younger self, I mean, I did care a lot about the hedonic stuff. But at least for me, I think I mistook the hedonic stuff for being life satisfaction stuff. Yes. Okay. I thought that if I

went out more and had more friends and had more crazy experiences or traveled to more places, that that would give me a lot of life satisfaction but it turns out it was just kind of the hedonic treadmill in a very fancy disguise. That's what I mean by people,

like when I say that people, I think, approach this backwards. And I think just developmentally for whatever reason were kind of wired that way to chase this progression backwards anyway. So we think that that attaining some amazing affect is going to give us some sort of life satisfaction. That satisfaction has meaning within it when it's absolutely the other way around. It's the other way around.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, sure. If you're in your 20s and you could flip that on its head, great. I think like that could be a wonderful goal. Most people don't do that and that's okay. And we'll talk about, again, we'll get into the life trajectory and the age stuff. And there's still things you can do about that and just kind of accept where you are too at some point.

I want to go on a little sidebar here about related to hedonic adaptation. Dan Gilbert has his fantastic book, Stumbling on Happiness. Yeah, great book. He has a concept that I love, which he calls the psychological immune system, which is basically like, our psychology is kind of almost built

to return itself to a seven out of ten. Yeah. Consistently, right? So it's like something great happens to you. You win the lottery. Awesome. You're a ten out of ten for a few days, then you're a nine out of ten,

then you're an eight out of ten. And then pretty soon you've completely adapted to it, and you're like a seven out of ten again. You like settle in there. similar thing if something bad happens to you. And you just kind of always come back to a seven out of ten. And what's interesting that he points out is that our perceptions of our situation actually alter themselves.

Our beliefs about ourselves and about the world around this will actually alter themselves to push us back into the seven out of ten. Let's say you grew up poor and then you win the lottery and you're like, oh my God, I'm the luckiest person in the world. But then you go buy a nice house, you move to a nice part of town, you buy a nice car, and suddenly you're surrounded by other people with a lot of money in a nice car and a nice house. And suddenly you're like, oh, John Smith across the street thinks he's better than me. Like, oh, he did the, like, I wish I had a house like that or I wish I was doing this instead.

And it's like, suddenly your mind has found new explanations and rationalizations for like why you're not a 10 out of 10. You're a 7 out of 10. And what I love about Gilbert's concept, because, again, if you listen to like a lot of self-help gurus or, you know, quote unquote wisdom on the internet, they're basically telling you, they're like, you can be a 10 out of 10 anytime you want. Just be grateful. Remember the things that are 10 out of 10, right? And it's like, sure, fine. Like you can, I guess technically. It takes a lot of mental effort. But Gilbert's argument is that you don't necessarily want that because the 7 out of 10 is actually, it is an evolutionary feature and not a bug. Like it's the creature that is a 7 out of 10 on the,

a happiness that is always looking for ways to improve itself. It's a creature that's seven out of ten that is always going to be mindful of new opportunities or new things that could try or potential threats that might come around the corner. And it's almost as if being a seven out of ten is the most adaptive. In the emotions episode, we talked about how the whole point of emotions is just to be adaptable to one's environment in the most effective way possible. And it turns out I think seven out of ten happiness is probably what makes us the most adaptable to our life in general, right?

It's like you're dissatisfied enough to keep striving and keep trying new things, but you're satisfied enough to, like, not put a gun in your mouth and, and, like, get out of bed in the morning, right? So I always loved Gilbert's framing of that. It makes a ton of sense to me. And it also just comes back to the main point of, like, maybe you shouldn't be trying to optimize happiness. Like, we're going to talk about baseline happiness in a second,

and kind of that like rubber banding back to seven out of ten that happens to everybody pretty much all the time. I think it's an interesting way to frame the hedonic adaptation conversation. And I also think it's something that you can leverage to your advantage. Like people don't think about this, right? It's like people get bummed out that they're like, oh, well, if I start making a bunch of money, eventually I'm going to take it for granted and I'm not going to be like super happy anymore.

That sucks that I'm going to adapt to it. Well, it works in the other direction too, right? It's like if you're afraid to take a pay cut, maybe to go into a new career, and that's because like making less money is very scary to you. Well, hedonic adaptation works in the opposite direction as well. That pay cut is going to feel awful for the first month or the first three months. But a year in, it's going to feel normal and you're going to feel fine, and you're actually going to be working on something that you care about a lot more.

So again, it's like optimizing for that meaning and purpose and not. not worrying so much about how you're going to feel in the short term. Right. Yeah. And it's like going back to the Buddhist point, too, is like just accepting that you're going to feel a seven most of the time. Yes. Like that in itself is kind of liberating too.

And it pulls the emphasis off of the affective part of happiness as well, just in the day-to-day moment-to-moment stuff. You're like, oh, I feel like shit. Well, that's okay. You're not going to feel like shit forever. Yes. Right. And that's part of the psychological immune system is because it's bringing you back

to a set point. You're right. It does change based on your surroundings. But there's kind of like a. if you can learn to just kind of accept it, that's how it is. I don't know, there's a freeing, liberating aspect to that as well. Yeah. Without being complacent, too.

It's like strategic dissatisfaction. You know, it's like just dissatisfied enough to be like, you know what? I should get up and go do something. There's a, I mean, there's an evolutionary wisdom. There's a lot of wisdom. Right? There's a lot of wisdom in it. And again, Gilbert talks about this in his work.

But he's like, you know, if you're a 10 out of 10 all the time, you're basically walking around being like, everything's awesome. Yeah. Why do anything? Fucking annoying is what you are. I hate those people. Yeah, but I mean, I don't consider myself a pessimistic person, but those people are annoying me just as much as the Debbie Downers. There is a certain amount of, I mean, it is, it's unrealistic, right?

Because you don't adapt. Right. Right. If you feel 10 out of 10 all the time, why do anything? Right. Why change anything? I just, I can't trust anybody who's a 10 out of 10 all the time either. You know what are you? Yeah.

Probably full of shit. Yeah. Or on drugs. Yeah, I was going to say a lot of cocaine. That's a 10 out of 10 all the time on cocaine, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The ride that steals the spotlight every time it hits the road, that's the Volkswagen TIG-1.

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We should absolutely talk about sex drugs and rock and roll. Kind of the only reason I'm here. I know. I know. This is all been a facade, right? Like my calendar said sex, drugs, rock and roll, and then I showed up and it was a happiness podcast. Yeah, it got me.

Yeah. I just like, oh. Sorry to disappoint you, Mark. Let's get, let's make this really fucking boring and nerdy how about. Yeah. Sorry. No, but really. So what are like some of the factors that make us happy and what don't?

I think there's, I think some of these you're going to think that, you know, oh, of course I didn't think that was going to make me happy. But there's like a little bit of nuance in here we can talk about as well. Let's kind of just start at the top here of the list we came up with. These are some of the most common things or experiences that people associate with with happiness. So I think we're going to talk about money. We're going to talk about relationships. We're going to talk about sex.

We're going to talk about geography, like where you live, like all. the things that people associate with being happy or miserable and we're going to like actually get into the research of like how much do these things actually affect whether you're happy or not. Right. Right. Okay. So let's start with drugs and alcohol, right? So the artificial happiness that we try to manipulate our happiness with maybe, obviously these are very common. It's a very common way for people to either achieve some sort of new affective state or even happiness in and of itself. It's got this quick fix appeal to it, right? You have a drink, you pretty much instantly feel better,

you know, you take a hit, whatever it is. They do cause these, like immediate surges in dopamine and serotonin and all that in your brain, right? And so you do get

this short-lived pleasure from that. Everybody kind of knows that. Everybody also knows the, you know, risk of addiction and all of that and the downsides to that. The thing is, is that when you have these

artificial spikes of, say, dopamine or serotonin or whatever in your brain, your brain often, it's kind of like its own immune system to, it kind of shoots the other way. Right.

And so you'll experience a lot of negative affect after those things wear off. You know, withdrawal that we know about. The best description of alcohol I've ever heard is you're borrowing happiness from tomorrow. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, man, I used to have such bad hangovers. That was so true. I was so salient so true for me when I would drink.

The other thing I want to say here, and anybody listening who's like done a lot of drugs will confirm this. Sometimes I'll hear people say like, oh, but if you're on drugs, like that's not real happiness, like, you're not actually happy. And I'm like, man, I don't know what shit you tried, but like, if you get the good stuff, like, yeah, yeah. Like, that is legit euphoria and joy. Sure.

And it's, uh, which again, should, the lesson there should be, maybe we should under-prioritize euphoria and joy. Like, if it's that easily accessible for such high a cost. Right. Maybe we shouldn't make it such a priority. Right. Right. Now, absolutely.

Your stress system, too, I mean, it screws with your, your whole stress. It's your whole body up. It does. Your stress response, it's basically it drags that your affective state and even your life satisfaction. It can drag that down over time, right? For sure. And then what you end up doing is you just kind of like, this is how the addiction cycle

starts, right? You're trying to achieve that again, so you need more drugs or alcohol to do it. And it just gets into this vicious cycle. Okay. I think we're aware of that. One way you could look at the addiction cycle is that you're trading life satisfaction in purpose to get more short-term effect, right? So it's like, okay, make me feel really good today.

And then I'll give up a little bit of life satisfaction, a little bit of purpose. And it's like the first time you do that, that maybe that feels like a good trade. But then it's like the 10th time you do it, you're like, uh, and then, you know, you get to the 100th time you've done it. You're like, okay, my life's a mess. I'm a mess. I hate myself, you know. And that's kind of how you end up in that spot.

Yeah. So obviously using substances to alter your mood. I mean, okay, here's the thing about the two. There is some value in, let's say, social drinking, okay? Or you could even take something like an antidepressant. Yeah. Okay, well, what do you mean? Well, you just said substances to change your mood.

Oh, I got you. So I was thinking, I just wanted to say, like, we're not, this isn't. No judgment here. Well, this isn't even necessarily, like, exclusive to, like, say, party drugs, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, this could be something, this could be like a pharmaceutical or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And if you need that, obviously, you know, if you have some sort of mental health disorder or something like that. Obviously, I'm not, antidepressants are great. They've helped a lot of people. I'm not not shitting on those by any means. But more if you are intentionally kind of like just trying to alter your affective state, especially on a regular basis, that's something you probably want to look at. Now, that said, though, I do think there's a place for drugs and alcohol in society, recreational drugs and alcohol in society.

Let's fucking go. Yeah. This is what you're. here for it, right? This is what you get up for. Alcohol itself is it's a great social lubricant. It's all I mean like come on. Like if you have a drink and you're around some people you don't really know too well, it's a good way to get to know people. I'm not going to sit here and shit on alcohol all the time just because I don't drink. I actually have been the last couple months, I've been having a drink here or there. It's always been in a social setting. I haven't done it alone. It's been like half a glass of wine here. Okay. With dinner when I'm out with

friends. I have no urge to drink alone anymore. I'm looking at you judging me. I know. I know. I knew I was going to do this. I was going to do these judgey eyes. It's not a regular thing. I don't like it's not even a weekly basis or anything like that. But it's like one or two a month I've had, you know, in the past few months. I do think there's an interesting argument around like let's talk about like moderate use, right? Like moderate alcohol use or moderate, I don't know, marijuana use or something. Or even moderate like psychedelic use. Like there might be an argument of, you know, if let's say if mild drinking helps you make

friends and, you know, lowers inhibition and, you know, like helps you relax on the weekend so you're more effective during the week. That's probably not true. But, right. Yeah. Now, you know, like, to me, the argument would be social. Like, it's like gets you out of the house, gets you doing, building relationships with people. Like, yeah, as we'll see in a little bit, you know, relationships matter a lot. Yes. With happiness. So I guess I could see that argument a little bit. It's still not great. It's not, no, it's not great. It's not great for your health or anything like that. If there's a big social component to it, I think you can make an argument for it in certain situations and in great moderation as well. I'll give you a little bit of an example. Like, since I've

lived in Colorado, there's, I mean, there's a lot of breweries in Colorado. There's a big alcohol culture there. But there's also very much a big active lifestyle and social kind of culture there as well. So like you go on a hike and you might bring a beer with you or you go, you know, go on the ski slopes. You like stuff a couple in your coat for it. So when you're on the lift, you know, and you're like, have some beers, but you're with your friends, right? Okay. When I lived in the Midwest, it was like, you're just drinking to drink. That's what you just go out to drink, you know?

And there's more of just a drinking for the drinking state culture around it. And I think that is where you need to really kind of exercise a lot of caution around those sorts of things. Okay. We're getting off on. I didn't want to go this deep on alcohol. But, I mean, obviously heavy users of drugs and alcohol over the long term are less happy.

They've shown this over and over. Addicts, obviously. That's very obvious. Light to moderate though in social settings if you're gonna do it. Okay. Just be very very intentional right. Sure. Is what I'm saying. Okay.

So let's go to the sex part, Mark. Oh, okay. Now, okay. I'm interested again. Yeah, all right. Mack, I'm not to brag, but I've tried this and it's awesome. Okay. It's great.

I'm so, I'm so proud of you. Yeah, I know, right? It finally happened. I mean, okay, look, like physical. Intimacy, sex, it's a very human part of life, right? It's a very, it's a great part of life. Overdoing it and doing it for the wrong reasons, I think, is where we ran into trouble. Regular sex actually does correlate to like a better sustained mood for people. So your affect is actually moderated pretty well and elevated over time. Up to about once a week is what they find. Okay. Anything beyond that, it's kind of like,

there's a pretty diminishing return pretty quickly. Okay. Okay. And really what they found, too, is that it's more of the quality of the connection that you have with the person, even if you're, if it's a casual sex or, you know, you're single and you're kind of dating around. So it's how hot they are, basically. That's like, well, I mean, there's probably a pretty good mood.

Okay, look, look. That's what I'm hearing. There's a thing, like, you know, there's kind of this idea. I don't know how true this is, but the research actually is showing. this, you know, like Gen Z is having less sex. They're using less drugs and alcohol and stuff like that. There's, there are definitely times where I'm like, maybe you guys just need to have a beer and get laid. And that would fix a lot of your profits. Like, I'm not going to say that it's not going to lead to a life satisfaction. And I'm going to lead a lot of meaning in your life.

Totally. It could improve your week, right? It could definitely alleviate a lot of anxiety. Yes. Which seems to be a big problem among young people. You know, it's interesting. I remember so early in my career, I was a dating relationship coach. And I remember, particularly with with men, like especially young men, they seem to have this like, it's like if they're not having sex, it's like they're stirring in the deserts, you know, and it's like this cosmic injustice that's been inflicted upon them. And I remember I wrote, I wrote an article, this was a long time ago. This was probably like 2010 or something. But I wrote, I actually went and I looked at the research around sex and happiness and sex and life satisfaction and sex and health outcomes. And, you

Yeah, you do get a mild boost if you are sexually active on a number of these things. But like, it's not, like, if you're not having sex, it's not the end of the world. Like, you're not really losing a whole lot if you're celibate or if you're not having sex for an extended period of time. I remember I posted an article about this and like all of the 20 year old dudes like fucking rioted on my blog in the comment section. And they're like, easy for you to say fucking blah, blah, blah. But it's, it is true. Like, I mean, especially like if you go look at, I mean, they've like done research on like nuns and monks and stuff. Like people who are salivate and like perfectly fine.

Like it's. Well, how much of that do you think it was a little bit of a personality thing too? Because you and I have also found over the years, you know, we've done like some surveys on married couples. You know, you've written several articles where we've asked people, you know, like, you know, how important is sex? And there's such a mixed bag. Yes. And it definitely, there's a personality. thing to it, probably a developmental thing to it too. Yes, if you're a young male and you're

having this, you've got hormones raging and all of that. For sure. Well, and I would say culturally too. Culturally, sure. I think this is less true today, but especially like when you and I were growing up, like you were taught as a young man, like your status is equivalent to basically how many girls you can sleep with. So I look at that and I'm like, it has nothing to do with the sex. It has everything to do with a bunch of young men who are very insecure about their place in the world and how much value they have in the world. And they're using attention from women, sexual interest from women as like a metric to judge themselves. And yeah, that measurement's not going so well right now. So they're very upset. I think that's probably still true for the

most part. Yes. Yeah. I remember when I got married, we sent an email out to the audience and said, for everybody who's been happily married for more in 10 years, like send us your best advice. And I think we got like 600 or 700. I think we got 1,500, actually. Okay, 1500 submissions. Yeah, yeah. You and I went through everything and we kind of like aggregated it into like 10 or 15 basic pieces of advice.

And one of the items on that list was, I think I call it like sex was the state of the union or something like that. It was like your sex life needs to continue and persist and be healthy and fun and whatever. And I remember the initial version of that article had that in it because a lot of couples told us that or a lot of people told us that. And I remember as soon as it was published, another group of people sent in hundreds of emails saying, that's bullshit. I've been with my partner for 35 years and like, let me tell you, it's not all, like, things get old and dusty after a while.

And like, and that's okay. And so we actually ended up removing that. Like I remember so many people emailed in saying that that we ended up removing it from the article or did we revise it. I can't remember either. We did something with it. We did something. And basically the conclusion I remember coming to was like some people in the world connect a lot through sex and prioritize it.

It's something they care a lot about. And then there are some people in the world who like don't prioritize it. And they don't really care about it and they don't connect through it super strongly. And I would say if you are one of those people who like derives a lot of connection and intimacy from sex and you care a lot of. about it and it's like you have a very high sex drive and that's very important to you, then yeah, that's probably important in your relationship. The same way, like, plenty of things can be important in a relationship if it's something that you both value and you both talk about.

Yeah, right. But if it's something neither of you value or neither of you care about, then it's probably not a big deal. And so it was, I just, it's an interesting story in that how many people, just how, like, polarized it was. Like, how many people emailed then saying, like, sex, really mattered in their marriage and then how many people emailed in saying no no no no no sex really doesn't matter in the marriage like it's all about trust and friendship and respect and

you know living well together right right yeah so it's an individual thing it's a personality thing a little bit and just your relationship with yeah how well you connect with somebody um uh through sex or or physical touch or whatever it is yeah yeah yeah how hot they are how hot they are Yeah. Okay, I'll leave you with this one stat for this section, okay? Which I found just fascinating. Increasing from monthly to weekly can exceed the happiness gains of increasing your income from $15,000 to $50,000 annually. 15 to 50?

15 to 50. Like increasing, so increasing the frequency with which you have sex from monthly to weekly can have the same effect as increasing your salary from 15,000 to 50. $50,000 a year. That's pretty crazy. Well, I know what I'm doing with all my employees next year. Oh, that's going to be an HR nightmare. Oh, God. Anyway. Got very awkward in this room.

Please no. Time for your annual review, Drew. Okay. we're going to keep going here because the next action is money. I want to talk about that race, Mark, and not in that way, okay? Okay. Let's keep going, please. So speaking of money, how much does money actually influence our happiness?

And that's actually a pretty complicated question. The kind of conventional wisdom is, oh, you can't buy happiness, right? Well, that's true. You can't buy happiness. but you can buy a lot of things that might resemble happiness or at least take away a lot of misery, right? Yeah. You know, there's been all sorts of research that's gone into this,

especially in the last about 20 years or so. Tons and tons of research went into, you know, what's the effect of earning more money on your happiness or losing money or, you know, global GDP or your country's GDP on happiness? All of those things have been studied to death. And there was never really much of a consensus up until very recently. And I think we're forming more of a consensus around it.

You know, so a lot of people have probably heard this idea that, you know, in the United States anyway, if you're making, you need to make at least $75,000 a year to, to, oh, like, gain some level of baseline fulfillment or happiness. And then anything beyond that, it's not, it doesn't have a whole lot of a friend. Diminishing returns. And like, yeah, the conventional wisdom for like 20 years was like anything past middle class income was diminishing returns. And then it was like past 100K.

was basically no returns. But that's changed. Yes. Like, just in the last five or ten years, they've like really, they've actually discovered that money does correlate to happiness as far as they've measured it, but it just levels off dramatically. Yeah, there's a little more nuanced to it now. Okay. So, yeah, for a long time, there were kind of these two warring camps even.

Oh, no, the more money you make, it just keeps going and going. And a lot of people are like, yeah, that doesn't seem quite right. And then there was this other camp saying, nah, no, actually, like it's kind of shit after or 75,000 to 100,000, maybe just don't get a whole lot out of that, right? What they actually found, this is actually 2023 was this study that came out. So it was pretty recent, less than two years ago.

And it was from Daniel Conneman, the Nobel Prize winner of a psychologist and Matthew Killensworth. They had what they called an adversarial collaboration on this study. And what they found was that there's these different cohorts and they respond differently to money. So you have one cohort, which is what they call it just kind of, they don't call it this,

but I'll call them the miserable people, right? And yeah, they respond a little bit to money up to that $75,000 to $100,000 mark. And this study since 2023 is about $100,000. They respond, they do gain some life satisfaction and even affective gains up to that mark. And then pass that, just no amount of money is going to make them any happier. Then you have kind of what the conventional, wisdom found, which was, yeah, you do gain up to that level two. And then you get a little bit kind of incremental, small increases after that. Fine. But then they also found this third group

where they're just happy no matter what. Like you give them money, great. You give more money, even better. More money, more money. And they just can't be satiated. They're like, yeah, I love it. Keep got, keep it coming. And they just get happier and happier and happier. So there's like this perpetually unhappy co-art and then it's perpetually happy co-art and the people in the middle is what they found. So it kind of depends on your relationship with just kind of your baseline happiness and also your relationship with money, how it influences it. I just think that's fascinating. It's a fascinating finding that they found. It kind of resolved that, like I said, a big nerd debate that they had for over-a-dected.

This was like a 15-year kind of back and forth. Beef. Yeah, yeah. Psychologist's beef. Psychologist's beef is a big nerd war, like I said. Yeah. I would say that for the most part, for most people, money does have a diminishing return. Yes.

Okay. I would put myself in this camp for sure. And I do believe that even the people that do continue to increase happiness from money, it's a logarithmic curve. It still is, but it's a steeper one than the others. Yes, you're right. Yeah. It is a lot.

So it's like going from, you know, 100K to a million is like the equivalent of going 50k to 100k in terms of happiness or whatever. So it's, it's... For the most part, that's what they find out. Yeah. Those numbers are not... I just made those numbers up. But like, that's roughly what the proportionality looks like. Is that what you...

Is that your experience, I think, too? I generally, yeah. Yeah. Like, I would say, yeah, once... Like, getting the six figures feels a lot better than five figures, and then getting the seven definitely feels better than six, but then it's like, yeah, like at some point you just kind of stop carrying. What I've noticed just anecdotally, like both with myself and then just like a lot of very

wealthy friends. And I guess this kind of maps to what you're saying is like everybody seems to kind of have a number that once they hit that number, they just kind of check out. Yeah. Like I hit a number, I don't know, like pretty quickly after my book blew up. That like, I was like, okay, I'm good. Yeah. Like I'll take what, yeah, if you want to give me more, I'll take it.

like, I'm not really stressed. Like, I don't really think about, you know, how much money I'm making, how much money I want to make. And I've noticed that with other people, you know, I have friends who, you know, they hit six figures and they feel that way. They're like, okay, I'm good. And then I, like, and then I have friends who are eight figures and they're still not satisfied.

Yeah. Right. So it's just, it does seem very personal on some level. Yeah. I think it absolutely is. I mean, and obviously, too, going back to the whole relative thing, the people around you, we kind of talked about your psychological immune system. It's the same kind of with money, is that you obviously are going to compare yourself to the people around you as well. So if you're

moving to a fancier neighborhood, then you're going to feel less adequate, right, or whatever it is. But same too. Like with the country you live in is obviously going to make a huge difference. So, you know, those numbers were thrown out 75,000 to 100,000. That's like the United States, North America. If you're living in like in Latin America, it's close for like 30 or 40,000 or less than that, maybe even in some areas, depending on country. So it's relative, and then there's, you get different kind of increases or decreases your happiness based on the people around you as well. So the TLDR is that money does make you happy, but it's complicated.

Yeah. And it passed, past a certain point, past like probably a decent middle class income, it's a, probably diminishing returns and then and then B, it's also probably predicated on a bunch of other factors

like who you're surrounded by where you live your personality you know, all sorts of other things. Yeah, yeah. You've said this before too or we've talked about this before

anyway where you've said you know money, yeah sure it's not going to buy you happiness but it can really take away a lot of misery too which is we'll get into that which we'll come back to that yeah,

we'll keep coming back to the buy away unhappy. That was actually something my dad told me which I've find very wise, but he told me, he said money doesn't, the money doesn't buy happiness. It buys away unhappy. Yeah. Which that has definitely been my experience.

It's like most of the stuff like in my life today, like don't get me wrong. It's awesome having like nice stuff. Yeah. A nice house and everything. But like past that, like past like having a nice house and a decent car and all that stuff. Like really most of the satisfaction, it just comes away from like buying away friction. Like not worrying about how much my Uber costs. And like something comes up and I miss a flight, like, I'm not really sweating.

Yeah. It's not a big deal. Right. So it's just it's like it's just all the stress that doesn't happen is really actually what the value of it is. Now for sure. For sure. Okay. We'll leave that at that.

We'll keep moving here. Okay. The next one is fame and status. Okay. I don't know. I don't know how much. Do people think that being famous is still like an awesome? thing. Is that like a, is that a widely held belief? Oh, dude, you're in L.A.

Well, yeah, okay. You're such a Midwestern boy. I guess so. They definitely do. I, okay, definitely. Okay. I just, like, I've personally met, first of all, there are, there are a handful of people in our industry who have, like, explicitly said, like, Tim Ferriss wrote a whole, right, right. He wrote a, like, 10 years ago, he wrote a huge blog post about how his whole goal was to become famous and how miserable it made it. It's actually a great blog post for people to check out if this is like something that they think about a lot. But I'll tell you like it's interesting because I'm with you. I'm like I never really cared.

But it's been interesting living in L.A. Like I've probably come across three or four people since I moved here who are obsessed with getting on TV. It's it like occupies all of their mental energy All day like they're they're auditioning for shows and they're trying to get on reality shows and they're like you know They're trying they're trying to become contestants on game show like it is like okay okay it is their focus 24 seven and of course they're like an actor and or they've got a screenplay or like all this shit like they've got like their Their Hollywood dream but like you know they're just obsessed with like getting their foot in the door if like oh if I can just get on a game show Okay. And if I can show the producers that I'm like really engaging and entertaining, then maybe I can get invited on to like, you know, some big reality show.

You know, like they've got this whole thing mapped out in their head. And I just sit there like kind of looking at them in horror as they describe this to me and don't understand. Right. I mean, yeah, I have no problem with like people having dreams and want to do big things or anything like that. Yeah. The obsession with the fame part to me is there is, yeah, there is a there is absolute like the stereotype about L.A. Like there is absolutely a segment of the population here that is just like absolutely fame and status obsessed and it and it is really gross. Okay.

Well, I mean, the research bears out that it's there's a weak correlation with certain aspects of happiness. But I mean, it often decreases happiness at a certain point. I think kind of what you were just mentioning there, you're seeking a lot of external validation. That leads to a lot of anxiety, a lot of instability. I think one thing to you don't realize, or people don't realize when they're thinking about, oh, I want to be famous is like the lack of privacy that comes within, the public scrutiny that you get.

I don't think people realize how unwanted that is at all. If you're constantly, some, an idea of you forms in the media that you might not have any control over, that just to me, I don't know, that's never said, never sat well with me. I'm a big fan of Bill Murray. I'm not a big fan of like a lot of movie stars,

but Bill Murray is like, I really like Bill Murray. And he had this one saying, he's like, you know, if you want to be rich and famous, try just being rich first because there's not a whole lot of downside to it. But he's like, the fame part has not gotten me a whole lot. Because often people who want to be rich, it's just a proxy for status. Like I think a lot of people who really covet a lot of money,

it's like it's not actually, like they don't really want the luxury or the jet. I mean, some people do. But in my experience, like, most of the people that I know or have known who are like really want to become rich, it's kind of a status play. Like it's like they just want to like they want to ball out and have people want to like get the attention and, you know, have people want to be friends with them and all that stuff. So yeah, I do think there is some wisdom to that. You know, one of the things that I've noticed just among like my friends who are like internet famous, the ones who, who. who struggle with it a lot. I think it's not even like,

it's not even the lack of privacy per se. I mean, that is part of it. But it's the, you never know when you're being watched. So, yeah. When I've talked to friends about this, they're like, yeah, I really only get recognized like a couple times a day.

But I'm, it happens enough that I'm, I'm like constantly worried that I'm being watched. Right? So a friend of mine says, said that like if he's in public and his kid starts misbehaving or just like throwing a tantrum, he said, he's like, it sucks, but I'm like, I'm mortified because I'm worried that one of my fans is going to be here and like is going to be watching my kid just like be a fucking demon and start

making, like, he's a bad parent. Right. Or pull out of the phone and being like, wow, this so-and-so's kid is like a total, you know, a lunatic or whatever. Or like if he wants to yell at his kid, right? Like, he doesn't feel free to do that. Or, you know, it's all sorts of stuff like that. So I get how, like, that paranoia can kind of imprison somebody.

But I don't know. I feel like this is very personality driven. For sure, yeah. Yeah, like, I think what I've observed is that some people have a personality that's, like, pretty predisposed, like, managing fame and attention. And then some people have personalities that are not predisposed. And I think if you just look at the range of celebrities, like some celebrities have handled their fame wonderfully and like gracefully. And some celebrities have not.

And Britney Spears, yeah. Yeah. And so it's like I do think a lot of that comes down to personality. Like that was one thing I took away from working with Will Smith is like he loves being famous. Right. But he loves people. He loves people. He loves being at the center of attention.

Right. He loves performing. He's extremely extroverted. and yeah, you spend a day with him and you're like, okay, yeah, he's built for this. Right. He's totally built for this. Right. Yeah.

And I think you're kind of, with the status thing, you're kind of getting out where I wanted to go with this, which was a lot of times we have these, like we have this desire to be famous or high status in some way. And really what we, yeah, a healthier form of this is looking for kind of status within your own close social group. I think that there's a healthy way to do this too. You can achieve status by helping other people that are close to you and not being like. like famous necessarily for it, but you achieve status in your social group through through helping or through pro-social behavior. I think that's a better way to channel that. You need some external validation.

Well, fine, do that with the people that actually matter and you care about. It's interesting, though, because it's, I mean, I agree with you. You know, one of the things that we've talked about before in the past is, like, how people are over-prioritizing the global and under-prioritizing the local. Like, yeah, like, it's, it's, I think, and I do think a lot of this is just can be laid at the feet of social media of like people being too cognizant of what a thousand random strangers around the world are going to think and like not cognizant enough of like what the people next door think. And so, yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice of just like stay local, think about the people around you, you know, try to build status among, your friends and coworkers and family and then like fuck fuck everybody else yeah like it's it's gonna be like don't even have to go into it there's a

million stories out there of you know depressed and drug addicted celebrities it doesn't make you happy yeah it's not gonna fill the void so in case it needs to be said what do you think okay so you're probably you're the most famous person i know okay okay and you're i mean i don't want to stoke your ego too much here, Mark, but you are probably... You clearly don't know many people. Well, I mean, you are probably one of, if not the best-selling author of the last decade, right? I'm not the, but like... I've sold a lot of books.

You're up there. You're sold a lot of books, okay? And I am online a lot. Yes. Your internet famous for sure. Okay, there's that. How do you think this has affected your happiness or has it? I do think it's net positive.

I also think I'm like kind of the perfect level of fame, which is like I only get recognized periodically, you know, like it once a week, twice a week maybe, which is the perfect amount. It's like it's just, it's a nice little ego boost, but it's not so much of an ego boost. Like it doesn't interfere or get in the way of like anything I'm trying to do. But I also think someone is my personality.

Like I kind of don't give a fuck what people think. Yeah, right, right. Like I just I really don't care. That was the other thing that I noticed like when my career took off is like I started getting invited to all these like, you know, events with fancy people and famous people and billionaires and stuff. And it's like, talk about hedonic adaptation. Like, you know, it'd be really exciting for like an hour. Yeah. Or maybe even an evening.

Yeah. But yeah, after pretty quickly, I was just like, who cares? like, what am I doing here? Like, I have nothing in common with these people. Right. What am I doing here? It's all just high school kind of at some point. It is.

It is. It is. But it is funny. Like, I don't know, I do think it's a net positive. Aside from the ego boosts, like, this kind of gets into the irrationality of human beings. Like, it is funny how much it kind of greases, you know, greases the process of, or greases the wheels in like various processes or open certain,

doors. Like, like, one thing I know that a lot of, um, like, high-end hotels and restaurants will do these days is, like, when you make a reservation, um, they will look up your social media account. So like, they'll look up your Instagram or TikTok. And if you have a lot of followers, they treat you differently. Yeah. Right. So it's like, there are been times where I will show, like, I'll book just a random hotel and I show up and there's a gift in my room. There's a letter from the manager. There's like, I got like a free, upgrade to like a presidential suite for nothing. I like literally talk to nobody. And it's just clear. It's like, okay, they Google me. You know, like so and they're hoping I take a picture and put it on Instagram. You know, like, so there's a lot of perks like that that are just funny. Well, that's what that was a Bill Murray's like he said, you know, be rich first because being famous is basically just got me a good seat at a restaurant before. Yeah. That's it. That's it. That is most of it. I mean, it does get you in the rooms that normally you wouldn't get it to. And so, I mean, that is nice.

So, yeah, the next one, physical attractiveness. And this is similar to the fame thing. Like, what's super interesting about this, and I can verify this from copious ones. My God. Being hot makes you happier. Okay. Gather around, kids. Yeah, look how happy mark is right now.

Let me tell you what brings me all of my happiness. No, but seriously, being physically attractive does correlate to a slight amount of greater happiness, but it's not because you're hot. And it's not even about how you feel about yourself. It's actually about how people treat you. People tend to treat physically attractive people better. There's a thing called the halo effect, which is basically like if somebody's very physically attractive, we tend to unconsciously assume that they are more trustworthy, more competent, nicer, smarter, all these other things.

And so the more physically attractive you are, generally like the better people react to you and because they're reacting better to you, it generally improves short-term effect. Better social skills because you're treated, you know, from a young age, you're treated a certain way. Yeah. Yeah. So it is a minor kind of little baby boost to short-term effect.

But there are costs. Yes. Right. Yeah, let's defend the hot people. Let's defend you, Mark. Sorry. It's not all just benefits. Let's defend the ugly people.

D. I don't know if I should have been the ugly people here, but there's some research to suggest that highly attractive people or attractive people, they have kind of a higher social pressure to maintain those standards. We just talked about that they are smarter, that they are kinder, that they are better people. Fashion models, too, what they find too, with people who make money based on their looks, long term often have are kind of maladjusted. They'll, they report lower well-being, they have increased stress. And just like I said, they're just more maladjusted over time too. Yeah. I think another thing too, this, this one I can kind of see a little bit more is that they have more difficulty forming genuine relationships.

Because there probably always is kind of going on in the back of their mind. Like they just like me because I'm attractive. Like I imagine like an attractive woman probably thinks that a lot too. Yeah. You know, or maybe it's just jealousy or envy that these people are feeling. That's why they're getting this attention. I think there's probably an interesting analysis on like the difference between physical attractiveness and like self-image, right? Because there are a lot of extremely attractive people who have terrible self-image.

And there are a lot of people who are not super attractive who have like a very good, healthy self-image. And I feel like that your self-image is probably way more determinant of how happy you are or how good you feel than like your actual physical. proportions necessarily. Yeah, definitely. I mean, but it's a, it can be, you know, if it's too big of a part of your identity, especially, you know, like I'm getting older now too and I can, you know. It sucks. It sucks.

Dude, it sucks. Looking in the mirror and being like, ugh. Where did that wrink? Gray hair and these wrinkles and all this. And so if you base too much of your identity on that, obviously over time, you got to find out that figure out another way to have some validation. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't want to dwell on it too much, but that's kind of, it does matter for

our happiness to some extent. Yeah. Yeah. Let's get in another one. Okay, geography and environment. So a lot of people, I think, feel like if I could just change where I live, change who's around me, then I would be happy, right? And it's not quite that simple.

Definitely, you know, you've traveled around a lot. You've lived in a lot of different places. You've seen happy people in places that are supposed to be miserable versus not seen the same as well. Basically, though, what they found is that it's primarily not the location itself. You know, we think like moved to a place with a beach. You know, like come out to L.A. And it's nice weather.

Or view. Or nice weather. Right. Sunlight. Yeah. Whatever it is. That does matter a little bit, but it's usually more about the, kind of the social and institutional context of a region that have way more impact on your happiness.

Okay. Let me just, I'll give you like kind of at the national level, what they found is things like GDP, gross domestic product, right? Social support, a healthy life expectancy, a longer, healthy, healthy, healthy, your life expectancy, the amount of autonomy or freedom you get in a given region, the generosity of the people around you, an absence of corruption, okay? Those actually have way bigger influences on your happiness based on the location of where you're at than the location itself. Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to the hedonic adaptation thing too. Like you can move out

to Southern California and it's nice every single day almost. But you just get used to it very quickly. Those sorts of things anyway. I can confirm California makes you soft. Yeah, it does. It does. I bitch about anything. I can.

Yeah. I will say things, though, like, say you're living in like Chicago or Minneapolis and you have seasonal affective disorder, moving to Southern California or Phoenix or something like that, that's probably a good move. Some sort of in like some sort of health condition. Absolutely. Absolutely. So those things do absolutely matter.

But I don't think it's quite the way that people think it does. I don't know. I've been, I've traveled a lot as well, and I find happy people everywhere, and I find miserable people everywhere. So I just, I think this one we usually probably give a little too much weight too. Yeah. I don't know. What do you think? I think weather is the big thing that people overweight. Like there's a, there's quite a few studies on weather and happiness and it like does not matter. Yeah. I mean, if you go back to the world happiness report and if you believe those stats, which we don't, but like the Scandinavian countries, they're cold as hell and dark in the winter and people are, they're fine there, right? So yeah, definitely. So now for a big one that does have a lot of influence on your happiness, which is love and relationships, or at least, you know, we tend to think that has a huge influence on our happiness. And it does to some extent, you know, one of the longest running studies on happiness, the Harvard study of adult development, the one that it began clear back in the late 30s is still going to today. Harvard has kept that up. It's found that meaningful relationships, especially like spousal relationships, are one of the biggest predictors of happiness. There was even one of the lead researchers that league researchers changed over time.

But one of the researchers said that happiness is love, full stop. Like that was it. Like decades of research and that's what they found out, right? And I do remember, too, hearing about one of the happiest individuals they've ever measured on this study was probably one of the most boring ones too. He was just this guy. He was a teacher. He had like two or three kids. He loved his wife, lived in a middle class neighborhood, all of that.

And he was like off the charts on happiness, right? Wow. And he cited his relationship with his wife as one of the greatest sources of happiness that he had. Obviously, a toxic or unhealthy relationship is going to have a lot of downside to your happiness, too. It's going to influence it negatively. Yeah. So you want to avoid those more than seeking out any, like a, like a, Mad relationship is worse than no relationship, I guess, is what I'm saying there.

That's definitely true, especially when it comes to romantic relationships, like, because we're about to get into friendships. Yeah. And it's interesting because I think people tend to assume that if they're single, they're going to be miserable, so they need to have a partner. Yeah. But it's actually, you're better off single than having a bad partner. Whereas with friendships, people tend to underprioritize friendships, but you're actually, like,

way less happy if you have no friendship. Right, right. Well, let's just get in that. Let's just talk about friendships because, yeah, I think you're right. I think people, we way over index on the romantic side. There's way more content on Instagram and all social media about your romantic relationship and how to have a good one and how to be happy in it and everything like that. When actually, I think for the vast majority of people, it's going to be the friendships in your life. It's kind of your chosen family, right? That will influence your happiness to a much, much greater degree. And then not only that, if you are single, I think one of the best pieces of dating advice, is to go make more friends. Yeah.

Like that's my dating advice for most people. I was like, go make more friends and you're just to meet more people that way. For sure. Expand your social network.

And then as kind of a byproduct of that, you'll probably meet somebody that you really like and you can get naked with, right? Like that's what it's all about. I think that's what it's all about too. Yeah. Yeah.

As long as they're hot. As long as they're hot. Now that you should be using your friendships to laborers to get laid. That's not what I'm saying. Yes. Manipulate your friends into introducing you to a partner. It does help.

Social bonds in general, though. Yeah. This is one of the, I mean, over and over and over again, this is what they find, is that this is probably the biggest contributor to your happiness, whether you have a strong social group or not. And, you know, in the, especially in the United States where we've gotten so individualistic, we hunker down in our apartments in our houses and we don't connect as much. We're just talking about being over-indexed on the global and not enough on the local. this is a problem. I think we all are starting to face a little bit more honestly now, and I think it's about time we do. Obviously, your social connections have a huge, huge impact

on your happiness. And that's just, I mean, we're social creatures. We need that, right? I think one of the reasons why people probably over-index on romantic relationships, I just thought of this, is that, you know, friendships are generally, they probably play more to affect and life satisfaction, which is a little bit shorter term. And, and, and, you know, you know, milder words. Like your romantic relationship really hits on the purpose and meaning drum. Yeah. Very hard.

In fact, it's probably one of like the quickest routes to a large amount of purpose and meaning. So it just occurred to me that that might be why people over-emphasize that and under-emphasize the social friendships. Yeah, that's the perception. I think there's a lot of meaning and purpose you can find in friendship, though, too. What about kids? What about kids? Because for a long time, there was, I don't know, there was like research around 2010 that found that parents were less happy than non-parents. About 10 million people lost their collective shit on social media.

And you don't really hear about that study anymore. So like where did we land on the kids in happiness thing? Well, let's go back to our definitions of happiness, our three components of happiness, right? You have your affect. You have life satisfaction and meaning, right? It's true. Parents, when they're parenting, they are less happy from an affective and a life satisfaction viewpoint.

They're absolutely less happy. They're underslept. Usually they're stressed over their kids. Their kids are probably being little dickheads, you know? And they're just, they're worried constantly about their kids. Yeah. They're probably stressed financially to some degree. So, yeah, there is a lot of things to be unhappy about with children.

You know, I saw recently, you know, not too long before we were recording this, I saw something from Chapel Rhone, the musician. And she's like, none of my friends who have kids are happy. They're just, they're, they're, you know, they're miserable, they're underslept. I see no light in their eyes or something along those lines. Yeah. And, you know, she's in her 20s. Okay, fine. The thing about it is, is that it's really getting at those, the, the affective part and the life satisfaction part while you're parenting.

Yeah. But nearly every parent you ever talk to will say it is the most important, meaningful thing I have ever done is to raise a child. It has nothing to do with, you know, getting enough sleep and making sure your morning routine is optimized or whatever. Yeah. That's such a shallow kind of empty form of happiness that I think people who criticize people with children on that basis are getting at that. I just think it's, that's a very naive definition of happiness that you're getting at when you're saying. oh, parents are miserable people. It's not that at all.

It's that they've given up a lot of those other things to raise a child and have a very huge source of meaning in their life. This is what we're designed to do, quote unquote, by evolution, right? We're designed to propagate the species. So like what more meaningful thing to do is there than that? This is coming from two men who do not have children. Yes, right. By the way, side note.

I also think I find it interesting. thing that comments, because you do hear comments like that quite a bit, especially among, you know, our generation and younger. It's funny, though, because there's so many other things in life that require like a massive amount of sacrifice and short-term misery and struggle and stress that people don't say those things. And nobody sheds all around for that, yeah. Like, I've never heard, for instance, you could say exactly what Chapel Rowan said.

Yeah. You could say the exact same thing about anybody who's started. at a business. Yeah. Right? It's like multiple years, not enough sleep, stressed out of your mind, like no money, you know, like it's constantly living on the edge of bankruptcy. And, and yeah, like, but nobody looks at that and it's like, wow, they seem so miserable. Why would you ever start? No, it's the opposite. It's like it gets romanticized and people are like, oh, wow, they're so brave and they're like going for their dreams and like good for them, you know? And it's, I feel like you could come up with multiple examples of that, you know, athletes, right?

It's like athletes are stressed out of their fucking minds. They're literally training from the moment they wake up until the moment they go to bed. And yet we like, we celebrate that. We don't, you know, we're not like, oh, wow, they look so miserable. Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, no, absolutely. Landing. Like, yeah.

I just, it's strange that we pick children as the one thing to like kind of shit on. Right. I mean, all those other things too. You're choosing to do that. If you choose to have children, sometimes you don't choose to have children. It happens. I get that. you're choosing to have children or you're choosing to start a business, you're choosing to be an

athlete or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah, I don't quite get that either. And it's those commitments, right, it's like when you are giving up your short-term happiness and your short-term satisfaction for that long-term meaning purpose and long-term life satisfaction, like that is, that that's that's the magic sauce, right? Like, that's actually kind of what life's about. Like, that's how you get off the hedonic treadmill. That's how you build a sustainable, you know, like that is the eudaimonia, like the stable eudaimonic form of happiness is, you know, being able to commit to things.

Right. Absolutely. Now, I'm not saying you, I'm not saying the opposite either. I'm not saying you need children to be happy. You have to be. Yeah, totally. There's plenty of that. But you have to commit to something.

You do have to commit to something. Yes. And it probably is going to be painful. Yes. And you are going to sacrifice something. thing and it's probably going to suck. Yeah. You know, maybe it won't suck as much as raising a kid does at times.

Yeah. But you might also not be getting that the back-in meaning from it as much either. So, all right, we just went through this whole list of things that may or may not make you happy in different ways. Yeah. I think a good way to kind of, a good lens to put these through is going back to Daniel Conneman, that same psychologist from the money studies, right? He has this idea called the experiencing versus the remembering.

self. Okay. So he says that just mentally we have these two kind of different modes. One of them is the experiencing self. That's kind of like the affective. We're processing the affective states as they're coming in. These affective states, according to him, last about three seconds. Okay. And we're experiencing life in about three second increments. Okay. The emotions that come up, the whatever's happening around us, all the evaluations we have around it, that's the experiencing self. Okay. But then we have the remembering self too. And the remembering self is the one looking back and kind of forming a narrative for your life and coming up with an interpretation of why these things happen or the meaning around them. Two different selves that we have

and we're often optimizing for them at different times or in different ways. A really good example is with children. Right. Right. Like I just mentioned, parents while they're parenting, their experiencing selves are miserable, right? But when they're looking back on that experience, they think, wow, that is the most important, most significant, most meaningful thing I have ever done. How can those two things, they seem like they're just opposites, but they're really not. It's just there's two different levels of looking at the thing. Yeah. Okay.

The remembering self, Connman argues that the remembering self is actually probably more important for our happiness. Just like the example we just used with children illustrates that, I think. And it's because we use that remembering self to write the narrative of our lives, to interpret the events of our lives, to make meaning out of our lives. So, you know, when you're, when you're looking at these, all these different things, you look at from the drugs and the alcohol and the sex, you know, that's pretty high on the experiential self. There's lots of positive emotions that come from those, but maybe not so much in the remembering self. Derek Sivers, you know, your buddy has this really good line in a book that I love to quote. He says, nostalgia is just memories minus the pain, which I think kind of gets

at this. That's such a good line. I love that line. Nostalgia is memory minus the pain. And so we don't typically remember the emotions. I mean, think back on any part of your life. You don't remember the day-to-day emotions. We have a strong bias towards the positive side of our memories. And the narrative that we constructed around it, right? And so I think that's just a really good way. Whenever you're thinking about, will this increase or decrease my happiness,

using it through the lens of the remembering and the experiencing self, I think that's just a really good way to look at that and say, okay, how is my remembering self going to kind of interpret this at some point? I think that's very similar to, I think Jeff Bezos has this thing, which is like the regret minimization model, which is like he said, anytime you're faced with a difficult choice, take the option that you are going to potentially regret not doing. You're optimizing your entire life to just minimize the potential of regrets as much as possible. And it turns out that a lot of the things that you end up regret not doing are suck in the short term and are very difficult. But it's like if you're trying to head off the regret before it happens, you just push yourself. through it. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. The remembering self really does get to the life satisfaction and the

meaning much more than the affective state where the experiencing self kind of lives. Just a reminder before we move on that if you are feeling overwhelmed or this feels like a lot, we do have the free PDF guide at solvepodcast.com slash happiness. It goes over everything that you're listening to here, including much more, has all the references, links, book recommendations, and so on. So softpodcast.com slash happiness. Let's move on. All right, so we keep talking about hedonic adaptation, like the idea of like, okay, something great happens, you buy a new car or get a boat or whatever, and it's like makes you happy for a little while, but then you revert back to kind of your baseline level. I think it's worth talking about where is that baseline level? What determines that baseline level? And how much of happiness is nature versus nurture? How much of it is actually in our control and how much of it is up to genetics or up to our circumstances? And there's actually a top of our top of our circumstances. And there's actually a top of our. ton of science on this, and I think the results are actually quite interesting because I think

the percentages land in regions where people wouldn't expect. So let's start with the first one, which is genetics. As a psychology nerd, I love how psychologists go about figuring this out. So if you think about it, it's actually extremely clever. If you have twins, identical twins, they have the same genetic material. Now take those twins and assume that they're separated at birth. Now, you have two genetically identical individuals who are raised in completely different environments by different parents and went to different schools and hung out with different kids growing up.

This is gold to a psychologist. This is, like, absolute gold because now you can actually control for genetics and actually see what is making a difference in the person's life. And so there have been a number of researchers. I believe the most prominent one was a guy at the University of Minnesota who literally spent his entire career just scouring the country looking for twins separated at birth so he could like run a bunch of psychological assessments on them. And sure enough, when you run these assessments, one very surprising and interesting thing pops up, which is that twins that are separated

at birth and grow up in completely different environments tend to be closer in their levels of happiness than two siblings who grow up in the same house. Now, what does that mean? That means that genetics is actually accounting for more happiness than a brother and sister or two brothers who grew up with the same parents, go to the same school, play with the same kids growing up. That's mind-blowing. That's something that I think most people wouldn't suspect. And I think it's something that doesn't get broadcast a whole lot.

Like that's not a headline that people get excited to share on Facebook. You know, it's like, oh, most of your misery is determined by your genetics. Nice day. Good luck. Good luck. But it's not that simple. Like it's not that deterministic. Sonia Lubimirski, friend of the podcast, she's been on the show a number of times,

hung out and talked with her many times. She's one of the preeminent researchers on happiness in the entire world. She is doled out, roughly speaking, that about 50 to 55% of your happiness is genetically determined. and then the other 45 to 50% is determined by your circumstances and your actions. We're going to get into those on a little bit as well. So one way to think about it is that your genetics are primarily determined what your set point of happiness is. So when you go throughout your life, you know, if you constantly ask yourself on a scale from 1 to 10, how happy am I?

Most people land around 7, 7.5, 6 and a half, somewhere in that range. Most people, most of the time, are going to say around a 7. But some people, they're more like a six most of the time. Some people are more like an eight most of the time. A few people are more like an 8.5 or 9 most of the time. A lot of that set point is determined by simply your genetics. And it's not just your level of happiness. It is how optimistic you are, how quickly you recover from setbacks,

how much you savor positive experiences, how sensitive you are to stress. A lot of this is simply genetically based, it's personality based. One way to think about it is that some people have a talent for happiness, the same way some people have a talent for music or they have a talent for public speaking or they have a talent for math or whatever. Some people, happiness just comes easily to some people. It comes naturally. And some people, they have to do a lot more work for it.

And like anything else in life, it's not fair, but that's just how it works. Right? And if there's anything that I think we've learned from this episode so far is that Happiness is overrated. So if you're one of the people who's not naturally gifted at happiness Yeah. Don't worry about it so much. Can we to just talk real quick about like what does that mean that you're genetically predisposed? Like actually what is that because people hear that and are like oh, it's your genetics and it's like well then you just kind of leave it at that Can we just talk real quick about like kind of what that actually means? Like I dove into it a little bit and Like for example if you there's genetic differences and say that the serotonin or dopamine receptors in your brain or how much serotonin or dopamine you produce

in your brain or how well you process it. There's things like endorphins too. It's like the exercise induced endorphin release that you get after exercising, right, like you feel good. Runners high or something like that. That's actually partially genetically determined as well. Interesting. So hormones related to stress, you mentioned stress, how reactive you are to stress.

So how much, say, cortisol or other stress hormones that you produce in any given situation and how well you process those, your body and everything like that, that's partially genetically determined as well, interacts with the environment, of course. But then another one, too, I found was that like your circadian rhythm, like hormones associated with circadian rhythm like melatonin, how much your body, your brain and body produces, or how well it metabolizes it or when it's produced.

So obviously there's an environmental component to that. When it gets dark, your body starts producing melatonin. But there's a genetic component to it as well. like how much it gets turned on or off. So how much you sleep even to is regulated by that, which influences your happiness. Oh, we'll get to that. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think when people, because sometimes I remember just hearing that,

I was like, genetics, you know, determine your happiness or determine whatever your mood or I'm like, how the hell. And so that's, I just wanted to pinpoint that and let people know there's kind of like these mechanisms, underlying mechanisms, both from like a molecular level, all the way down the molecular level to like the brain structures, how your brain is even organized too. is partially genetically determined. I think it's important to point out, and we're about to get into strategies

on how to move your set point of happiness slightly in one direction or another. It's almost like the center of gravity for your happiness. It's like the baseline that all else being equal, you will naturally return to, but there are plenty of actions and habits and behaviors that you can develop or implement into your life

that can move that baseline up slightly or make sure that you are more consistently having more positive experiences on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, it sets the boundaries, but you can kind of play within those boundaries for sure. Totally, yeah. Totally. So the second category is circumstances. And this is the one that I think everybody overestimates.

The circumstances is like, you know, the place you grow up, how much money you have, the environment that you're in, the weather, you know, you're just a different. job satisfaction, whatever, your physical traits, all these things. Like the circumstances, basically like the environmental factors that are outside of your control or outside of your direct control that our brain consistently plays a trick on us and tells us that it's, oh, it's their fault that I'm not happy, right? It's like, oh, if I didn't live in this city, I would be happy. Or if I was three inches taller, I'd be happy.

Or if I was made an extra $10,000 a year, then I'd be happy. Like this is the circumstance is the thing that our brain naturally overrates and puts way too much weight on. And researchers come to the conclusion that circumstances probably account for roughly around 10% of our day-to-day happiness. Generally speaking, we will return to our baseline over and over. It's really only if our circumstances become chronic or extreme in one direction or another, that it really moves the needle over to long term. So things like living in extreme poverty, suffering from chronic pain, going through social isolation, losing a significant relationship. All those things will alter your baseline happiness over a long period of time, not permanently, but like over a long period of time. It is interesting.

So they do have a lot of data on the actual correlation between income and happiness, marriage and happiness, physical attractiveness and happiness, job satisfaction. happiness and like what percentage of your the variance of your day-to-day happiness is attributable to those things and it is shockingly low it's caught quite small it is very small so income comes in around 3% of your variance in happiness marriage explains about 2% of the variance physical attracting this explains about 1% and job satisfaction accounts for around 2% these are all extremely small correlations like in the data itself like the The R is like around 0.115, which is so small that I think in a lot of fields they wouldn't even publish that.

They're just like, what's the point? It's a small effect size for sure. Yeah. Super small. And then that brings us to the last category, which is your intentional actions. And the good news for all of us is that our intentional actions, it's the one category that we can control. These are the things that we choose to do on a day-to-day basis. And these things account for roughly 35 to 40% of our happiness.

So we have a lot of leg room to work with in terms of boosting our day-to-day happiness, making ourselves happier people. That's the good news. The bad news is that the actions and behaviors that consistently drive happiness are probably all the things you already know and are not doing. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, let's get into it. Yeah, what are these things?

Let's get into it. The first one, I mean, I feel like we hit this every episode. Diet, exercise, sleep. I'm sorry. Sorry, guys. Not going to surprise you. But let's start with exercise in particular. I think exercise, particularly when it comes to mood and happiness, is like pretty, pretty shocking.

And it's the amount of effect it can have. You know, one way to frame it is that imagine if, there was a pill that improved mood, reduced anxiety, alleviated your depression, boosted your self-esteem, enhanced your brain function. Oh, and it also improves your sleep quality, makes you physically sexier, and helps you live longer, and it's free. What would you say, Drew? Would you be like... Sign me the fuck-up. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. But then now imagine if I told you, oh, that means going to the gym. Yeah. You're like, I'm out. I'm out.

Right. Never mind. I don't want it anymore. Right. It is like when you put it in those terms, it is just so shocking. Like if exercise was a drug, it would be, it literally would be a miracle drug. Yeah. It would be a miracle.

Like, it solves everything. Yet nobody does it. Right. Even just like going for a walk. Like that lifts my mood. Yes. Yeah, it's short term. Yes.

It doesn't last a long time. But it lifts my mood and lets me get shit done, you know? The crazy thing, the craziest thing is that when you look at the research on exercise itself and what drives most of the benefits, people who go for a walk for 30 minutes a day experience like 80% of the benefit as the gym rats do. The dudes who are in the gym two hours a day like lifting heavy shit, like just go for a walk. Like it's amazing. Literally that simple. Yet we don't do it. Sleep, I don't need to tell you.

No. How much sleep matters. who has tried to go to work on three hours of sleep, knows how absolutely fucking miserable it is. Yeah, it's not just that you're tired too, right? It's that you're disregulated. You are irritable, you're angry, you're sad, you're mopey, you feel pessimistic.

It is sleep affects your mood and your emotions like dramatically. Yeah. When I wake up in the middle of the night too, I just have the worst thoughts. Like if I'm up at 3 o'clock in the morning, I'm just like, oh my God, my life is over. This is that thing's got. It's just, it's awful. And then I wake up and I'm like, okay, I'm fine after a little bit of sleep.

So yeah, definitely. Yeah, totally. And then, of course, diet, nutrition. I mean, obviously you want to be metabolically healthy and all that's, like, all these things are interrelated. But, like, with diet specifically, there's quite a bit of research on, like, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, you know, vitamin D3 and, you know, magnesium and fish oil and all this stuff.

B12, I think is one of them, too. Yeah, it's like if you're lacking. in any of these, then you'll definitely take a hit to your general day-to-day mood and your mental functioning. So I hate to be of the bearer of bad news, but eating broccoli does make you happy. So believe it or not. And then the big one, relationships. Honestly, like, if there's anything in this episode that should be in a bright neon sign

flashing in people's face, it is the quality of your relationships will ultimately have the largest effect on the quality of your happiness, how happy you are on a day-to-day basis. And that's not just the quality, it's not just your romantic relationship. It is the, it is all, it's the aggregate of all of your relationships. Do you have a strong social support network? Do you have friends that you care about? Are you surrounded by people who, who care about you, who have your best interests at heart? And yes, the people that you are close to is at a healthy intimacy that you have with them.

Do you have good lines of communication? Do you feel supportive and cared for? Probably the longest running psychological study in the world is famously known as the Harvard study. So it started in the late 1930s. As time went on, they started following up with them. I think probably what happened is that the medical stuff wasn't super interesting, but they realized that they had this incredible psychological data set. And they're like, oh, let's keep this going.

So they followed up with these men throughout their entire lives. And it's still going today. It's like an 80-year-old study. I imagine most of the original participants have passed away by this point. But it is basically, it was a longitudinal study where they followed, I think, around 1,500 men from starting around like age 20 throughout their entire lives. And every few years they would check in with them and give them just these massive surveys of like what's going on in your life. How's your marriage? How's your job?

How much money do you have? Where are you living? So on and so forth. decade after decade after decade. And then finally in the 90s, George Vailant, who was the primary administrator of the study at the time, the study's so long that they've now gone through like three head researchers who have like been administering it because they just,

the study outlives them. Right. Yeah. But at the time, George Vailant was running the study and he wrote a book about the results where he said that full stop, I could sum up the entire 70 years of data in a single word, which is love. It's like Happiness equals love. Happiness equals relationships. The hippies were right. I know the fucking Beatles, dude. The Beatles had it had it right all along. All you need is love. You know in our in our episode about emotions we talked about how the our relationships co-regulate our emotions with us that that

like we are when we say humans are a social species. What that means is that like our are our biology, our nervous system, our, like, our cognitive system, like, we are intertwined with each other. We need each other to function correctly. And that is part of the role of our emotions. And happiness to a great extent is, like, is living in a state where your emotions are well regulated, like, where there's like, we'll talk, we'll talk about this in the next section, but it's like nothing is fucking up in your life at the moment, that you feel aligned

with everything you're doing and everything. feel smooth and there's like no impediment to pursuing what you want to pursue or becoming what you want to become. And having good relationships around you is like key in doing that. So relationships are huge. We're probably due to do an episode on relationships at some point soon. I'm sure we'll do many episodes on relationships or various aspects of relationships. So if there is one takeaway from this episode, it is the biggest driver. of your happiness is going to be the people you surround yourself with. Just one point I want to tack on there too.

I think there's kind of been a lot of this idea that's out there. It's like, well, you know, but relationships are hard. People are flaky and nobody wants to be friends anymore. Nobody wants to follow up. And nobody, you know, all the dating market is a mess and blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay. And so people are like, well, I'm just not going to try. I'm going to give that up.

It's like, okay, yes, relationships are difficult. Yes, there's a lot of friction involved. What's the alternative to that, though? I'm just going to be a lone wolf and social isolation. that's going to make you way more miserable than having a handful of difficult relationships in your life that you have to navigate. Totally. So just to point that, I think there's a lot of people who are like, well, you know, absolutely. Screw people.

Like, no. And we don't have to get into this now, but like I would argue that a little bit of friction in relationships is a feature, not a bug. And healthy, yeah. Yeah. That's part of what makes you grow in a relationship. It's part of what makes a relationship meaningful. But anyway, we'll save that for another episode. Yes.

In terms of things that you can actually do yourself relatively immediately, and now this moment, probably the number one action is practicing gratitude, doing a simple gratitude journal or gratitude prompt or gratitude meditation. Like if there is a hack that exists for happiness that will like move the needle very slightly and roughly two or three minutes, gratitude is it. Like that is that's the king out of all the interventions and all the little self-help exercises like that is kind of the one that survives and comes out on top another one is experiencing flow and flow is basically that that state of of getting lost in whatever you're doing like feeling kind of when time just starts

floating by and you forget where you are and and it's you're just so immersed and whatever activity you're you're doing that you kind of lose sense of the outer world or anything else that's going on. So flow is generally, I think it's representative of living in alignment with things you care about. I think it's also representative of working on something that is like very meaningful to you. I think flow, I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent. I think sometimes flow is one of these things that it's like, I think it's the effect of stuff that's important. Like it's flow is downstream of meaning, of purpose, of value alignment, of competency, skill, developing skills.

But it's one of those things this happens often in psychology is that like psychologists discover the effect and then they assume that it must be the cause. And so they're like, oh, you just need to get more flow in your life. And then they like start coming up with all these tactics and hacks to get flow. And it's like, well, no, if you just kind of figure out the meaning and values thing, that flow happens naturally as a side effect. Right. Anyway, the point is, is that what the listener can do right this minute is just think about the things in your life that put you in the flow. That you lose yourself and you lose track of time and just do more of that because that's where the good stuff is. Right.

It goes back, start with the meaning and the purpose side. And like you're saying, that flows from that. It flows. It all flows for that. Beach. Next one, this one is super interesting. Altruism, helping others. Acts of kindness is sometimes what it's referred to in the literature.

So Don, Acknan, and Norton in 2008 had a seminal paper that was like a bit of an earthquake at the time where they discovered that people who spent their money on other people were happier than people who spent money on themselves. Which is super fascinating. And it's, I don't know if you've read this study, but it's like it's actually really interesting what they did. So they started out. They just took like cross-sectional survey data. And I think the survey just happened. It was like some sort of happiness survey. And it just so happened that it included, I think, how much people gave the charity or something.

And the researchers just like ran an analysis on it, like looking for correlations. And one popped up of like people who gave more money to charity tended to be happier. And so the researchers were like, huh, that's super interesting. So what they did next is they went and they found people who had just come across like a windfall of money. money. So lottery winners, people who just inherited a fortune, you know, I guess like startup founders who just exited for $100 million, like basically people who just went from middle class normal to super fucking rich really quickly. And what's interesting about this is that by this point there have actually been quite a bit of research on lottery winners and like the fact that they don't end up happier most of the time. And in fact, a lot of lottery winners become miserable and go broke. because of the money. So there was already quite a bit of data and research on people who had had windfalls.

And so these researchers went and found people who had windfalls. But instead of tracking what they did with the money for themselves, they just tracked how much these windfall people spent money on others. So how many of them went and bought a house for their mom and bought a car for their cousin

and paid for their sister's college tuition or whatever. And sure enough, what they found was that all lottery winners see this huge spike in happiness early on and then within a couple years it like resets the

baseline level. What they found is that the more people with windfalls spent on other people, the slower that return to baseline was. And in some cases it never completely got back there. And this like got them really excited. And so the last thing they did is they just rounded up a bunch of participants

and they separated them into two groups. They gave one group. I think it wasn't, much money either. I think it was like $40 or $50 each. So they gave one group of people each $50 and they said, go spend this on yourself. And then they gave the other group of people $50 and they said, go spend this on somebody else and then come back afterwards. And then they measured people's happiness both before and after and then, of course, like a few days or weeks out. And sure enough, the people who spent money on other people, which again,

like you're somebody's literally handing you 50 bucks which like I think our intuition it would always just be like oh yeah I'd rather get 50 bucks than like have to go buy something for somebody else right but sure enough the people who had to buy something for somebody else all came back and um in in on average stated that they were significantly happier so acts of kindness generosity charity um there you can be a little bit selfish with it which is just like understanding that like this is going to make you feel really good. And I, again, I think it comes back to the meaning thing, right? Because it's like when you spend something on yourself, you're optimizing for effect

and maybe a little bit of life satisfaction, which depending on what you spend on, which we'll talk about here in a second. But when you spend money on others, that I think that gives you meaning and purpose much more than it does. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's kind of this idea, too, that some people,

get for some reason, they're like, oh, I don't want to make too much money because then I'll turn into an asshole or something. You know, you run into people like that. And you're like, you can help more people if you have more money. Yes. Right. And that's one of the benefits of having more money is that you can help more people and you can decide how you're going to help more people that way. And so, you know, when your resources are more limited, then you have to focus on yourself. Yeah. I think that's probably one of the reasons why poverty, you know, it does kind of make you more miserable is because you're just constantly thinking about your own survival and own yourself because you have to you are but yeah you are by necessity self-absorbed yeah right

like you literally don't have the bandwidth that's not a moral judgment that I'm just saying it's just like ground level truth when you don't know where your next meal's coming from like you have to think about yourself you can't think about anybody right totally on board with that and I'll just say too like anecdotally speaking I I strongly believe that money doesn't change people it am simplifies who they are. Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree with it.

All of my observations is that people who are stingy when they didn't have money are even stingier when they have it. People who are greedy when they didn't have money or even greedier when they have it. And people who are very kind and generous when they don't have money are even more generous when they have it. So I don't think money changes people much. Well, when we talked about money,

that kind of bears out in the most recent research too, right? If you're miserable without money, you're going to be miserable with money. Exactly. Yeah. It's not going to move the needle much. past a certain point. Isn't that so ironic, though, that like the people who are happy without money are the ones

who become happier with it. Dude, I love the human mind. It's so fucking interesting. All right. Last one. Experiences versus stuff. Ah. So this one, this is another really good one.

The millennial philosophy, right? Dude, this hit our generation hard. Yeah. And I think we were right about it. I do too. I do too. Over tourism of half the planet aside, it's... Ah, right.

Yeah. There's that. It is like, I mean, it is correct. And I do think it is something that our generation got right. Like, basically the short version of it is that, you know, let's say you want to spend $5,000. You can either spend it on a really nice, shiny object or you can spend it on an experience. Generally speaking, people who spend it on experiences experience more happiness and that happiness is sustained for a longer period of time. Bonus points, if that experience involves other people you care about.

100%. Yeah. See relationships. So it's like if you're just like some optimization nerd who wants to optimize for happiness per dollar spent, spend on experiences that involve other people. This is something that you actually hear come up quite a bit. Like if you listen to a lot of the kind of like the personal finance gurus like, you know, Rameet and Dave Ramsey and Scott Galloway and people like that, like the thing that they always say is like the best part about being rich is spending money on other people. Like that is actually what Drives like all of the meaning and again

It's because experiences are meaningful This kind of comes back to what you were talking about About the experiencing self versus remembering self Like when you buy a thing It's fun in that moment But then the hedonic adaptation kicks in and you get sick of it And then on top of that stuff Especially expensive stuff has upkeep

It has maintenance It falls apart. It's like you have to worry about it and clean it and do all sorts of crap. Programmed obsolescence too. It's going to go out of date at some point. Yeah, exactly. It's like trends change in 10 years. You actually hate it, but it was so expensive.

Cool CD player you bought. Yeah. My $700 CD player in 1984. My beautiful DVD collection. It's, you know, stuff is very tenuous. And you don't think about those long-term trainers. when you get that short-term boost to effect. Whereas experiences, you get to enjoy it in the moment,

but you also build the memory. And if you do it with somebody else, you build a relationship, right? So your remembering self gets to benefit from that experience for years and years and years afterwards. So, you know, this is why it's better. Instead of buying your mom like, I don't know, like a new iPhone, you know, it's like,

take her to the beach, you know, get her a spa day together. And, you know, it's like that. You'll spend a weekend with her, yeah. Exactly. Because it's like those are the things that you're going to still be enjoying and remembering and caring about, you know, 10, 20 years later. Whereas the iPhone's going to go out of date in like six months. So.

Yeah. Yeah. And just to highlight, that's the hedonic adaptation is really like it's much, much stronger for physical objects or things that you buy material versus an experience that you have. you know, experiences are novel. Even, you know, you're hanging out with the same people, but it's always a little bit different. So there's a novelty to it.

And that's why you don't adapt to it as much. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, Mark, I think there's going to be some people who, you know, we just went through this list of things that, of intentional activities that you can do. Yes. And just like, okay, well, okay, so now I need to get exercise and I need to hang out with

people. And, you know, maybe I need to, like, get into nature. We didn't really get into that one. But that can help you boost your mood and everything like that. Like, when the hell do you have time? Like, what am I supposed to do? Go to the gym and then I'm supposed to go see friends in the same night. And I'm supposed to get a half hour or two hour walk, you know, two hours a week in nature is apparently a good mood booster to.

When the hell am I supposed to do these things? Well, I recently came across, I think it was a newsletter that Oliver Berkman put out. And he was making this point. He's like, you know, this seems overwhelming when you're trying to get into this. And he's like, why don't you go for a hike with your friends? You get exercise. You get nature and you get social time right there. Like try to combine these activities as much.

much as you can because you don't have to do each one separately. I think we get a little too compartmentalized around some of these things. So like trying to combine these activities in ways that are synergistic and actually kind of create something that's even more fulfilling than just doing each one individually. And yeah, and it's also like you don't have to do them all all the time. No, no, right? You know, it's like pick one and work on that, right? It's like if you're...

Keep it simple. If your sleep is shit, like just focus on your sleep for a while or, you know, get a little more exercise. But yeah, absolutely. you can that is like one of the nice things I will say about living in L.A. is like so much of social life out here is like built around these things.

It's doing things, yeah. It is like people are are very health conscious out here. So like dinner parties often revolve around healthy food. People like meeting up with friends often revolves around like a hike or surfing or even like fitness class, things like that. And there's plenty of nature out here.

So it is like, I think that is probably, again, why the relationship piece is so central and important here. Because if you find people who are already doing these things and just go do it with them, A, it makes it way easier to do it. And B, you get to build those relationships, which is great. So I actually want to return to this kind of epicurean idea of don't pursue happiness but remove unhappiness. Because at this point, we've now kind of gone through all the pertinent research. around what makes you happy, to what extent does it make you happy,

what doesn't make you happy, but most people think it does. And I do think there's an interesting pattern that shows up, which is that the things that consistently make you happy are almost entirely within your control. And then the things that are out of your control, your circumstances,

it's less about getting more of it, and it's more about just removing friction and impediments, right? So it's like, take money, for instance. It's like having tons of money doesn't move the needle nearly as much as just not being broke. Or having tons of sex with tons of people doesn't move the needle basically at all, whereas just not being alone. Right. It does. You know, so it's like when it comes to the circumstantial stuff that we tend to obsess and worry about and complain about, it's not about maximizing those things.

It's simply just removing the unhappiness, removing the friction from those things. One of the reasons I want to return to this concept is because it ties into what we were just saying is that like you don't have to do that much if you're broke and really financially stressed it's not that you need to make a fuck load of money it's like you just need to make enough to not be broke.

Some stability, right? Yeah. And if you're lonely, you don't need to have tons and tons of friends and be going out every night. You just need to not feel alone. Like it's the bar is actually way lower than you think and I just want to kind of return to this Buddhist idea of Dukha, you know, the broken wheel that is spinning. Because I think now that we're kind of informed about all the research and everything, I do think, at least for me, I see it a little bit differently.

And that really what alignment is, is that you're able to live your life without feeling impeded or obstructed in any significant way. It's like whoever you want to be, whoever the ideal Drew is in your mind, the more you can just remove the impediments to that ideal drew, the happier you're going to be. Like happiness is this, it's not an active state that you find.

It is rather the absence of obstructions and impediments to the things you care about. You almost don't notice it. Yes. Like in a way you don't notice it. Right. Right. Absolutely.

Actually, I have a fantastic quote about this that I love. This comes from the philosophy. for Arthur Schopenhauer, who ironically was an incredibly miserable person. But we won't. We won't get into that. He was a brilliant writer and a brilliant philosopher. And this is probably my favorite thing that he ever wrote.

So he wrote, just as a stream flows smoothly on as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will. If we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted. It has to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates, and resists our will, that is to say, all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself upon us instantly, directly, and with great clarity. Just as we are conscious not of the healthiness of our whole body, but only of the little place where the shoe pinches, so we think not of the totality of our successful activities, but of some insignificant,

rifle or other which continues to vex us. All happiness and gratification is therefore the mere abolition of a desire and the extinction of pain. I fucking love that. That's so good. And it's so true too. You just don't notice it. And it goes back to if you're trying to pursue it, then you're not going to get it. Right. Exactly. Which is, you know, in subtle or not giving a fuck, I wrote about the backwards law, which is, you know, in the book I defined it as the pursuit of a positive experience is itself a negative experience and the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive experience. And I think this really explains that, which is that when you're pursuing happiness, what

you're actually doing is subtly reminding yourself that you're not happy. Whereas when you simply accept unhappiness, what you're actually doing is subtly letting go of the impediment to how you want your life to be, which then makes you happy. It's this beautiful paradox that takes place. And I think it's something that's ever present and it's something that we often miss and forget in a lot of subtle ways. I do want to bring up just a couple other psychological points that tie into this, which I think are ways that we invent impediments for ourselves mentally, ways that we invent trifles that distract us from the whole success of our being. The first one is just social comparison. You know, there's the cliche that comparison is the thief of all joy.

You know, I think the conventional advice is to just like don't compare yourself to others. I think that's unrealistic. I think as humans, we are kind of wired to compare ourselves to others. Like we care what other people are doing and we care. We are concerned with like whether we're living up to the social expectations around us. What I always tell people is don't try to stop comparing yourself to others. Rather, compare yourself to better people and for better reasons. reasons, right? So it's like comparison, sure, it can make you feel bad. If you get on Instagram and you see somebody who's like way more attractive than you, has way more money than you and is doing way cooler shit than you and you compare yourself to them, then you're like, yeah, you're going to feel bad about that. But if you think about like your role models or your heroes or the people who inspire you, like the people you look up to, a mentor, that's also a form of comparison. When you look at somebody who is.

deeply inspired you and motivated you to like be better yourself. That's a positive result of comparison. It's like, wow, they're amazing and they're further down the road on the path that I'm on. I want to be more like them. I want to like watch what they're doing and try to learn something from it and see if I can become better. Like that's a form. I would say that's a healthy form of social comparison. And similarly, like, you should compare yourself to people for the right reasons.

So like don't compare yourself to people's money. Compare yourself to their character. How kind are they? How satisfied with themselves are they? How much integrity do they have? Right? Like, I don't really give a shit if the person sitting across from me has like 10 times more money than I do. But I do give a shit if they're a fucking liar and a scumbag. Right. Like, and if, and if they're like, have so much integrity that they make me feel like I'm a liar in a scumbag, then that's actually good. I actually want to spend more time with them and try to compare myself to them more because it's going to make me. better. So I think it's just be cognizant of your social comparisons and make sure that you're making the right comparisons and you're making them for the right reasons. The second thing I want to talk about comes from Schwartz's concept of the paradox of choice, which is the idea of the maximizer and the satisfacer that basically there are people who go through life trying to maximize everything. They're trying to like optimal health, optimal happiness, optimal productivity all the time.

It's a- Things they purchase even too. Some people are like, give me the top 10 gadgets on this or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It's basically perfectionism. And the problem with that is that you're setting the bar consistently so high, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed about pretty much everything all the time. And again, because you've set that bar so high, as Schopenhauer points out,

you're constantly going to become aware of all the ways that your life is not living up to your expectation. And whereas a satisfacer is somebody who sets the, bar at good enough and then just aims for that. You know, so it's like they shoot for 70 or 80%. And if they get past that, great, but if they don't, they're not going to, they're not going to worry about it too much. We're just kind of talking about the happiness benefits of this, but I will say that there's like, there's a lot of other repercussions of this as well.

I remember seeing, I think it was one of the Amazon shareholder letters or something, but I remember like Jeff Bezos wrote once. he said the optimal decision is made when you are 70% certain it's the right thing to do and that blew my fucking mind right because a lot of people hear

what you just said about the maximizer versus satisfying well then what about shooting so high with Jeff Bezos is like 70% that's good let's keep going right there's a productivity aspect to it yeah and I think it's because like the to go from 70 to 90% probably takes twice as much effort

as it takes to go from zero to 70 right right And to go from 90 to 99, it probably takes another two or three X. And you're going to learn a lot more by just doing and going. Just do it, let it fail, and you're going to learn quickly, and then you're going to adjust, and then you can make the next decision. And then the side effect of that is that if you are, if you're, if you're satisfying, if you're only looking for good enough, it's not going to bother you all the ways it doesn't

live up to perfection, which is imagined anyway. It's not going to bother you and mess with your head all the time. So those are a couple of ways that we self-enver. impose our own unhappiness is that we compare ourselves to unrealistic standards and we Demand unrealistic results from our from our own actions Why don't we talk about age really quick? Yeah, just because we do see variants in a lot of this stuff Right yeah depending on how old you are. Yeah, I think it's because our audience spans from teenagers to

You know, 75 year old retirees and I think it it's probably useful to touch on this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it's useful. You mentioned this earlier, too, that there, you know, it does seem to be, we prioritize different aspects of happiness throughout our life, and that's definitely true. I think the point of all of this is going to be, first of all, these are just kind of like averages, right? These aren't set in stone.

So if we go through some life stage and you're in that life stage and it's not your experience, of course, there's variation throughout all of this, and we'll talk about why that is. But I think it's important to also realize kind of what the, yeah, what the average experience and whatever life stage you're going through and be able to adjust and kind of adapt to that as you go. Know that you're not a weirdo, basically. Well, yeah. Or if you are a weirdo, know why and that's okay too. Yeah, yeah, that's totally fine.

Basically what they've found, developmental psychologists have looked at happiness through the lifespan. And basically, you know, a lot of people think, you're probably you're happy when you're young and then it just says a downhill slog from there. And that's just not how it works at all. They consistently have found what they call a U-shaped curve and generally speaking. But there's different aspects of happiness that are highlighted at each one of these stages. But typically in your youth, you know, late teens, 20s, early to mid-30s, you're generally kind of happier for the most part. You have higher affect anyway, usually because you're chasing experiences that are high affective states, right? And everything's new.

Everything's new. Everything's new, which is exciting, which is fun, which is, yeah. Exactly. What you're really doing is you're kind of exploring emotionally who you are, more or less, right? And so you experience a very wide range of experiences and emotions through these stages, and you kind of get a sense of like what, where your emotional sense or center of gravity is during this time. But there's a lot of ups and downs as well, right?

There's even any research to show that, like in brain imaging studies, younger people, there's heightened activity and brain reasons that are associated with reward and with even just emotion too. Like the emotional networks fire more strongly. And you can think about it. Like, if you're older and you're listening to this, you think about when you're younger, like things were just more intense, right? They were for me anyway.

I know like emotional intensity in my late teens and 20s. Like everything was just so intense. Everything's the end of the world. Everything's the best thing ever. Or it's awesome, right? Like, oh my God, we went to this concert and it was amazing and you get older and you're like, whatever, right? That's kind of what's going on there.

There's higher levels of those emotional highs, but you also have more anxiety during this time. Yeah. You have, there's more even anger and sadness or experience more intensely during these periods as well. So I think if you're younger and you're going through that, just know that that's like, that's part of the human experience is to experience these things much more intensely at that age, both the highs and the lows. Yeah. Again, this is kind of a period for exploration and emotional exploration especially. and this intensity, this emotional experience during this, this intense emotional experience during this period, it really kind of drives you to these life-building activities, as what I'm going

to call life-building activities like your career, like seeking relationships, figuring out your own independence, like how that works. So this is just kind of part of the evolutionary toolkit that we have, and that's what you're experiencing. So I know there's a lot of young people like, oh my God, like, why am I, why do I feel this bad? It's like, well, wait till tomorrow, you're probably going to feel awesome for one. Right. But also, this is just, this is part of life. And I know that's not, when you hear that, when you're younger, you're like, okay, what are I supposed to do with that?

Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things you really can do, though, is start to focus more on, you know, your life satisfaction and meaning like we've talked about instead of just kind of chasing the dopamine and the rush of emotional experiences that you're trying to go for. I don't know if anybody ever said this to you when you were, say, high school college age. But I always hated this because I was pretty miserable in high school. Yeah, same. I hated it when adults came up to me and they were like, these are the best years of your life. Oh, God, yeah.

That would make me so depressed. And now that I'm 40, I'm like, who are these people that peaked in high school? That is not true at all. Okay. No, no. Anybody who says that, if you're a young person, anybody who says that to you is like, fucked up somewhere because it's like life should get better. Right. Because you, you figure out who you are, you figure out what matters to you, and you find things that are more important to you

than, you know, like the next cool concert or whether, you know, the cute person thinks, like, likes you. You know, like, it's just things become way more significant and that significance brings a lot of satisfaction with it. Sure, like there's a lot of stress and difficulty that happens as you get older, but I would never trade or go back. Yeah, no. I mean, I think there is something to that saying, you know, youth is wasted on the young. And sure, like your energy and your optimism and all that is probably wasted a little bit when you're younger because you just don't know how to use it.

Right. But you go through those experiences and you gain some more perspective for sure. Sure. But that, I mean, it is true, though. When you get into middle age, you start hitting your 40s and 50s. generally speaking, there is a bit of a dip in happiness, what they find. This is probably really comes down to a lot of the circumstantial stuff that we've talked about. By the time you hit your 40s and 50s, a lot of people have kids at this point,

and the kids are teenagers and they're difficult to deal with. You're at your peak earning years usually, so you're earning more money, but this also means you have more responsibility at work, so there's a lot of stress on you. Your parents are getting older, so you're dealing. dealing with them at that point. So there's a lot of like life happening at this stage that tends to kind of like lower happiness in a lot of people, just on average. Okay. You have your peak responsibilities. You also start the social comparison you just talked about. That becomes a little more stark in this period, right? Because you've been through the early stages of your career

and now if you, you know, your friends, your college buddies or whatever, they've made partner, they've, you know, made a whole bunch of money and you haven't or the social comparisons are really stark at this age, I think. So when you're young and you compare yourself to others, it's usually over very superficial things. Right, yeah, yeah. Because everybody's in the same boat. Everybody's young and broke and has no idea what they're doing. So it's usually, usually compare yourself about dumb stuff.

Really stupid shit. Yeah. Like, oh, she is nicer hair than I do. Or, you know, oh, like, he's like such a good football player. I wish I could play football. Right. It's once you get older, like you're, everybody's life decisions are worn on their sleeve. Right, right?

So it's like once you get the 45, all the 45 year olds that you knew in college, like, you see what decisions they made and how that played out. And so there's like over decades, yeah. And so it, there's way more weight to it. And it's, I think it's, I would add to this too, and I, this is kind of the midlife crisis thing, but like. So you're bringing this up. Yeah. Yeah. So like when you're young, as you said, the whole project when you're young is kind of

constructing this idea of like who you are and what your life's going to be. Once you hit 40 and 50, like you, your life is played out. Right. You're like, you're kind of at the halfway point. Right. And as you said, you're kind of at the peak of your earning years, your professional years. And for most people, it did not play out how they hoped or they expected. And that's like a very hard thing to swallow.

It is very much so. I tried to do all the right things. It didn't really go the way I thought it was going to go. I ended up in a very different place than I thought I was going to end up in. And while like in a lot of cases, you know, people are still very happy with where they ended up. But it's just like, I don't know, there's almost this grieving of the life that you thought you were going to live, but you didn't. And I think that that's very hard on a lot of people. Right.

Yeah, and you see huge reactions to that sometimes to, the midlife crisis you mentioned. You know, this is the middle-edged guy who goes out and buys a sports car and divorces his wife and, you know, tries to start hooking up with 20-some-year-olds. Yeah. Stuff like that's usually a reaction to that realization. It's like, I want to go back and do it again. Right. And those are usually the people who tell you that tell a college kid that it's the best years of their life because it's like they never. They went down the wrong path.

Right. And they wish they could go back because that's the last time that they, they feel. felt like they were on the right path. Right. Yeah. So I think there's more productive ways of channel it. You could start a podcast, let's say, like that in middle age and try to stay relevant. Please don't start a podcast.

But yeah, it does, though. So all of that happens. Then you start getting into the later years where the U starts coming back up. Okay. And this is kind of counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of people. Like you hit your 60s and all of a sudden, on average. average anyway, people start to kind of accept their life situation a little bit more and stop fighting it.

Again, you're not pursuing happiness so much. You're just kind of accepting as it is. Right. I did these things. I didn't do these things and I'm okay with that. That starts to happen kind of in your 60s. Now, you know, there are, as you age, there are certain things that can definitely lower your happiness too if you're experiencing a lot of health issues, financial issues.

Chronic pain, yeah. chronic pain, anything like that, that's going to obviously affect how happy you are. But there's, I mean, consistently they find that the happiest people are usually in their 60s and 70s, if not their 80s, even sometimes too. I remember you told me a story one time you had an uncle that lived to be 99. And what he said his two favorite decades? What did it was? He said his two favorite decades were his 40s and his 80s in that order.

Yeah, in that order. Forties and his 80s, right? Yeah. So, yeah, if you're younger and, you know, it gets better. It can get better. and then I think it does. It just goes up and down. I know for me personally anyway, like my mid-30s or I love my mid-30s.

Like I was just, there was even times too, this kind of goes against what we've been talking about. But I would realize I'm like, oh, this is, I'm going to think of these is some of the best years in my life because it was just, it was great. I was, I had just kind of, for whatever reason I had done what I wanted to do to some extent. I accepted what I didn't. I kind of got more comfortable with who I was. But, you know, as you, I think as you get even old. more of that starts to happen as well. And I think that's what they find, or that is what they find with older people is that they have just accepted that, okay, life didn't turn out for me in certain ways, and I'm okay with that and other ways it has.

And then not only that, I mean, your mortality becomes more salient, right? And you start to, that is a clarifying, clarifying event, right? And you just stop giving you shit about all this stupid shit that we talked about. Who cares if her hair is nicer, who cares if he made more money? I don't care. I care that I have. You're probably not trying to maximize everything anymore. You're just like, that ship's sail, whatever.

This is good enough. And that's okay. And that actually makes you happier. There's an acceptance to it again. Just accept that this is how it is and stop trying to be so happy. And then all of a sudden you do get happier. I imagine gratitude comes in quite a bit as well. Yes, absolutely.

Because it's. You've probably seen some people around you, but either pass away or not do as well. And you're like, okay, well, I'm. Right. And you've also, you have lived long enough that you have perspectives. to really look back and be like, okay, well, that thing in my life, that was actually really special. And I'm, I'm so grateful for that. Yeah, it goes back to the remembering self.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can look back on those. And, yeah, again, so you look back on those times and the remembering self, it removes a lot of the emotions that happened at those periods, right? When you're looking back, but you remember them as significant and meaningful rather than what emotions they gave you. Right. So that starts to happen more and more as you get older. And again, you just, you selectively start to prioritize the more important things in your life

that are going to just naturally bring you more happiness anyway. And that just, it happens over the lifespan like that. Yeah. There's just, we talked about this before, and I think that it does kind of map onto this. The three components of happiness, your affect, your life satisfaction and the meaning, it seems that when you're younger, you're kind of really pursuing that affective happiness. more than the other two. As you get into kind of more middle age,

the life satisfaction becomes more of a factor. How satisfied are you with your life? The disappointments that are there. How much do you accept those? You can look back with perspective, like you said, and see the meaning and the purpose behind what you've done and make an assessment from there. So yeah.

For sure. One of the things, too, is like, I'm not sure how much, something I want to ask you, how much should you kind of rail against those trends in your life? Again, not everybody. It's an average and it's just kind of, this is what people tend to do and there's going to be lots of exceptions to it. But like when you're young, you know, I'm not sure you do have the perspective that you need. So maybe you should be optimizing more for affect and fun and everything like that.

I know there's, I look back on some of that and I don't regret it, you know? Right. First of all, yeah, I think if you're young, that is what you should be optimizing more because you don't know who you are. You don't know what you want and you don't know what you want your life to turn out as. Or maybe you think you do, but you're probably wrong. And it's like you're going to have to live through a few missteps or pivots to like really get clarity on who you want to be. I do think all that is normal. I think the risk for young people, and I speak as somebody who probably did this, is that when you overoptimized for exploration and effect and novelty, it's you can, you can understand.

index on purpose and meaning. And it's very easy to convince yourself that a lot of that exploration and novelty is going to be meaningful and most of it's not. And so I think it's just like be wary. Be careful not to bullshit yourself. Like really, really ask yourself honestly, like, is this going to matter in 20 years? Like is the 45-year-old me really going to give a shit that, you know, I don't know, went to a full moon party in Thailand?

Like, not to say don't go, but I'm just saying like, if that's what you're optimizing everything around, those sorts of experiences, like, you know, just be aware of what you're doing and be careful with it. Because I definitely, I definitely think I went too hard on that. There is an addictive quality to chasing novelty that you can get kind of caught up in. Right. And some people never get out of it. You know, it's like those are the Peter Panes who, like, who are 45 and they're still going to festivals. and doing a bunch of drugs and trying to hook up with people half their age. And it's like, yeah, you don't want to end up there.

Right. So, yeah, that would be my only disclaimer. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely research that shows just being aware of this U-shaped curve actually helps you kind of navigate these. So, again, it's more of an acceptance. So if you're in middle age and you're like, it's like this is just part of it. This is temporary. Yeah, this is a hard part of your life.

going to get through it and then you're going to see the meaning at the end of it. Yeah. So just being aware of it is like it tends to help people quite a bit. Yeah. So knowledge is power in that sense anyway. For sure. Yeah. All right.

So we've covered pretty much all the research at this point. And I imagine there's still a lot of you sitting there being like, okay, this is great. But like what do I actually do with this mark? So if you want to know how to implement this into your life, fortunately, my team, we have taken all of the content of this episode. We've broken it down into small exercises that you. you can do each day over 30 days, and we've put them in the momentum community. So the momentum community is built around action.

The whole point of the community is to help people develop an action bias. Do a small thing each and every day to help improve your life 1%. If you improve your life 1% over 365 days, that's a lot of improvement. It's like 35X or something ridiculous. I don't know. I don't have the math in front of me. Don't shoot me. So if you want to hop on that drain, that slow compound.

growth over time and you want to do it with thousands of other people who are like-minded and excited to do it with you. Check out findmomomitum.com slash happiness. Everything is there. Signing up is easy. You can get started today. And anything else? What else should I say, Drew? I mean, just look at Drew's excitement for the momentum community. He's like, he can't get enough. Go to findm momentum.com slash happiness. And not only do you get this episode, You can get all the previous episodes if you want to work on your emotions or find your values or defeat your procrastination all of those 30-day tracks are still in there as well. So you can you can just do all the things new all the things guys find momentum.com slash happiness. All right, moving on. All right, we're in the home stretch here, Drew. Why don't we like before we wrap up with the final takeaways? I do think it's worth now that we've like laid out all the research laid out all the philosophy. We have a very strong. understanding of just like what happiness is how it works, what causes it, what doesn't cause it. I do think it's probably worth revisiting a handful of like common happiness myths.

They get passed around all the time, especially in the self-help space and on Instagram. And just like assumptions that I think a lot of people have or that seem intuitive, but like are actually completely wrong. So I will I will kick it off, which is that to be happy means that you feel good all the time. And I think by this point, listeners should understand that, like, happiness is actually very, it's a multivariate, complicated thing that you can be extremely happy with yourself in your life and not having fun. It is not the same thing as feeling good or pleasure or fun or excitement. There's all sorts of nuances to it. And there's, there are even different versions of happiness that play out under different circumstances.

Yeah. Yeah, not only that, but research is shown, too, that emotional diversity. experiencing a wide range of both positive and negative emotions is actually better for your mental health than just experiencing all negative or all positive. You've actually written about this too. There's like emotional diversity. It's kind of like building a portfolio of stocks and bonds and all of that. And you're actually more resilient and you're better adjusted if you experience a wider range of emotions. Yeah.

And ultimately happier. Which makes sense because as we covered in the emotions episode, ultimately emotions are. our feedback mechanisms. They are things that we evolved biologically to help us adapt to our environment. And happiness is just another mental emotional state that is adaptive to our environment. Like one way to look at it is that every other emotion is telling us to change something. Right. You know, anger is telling us to do something.

Sadness is telling us to do something. I think happiness is probably the single state where it's like is the lack of change. Don't do anything. Don't do anything. Like everything's good. Let it be good. I think I'll also mention here that, like, there's something very beautiful and meaningful of, like, holding a mixture of emotions in your head at the same time. You know, being able to be happy and sad simultaneously or feel a little bit a tinge of regret, but also a lot of nostalgia.

You know, like, there's a lot, like, the human experience is just so complex and nuanced. I think I've always had an aversion to the happiness obsession simply because it just seems so reductionist. It's like, it just seems like it simplifies us into this, like, very simple and bland box, which, I don't know, it just feels insulting to, like, the beautiful complexity of life. Right, right. Yeah, I embrace that complexity. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, next one, next myth.

Happiness comes from control, okay? We've talked about this too, but there's really just an acceptance that needs to happen for you to be able to be happy. You don't control your happiness. You don't control your emotions necessarily. You control reaction to them, sure. But being able to control your emotions and manage your emotions and master your emotions, that is not what happiness comes from. It comes more from an acceptance and a reality. Like we just talked about experiencing all these different emotions and accepting them and just kind of being with them is really where kind of a sense of satisfaction comes from.

Feeling no obstruction to your present experience. And I think the desire to control your emotions or the desire to control your mental state backfires because the desire to control your emotions itself is an obstruction. Right. To feeling happiness, right? Backwards law. It's the backwards law. And I think, you know, I alluded to this at the top of the show, you know, there's kind of a more popular meme recently that I think originated with novel Ravikant, which is this idea that you can be happy at any given moment. It's simply a choice.

Is that true? I think so, first of all, I think what he's referring to is that in any given moment you can choose that acceptance and that equanimity and you can remove, like mentally remove all those obstructions to feeling happiness in the present moment. But I think the myth here is that should you remove those obstructions? Should you feel happy in every moment? Like I would actually say it's not very adaptive to feel happy in every moment, that you actually should go through periods of unhappiness in your life because that is how you grow. That's how you evolve. That's how you change.

That's how you make decisions. And that's ultimately what gives your life a sense of meaning is that that the remembering self is able to look back and say, wow, I like, I've handled adversity. I worked through incredible challenges. I've grown as a person. Ultimately, that is where you want to end up. Whereas I think if you just are constantly deciding to be satisfied in any given moment,

I mean, it's kind of the monk in the cave problem, right? It's like, okay, you can go be a monk in a cave meditating for the rest of your life. But like, is that really a life well lived? Like, do you, is that who you want to become necessarily? I've always struggled with that. I've always been skeptical of that. Again, I'm more of the modern scientific view that, like, emotions are adaptive.

They shouldn't be our masters. And I think if you are choosing to optimize for happiness in every single moment, whether it's, like, in an unhealthy way of trying to control everything or in a healthy way of just, like, simply accepting everything, like, I don't know if that's the point. Like, I know we keep,

coming back to this, but it's like, I don't, like happiness isn't the point. Right. I would argue the same thing. Right. It's, it is the byproduct of getting the other things. Right. Right. And when you're trying to control it, that's when you're, you're, you're, indexing and over-emphasizing the happiness. And I think the, you can be happy in any moment. It's a choice is basically saying, like, you can choose to be happy in any moment by simply not caring about anything else. So it's like the Buddhist, you know, non-attachment thing. And I just, I don't know, it seems impractical to me in the modern day and age. It was one. one thing in, you know, three thousand years ago to go sit in a cave for your entire life. You weren't missing out on a whole lot. Right. Right. Right. How a lot going on. Yeah. Whereas today, I don't know, just like, I feel like there's, there's got to be more to life than that. Next one, others have it

easier. Their lives must be happier than mine. This is the classic social comparison. This is like, well, you know, easy for you to say, you've got, you know, you've got all these fancy degrees and, you know, traveled to Chile and, like, learn to speak a language and blah, blah, blah. I think if anything people should have learned by now that, like, first of all, the circumstantial stuff doesn't move the needle very much. Second of all, you have no idea

what somebody's genetic disposition is. Like, this is the classic case of, like, I don't know, some rich and famous celebrity, you know, kills themselves or turns out that they're, like, you know, deeply depressed and addicted to painkillers or something. And, like, people are shocked. They're like, oh my God, but they're so rich and famous. How could they feel that way?

And it's just like, it just goes to show like you have no idea what other people are going through. All you see is their circumstances. You don't see, first of all, their genetic baseline happiness, which might be incredibly low. You don't see their intentional behavior. And you have no idea what they've been through. You have no idea what sort of like trauma and pain and struggle and suffering that they've gone through. and it's like it's just silly to compare yourself to like the most superficial external veneer of like what an individual's lived experience is like.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, like when I was, I traveled for a couple of years, you know, and, you know, did the whole nomad thing and all of that. And honestly, like going through that, I wasn't super happy during that time. I'll tell you that. I'm glad I did it. I found a lot of meaning through that. There was, I made friends.

I made lots of great experiences. I look back, my remembering self loves that, whatever. During that time, though, I was, there was long stretches of loneliness. There was, you know, I, like, not making friends sometimes in some places, that was pretty difficult. Also, just, I needed more stability in my life. You didn't see that from the stuff I was posting online at the time. Of course.

None of that. Okay. So that's just, like, one minor example, you know, of, you just don't know what's going on. I have a lot, too. I've been talking with some people lately, too, and then, you know, you see, oh, I know this person She posts online about her family and stuff like that all the time. And like their marriage is definitely on the rocks or anything like that. You just don't know what's going.

Dude, my wife has a theory that like the amount like the amount that couples post each other online is directly proportional to how many problems they have in the marriage. Probably not about bad. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yes. Moving on. Yes.

Okay. So next one. It's too late to be happy. Now, we talked a little bit about this with the, the, the, you know, the, you know, shape curve with happiness. But I think there's a lot of people who, you know, you hit your mid-30s or 40 or whatever and you're like, well, it's over for me. It's like you've got half of your life left, right? Yeah, at least. At least. And again, the research also shows, too, that happiness kind of waxes and wanes with life. And sure, there's circumstances that influence that,

but also just your life, just development, human development is such that happiness will probably increase as you get older. So it's not, it's never too late. Yeah. It's never too late. I think there's a perceptual bias or like kind of like a cognitive flaw in our brains where it's like when we're unhappy we seem to envision that happiness must be this like monumental achievement or task like we start we imagine that we need to accomplish far more than we actually do and it's not only is like our actions available to you and every given moment to be slightly happier um you actually don't need that much. Like it's, it's really just, you know, it's the difference, I think the difference between somebody who is, is feeling miserable and somebody who's, like, feeling fine is, like,

actually, it's not this, like, massive chasm. It's probably, like, a 10 or 15% difference in, in terms of, like, their lived experience. And so making small, simple adjustments, you know, reaching out to people, making a friend, joining a, you know, a group, or finding a new hobby, exercising occasionally, like, just a few of those things will probably actually will be enough to move you from the unhappy to moderately happy camp. Well, and not only that, the point you keep harping on, too, is the removal of the unhappiness part. I think that's what other people think, well, again, I have to have these monumental changes

and these big hurdles I have to overcome. No, you just need to get rid of a few things in your life. Totally. And accept a few things in your life. Yeah. It's like get rid of the toxic friend, pay off your credit card debt. And like, I don't know, eat a vegetable. And like, you're probably doing pretty well.

That's going to, yeah, that's going to get you a long and long ways. Yeah. And then finally, I'll be happy when X happens. Right. The classic. This is the trick that our brain plays on us over and over and over and over again. And again, it is an evolutionary feature, not a bug. It's like the carrot in front of the donkey.

It's like it's what keeps us moving consistently through life. And I think it's the sort of thing that like you're never going to completely get rid of it. You're always going to want things and you're always going to imagine that those things are going to make you happier. And they most of them probably will for some period of time. But just be aware of what your brain is doing. Like be aware of the game that your brain plays and that it's going to like the X in this situation. I'll be happy when X happens or I'll be happy when I get X. Generally speaking, your brain is going to vastly overrate circumstantial things in

material things. Like you are going to, your imagination is, is like biased towards relatively superficial changes and biased against actually meaningful changes. Like nobody sits around being like, well, I'll be happy when I finally volunteer at that soup kitchen. Right. It's like, nobody thinks that. Right. It's always like, I'll be happy when I buy a boat, you know, and it's, ironically, it's the person who goes and volunteers at the soup kitchen who's going to be way happier than the person who bought a boat. So, yeah, we're, we're, we're, we're, terrible of predicting what's going to make us happy. That's, yeah, that's borne out by tons of research.

That is all over the research. And we're also terrible at remembering what made us happen, which is also super interesting. Let's get into the 80-20 because it's, it is pretty straightforward. The first thing, I mean, this is the theme of the entire show. Stop chasing happiness. It's a byproduct of chasing the right things. It's not the goal itself. I think it's at this point, if nothing is,

convinced you. I don't know what else to say that will, but it's, you know, ultimately, you want to focus on all these other things that enrich your life and bring challenge and engagement and meaning and purpose. And then let the happiness happen as a side effect. Yeah, I saw a thing from Alonda Bouton, is that I used to say, yeah, Alondda Bouton of the school of life. And he was talking about happiness. And he said, instead of, you know, chasing happiness, like chase an interesting life. I thought that was a really way to look at it too. what we've been talking about all throughout this episode is, you know, the meaning and the purpose and everything like that is more, you're looking at having an interesting life. That's travel,

that's relationship. And relationships are hard and there's difficult things about them. And, you know, developing a really good career, that's hard. And there's interesting parts of that as well. So instead of chasing happiness, like, yeah, try to have an interesting life. And then that's one way to look at it. What's interesting is that this whole concept of pursuing happiness is like a very modern invention. Like if you look throughout like all the the ancient traditions, like it, they never talked about a happy life. They talked about a good life. Right. Right. How do you live a good life? How do you live a moral life? Right. Like in a good life. And it was just kind of understood that if you live a good life, then the happiness will happen. But it's like you don't, don't chase the happiness.

Yeah, it really is kind of, I think, with the rise of utilitarianism in the 19th century, that you start to get this obsession of like, how do we optimize for happiness? And And ironically, the biggest proponent of it was had a mental breakdown and became suicidal. So like that kind of tells you everything you need to know right there. That's a pretty big data point. Yes. To take into consideration. Absolutely.

Next one, start with the easy wins. Get some sleep. Yeah. Get some exercise. Go for a walk. You know, get out in nature. Call up an old friend. Eat some broccoli.

Eat some broccoli. It really is, I'm not going to be laborless too much. But it's like probably for 90% of the way. with people struggling with unhappiness right now, like, that is probably enough. That's probably enough. Like, if you just do a handful of things like that, get the, get very basic fundamental stuff figured out, you're, that's probably going to be enough to get you there. Yeah.

Processed foods, man, I've noticed this since I've really cleaned up my diet the last couple of years. Process foods will. Oh, you feel it. They'll send me into like an emotional just tailspin, yeah, for sure. So, like diet, I think is a big one too. all the others obviously exercising all of that. But yeah, I think diet is a little bit underrated in this area as well.

You know what's interesting when I quit drinking of huge chunk of my anxiety went away. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which was totally unexpected. I mean, obviously I expected the hangovers to go away and I expected. But like, one of the biggest benefits I got from not drinking was my moods became way more stable. And I became less anxious in general. Yeah, I know that too. Completely shocked me.

Yeah. It was not expecting that. Next one, invest in relationships above all else. They are the single strongest predictor of your happiness. So if you really do need the focus on one thing, this is it. Focus on the relationships. Not just quantity, but quality. If you have a bunch of people around you, try to build intimacy with them.

If you don't have a lot of people around you, try to get more people around you. Right. And I'd say start with the friendships, too. Like everybody like we talked about people tend to dive into the romantic side and get on the apps and all that start with friendships and go slow and Yes build it out. And again, quality over quantity. I mean here's the thing without getting too much in the relationship stuff like If you're unhappy in going into a romantic relationship expecting it to make you happy. Oh yeah. You're just going to fuck up that relationship. Yeah, it's way too much pressure on one person. Yeah, you're like you are it's over before it even starts. Whereas if you focus on the friendships and and build a happy life by yourself, then you're going to approach the romantic relationship from a much healthier place,

and that romantic relationship's going to have a much greater chance of success. So absolutely start with the friendships. Yeah. Find meaning through contribution. We talked about the acts of kindness, the importance of spending money on others, showing up for other people.

This also contributes to meaning over effect. I don't know what else to say about this. I mean, it seems pretty cut and dry. That one's pretty straightforward. and also just underrated. Yeah. People just don't, I just don't,

you can't understate how effective that is. Yeah. By experiences, not things. They appreciate in value rather than depreciate. Material things depreciate over time. Memories appreciate over time.

And then if you do want some quick fix exercise, practice gratitude daily. There are plenty of gratitude journals. You know, we have some gratitude exercises in the momentum community. you can do it anywhere.

It takes a few minutes. It's not rocket science. You just really take a few moments to think about things in your life that you're really appreciative of and that you don't want to take for granted. Right. It comes easier for some people than others. Especially if you're not a naturally grateful person,

I would say this is definitely a practice that will help you quite a bit. I find myself to be pretty naturally grateful and I don't have to focus on it too much. I've definitely met people who like, like regimented gratitude exercises over a long period of time have like completely changed their life. Definitely. Completely. Yeah. And then finally, when it comes to your circumstances or your environment, it's more about removing the unhappiness than it is about building the happiness. So don't try to be

rich. Don't try to be popular. Just try not to be broke or lonely. There it is. There it is. That's the 80-20. There it is. You know, it's interesting that there was a moment. I think it was really positive psychology kind of kicked off in the 80s. I think a lot of the good research started coming out in the 90s and 2000s. And then it really had its moment, I think, in the early 2010s. Like, there was kind of this five-year period where there was just like happiness books everywhere, everywhere. It was like all anybody was buying. And all this research was pretty new at the time. So it was kind of exciting. I'm kind of glad we're past that. Like, this definitely seems like a topic that was huge and resonated a lot 10 or 15 years ago. I've definitely noticed, you know, just through

promoting through my channels online and everything. Like people don't really think about this stuff anymore. And I think the younger generations that kind of understand that like it's overrated. You shouldn't be worrying about this a whole lot. Like get the other stuff right. And like the happiness will follow. Like chasing happiness just makes you more miserable.

So yeah, I don't really know what else to say. Like this definitely feels like the most cut and dry topic that we've done so far. Right. Yeah. Well, okay. So is happiness over? overrated mark.

As a pursuit, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. As an experienced, obviously not. Like, obviously, like, you want to have a happy life. Right. And you want to feel good about yourself and about the world and about the things you've done. So, like, that is important. But, again, I think the, ironically, the best way to achieve it is to not think about it.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, we didn't bring this up, but you've told this story before. You've written about this in several places. who've told this story about how in your travels, when you travel around for what was, the seven years, and you've been to very poor places, very rich places, and what you find is that people are happy everywhere.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. And even in the slums of the worst parts of the earth that you've been to, people can still find happiness. Yes. And what's interesting, the point you've made, is that we almost always take the exact wrong lesson away from- Yes, absolutely. So when I started traveling in my early 20s,

I kind of had a similar idealistic worldview as most young people do. And so sure enough, I went to really poor parts of Africa and rural India and, you know, slums in South America. And yeah, you see plenty of happy people. They're smiling. They're laughing. They're with their families. And I think the typical takeaway that people have when they see that or when young people see that is they're like, oh, my God, they're so happy. in this slum in India, like all the stuff I grew up with,

like all the stuff that my parents worry about and that I worried about in college, like it's so meaningless, like happiness is here the whole time. And I think that's completely the wrong lesson because if happiness is present in a slum where the life expectancy is like 30 and children are dying of typhoid and like rape and assault or rampant

in the environment, then we probably shouldn't take happiness. very seriously. Yeah. We should probably take other things more seriously. Like, to me, that is just evidence of like, okay, if you're optimizing for happiness, you're optimizing for the wrong thing. Because to Daniel Gilbert's point, you know, the psychological immune system, the hedonic

adaptation, it's like whatever environment you're in, your psychology will naturally adjust itself to justify it and to decide that it's okay. This is why, like, Stockholm syndrome happens, right? It's like people who are kidnapped and eventually come to start liking their captor. And it's a psychological adaptation to their environment of like it becomes the new normal. This is just what life is. And sure enough, the horror and the trauma of being kidnapped, you soon come back to a seven out of ten on a happiness scale. So it's like if people who are kidnapped and held captive and kids growing up in slums with like missing limbs and, you know,

People who are living in war zones are scoring a seven out of ten on happiness. Like, this is not the point. This is not the point. Like, there's got to be something better that we can optimize for. Because the irony, and I think this is where the kind of like the idealistic young people, like, oh, my God, everybody's happy. This is where that view falls apart is when you go to a slum in India or in South America or rural Africa. and you offer any of those people a chance to trade places, every single one of them would take it.

I don't care how happy they are. If you're like, hey, you want to come back to the U.S. with me, every single one of them will take it. Yeah, well, and it's not just poverty and war and famine that you can find happiness. And you can actually be super successful and a terrible person. Yes. And be happy, too.

So it's the other end of the spectrum as well. Right. It spans the whole spectrum. Happiness can be found anywhere. It's true. It's cheap. It's just not the point. It can't be the point.

It's not the point. Yeah, I mean, it's like you can probably visit a prison and find plenty of people who are very happy when they committed their crimes. So, yeah, it's, it really isn't the point. And I'm glad this is the only episode we'll ever do on it. Yeah. Because I just, I don't see, I don't see a whole lot of point in dwelling on it. Right. Um, last question, as we finish up every time, um, has prepping for this episode changed or taught you anything?

Or is anything you're going to implement? Not real. You're hard. This one, no, I'd like I'm just saying, I mean, that's, I kind of came to this very skeptical anyway. Yeah. And I always have been. I'm like, this happiness.

Like, come on. I think I've just kind of confirmed that that, that, yeah, happiness, it shouldn't be the point. Yeah. It's not a noble pursuit by any means. I think we also, we defined it in so many different ways. ways to, you know, like in the United States Constitution or in the Declaration of Independence, we have the pursuit of happiness. It's within the first line, right? Yeah. I think we probably misunderstood what they meant by happiness in that regard. It's more like the eudaimonic happiness.

So, you know, emphasizing those things, I think that's valuable. No, that there's different types of happiness or we mean different things when we say happiness. So that was a little more clarifying for me, but I still, it's just not a noble pursuit by any means, say, on. You know what's interesting is I've actually heard, I don't know if this is true, but I have heard this that back in the 18th century, the word happy and happiness was like much, it was much more seldom used back then and that Jefferson was very particular about choosing the word happiness because back then the connotation was that it was like a eudaimonic, like meaning life satisfaction thing. I've seen this before too, yeah. Yeah. And that it's really only in the last hundred years that happiness has come to mean like fun, exciting. excitement, pleasure, feeling good, good vibes.

But even in the psychological research, when they started studying happiness, when they were looking for a definition, it actually came out of a study in like the 50s where somebody was trying to figure out like a way to measure well-being for real estate purposes, like what areas, what influences happiness of a given geographic region or something like that. They found Aristotle's definition of eudaimonia. And then they're like, well, how do we operationalize this? we're just going to say good emotions minus bad emotions, that's how happy you are. And so we just completely screwed that up.

Now that became what happiness was. So it's just the, yeah. Yeah. Classic definition error. I guess for myself, I don't know, like, first of all, you and I have done the rounds on this topic for well over a decade. Like, this was by far the easiest episode to prep for because you and I are so familiar with this research. I wrote a book 10 years ago, shitting all over happiness. So it's like, I kind of came into this being like, yeah, I already know how this is going to go.

And I know what we're going to talk about. So I definitely, no takeaways for me, no ahas, no epiphanies or anything. I mean, again, just kind of refreshing a little bit of what I already knew. And I mean, it's nice to have some of these reminders of like, oh, yeah, it's the little things. Yeah, relationships matter. You know, so the simplicity of it is, that's a good reminder. It is. It really is.

Because we do have a tendency to overcomplicate our own lives and our own circumstances. So I guess that's it. That's a wrap on this. Again, if any of you want to dive deeper and operationalize this happiness advice into your life or to do it with a community of cool people who are working on themselves as well, go to find momentum.com slash happiness. We've got a full 30-day slate there for you to work through, and of course we've got all the previous episodes.

Also, the PDF guide, if you want to review any of this stuff, or if you want a full summary of it, if you want to look at the citations and references, that is at solvepodcast.com slash happiness. All the other guides are there as well. Yeah, if you've loved the show, please follow us and leave a review. It's the best thing you can do to help get the word out there. and we will be back next month with a brand new topic,

and I think it's going to be a little bit spicier than this one. See you next time.