SOLVED with Mark Manson - Solved, Highlights: What Actually Makes People Happy

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

So here's the thing about happiness: the harder you chase it, the faster it runs. That's not some bumper sticker wisdom. It's basically the core finding of decades of research. In this highlight, Dre...w and I get into the stuff from our original happiness episode that I think people need to hear the most. We talk about Schopenhauer's idea that happiness is less like finding a treasure and more like removing a rock from your shoe. We dig into why social comparison doesn't have to destroy you (if you compare yourself to the right people for the right reasons). We cover the paradox of choice, why the maximizer mentality is a trap, and why Jeff Bezos says 70% certainty is the sweet spot for decisions. Then we get into the U-shaped curve of happiness across your lifespan. Your 20s are intense, your 40s can be brutal, and your 70s might actually be the best decade of your life. We talk about why, and what to do about wherever you currently are on that curve. If you listened to the original episode, this is the part that ties it all together. If you didn't, start here. Vote for Solved for Best Indie Podcast in the 2026 Webby Awards: ⁠https://vote.webbyawards.com/PublicVoting#/2026/podcasts/features/best-indie-podcast • Get your free episode guide: 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 Check out our sponsors: • Waking Up: Get a 30-day free trial and $30 off the annual membership ($119/year). https://wakingup.com/solved 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

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Amazon presents Laura versus Fruit Flies. Swarming your fruit and terrorizing your kitchen, these little freaks multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Everyday with Amazon. What's up, everybody? Mark here. So a while back, Drew and I did a big deep dive on happiness,
Starting point is 00:00:35 like the actual science behind it. What the research says makes people happy, what doesn't, and what we get completely wrong about all of it. And it ended up being a pretty long episode, which means that a lot of people probably never made it to the back half, which is a problem, because the back half is where all the happiness is. This is the part where we get into why chasing happiness actually makes you less happy and why the things you think will make your life better, mostly want. And of course, about the stuff that actually will. We talk about the hedonic treadmill, the backwards law, why experiences beat stuff, why your 40s might suck, but your 70s might be the best years of your life, is the part where everything kind of comes
Starting point is 00:01:13 together. So if you want the full episode, it's in your feed, it's called How to Finally Let Yourself Be Happy, released in August. And if you want to take this still further, I wrote a free guide called Happiness Solved. It breaks down the psychology about what makes life genuinely worth living. the positive thinking bullshit, not the gratitude journaling, but the real mechanics of a meaningful life, explained totally plainly in plain English. It's free at solvepodcast.com slash happiness or grab it from the show notes. All right, let's get started. This is my lead researcher and co-host, Drew Bernie. 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
Starting point is 00:01:58 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. 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, it does.
Starting point is 00:02:31 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.
Starting point is 00:02:51 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.
Starting point is 00:03:09 You just need to not feel alone. The bar is actually way lower than you think. And I just want to kind of return to this Buddhist idea of Dukkah, you know, the broken wheel that is spinning. Because I think now that we're in full, about all the research and everything, I do think, at least for me, I see it a little bit differently
Starting point is 00:03:31 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,
Starting point is 00:03:50 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.
Starting point is 00:04:06 Right. Absolutely. Actually, I have a fantastic quote about this that I love. This comes from the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who ironically was an incredibly miserable person. We won't. We won't get into that. He was a brilliant writer and a brilliant philosopher, and this is...
Starting point is 00:04:24 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,
Starting point is 00:04:52 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 trifle 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.
Starting point is 00:05:20 It'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. 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.
Starting point is 00:05:55 Right. 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. There's the cliche that comparison is the thief of all joy. I think the conventional advice is to just like don't compare yourself to others.
Starting point is 00:06:46 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. Right? So it's like comparison, sure, it can make you feel bad.
Starting point is 00:07:11 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 know, and you compare yourself to them, then, 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.
Starting point is 00:07:33 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 watch what they're doing and try to learn something from it
Starting point is 00:07:51 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
Starting point is 00:08:02 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
Starting point is 00:08:16 has like 10 times more money than I do, but I do give a shit if they're a fucking liar in a scumb bag, right? 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
Starting point is 00:08:32 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 to talk about, comes from Schwartz's concept of the paradox of choice, which is the idea
Starting point is 00:08:49 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. Things they purchase even to. 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
Starting point is 00:09:14 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 percent. And if they get past that great, but If they don't, 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 a lot of other repercussions of this as well.
Starting point is 00:09:54 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. Right. Because a lot of people hear what you just said about the maximum.
Starting point is 00:10:14 versus satisfying. Well, then what about shooting so high with Jeff Bezos? Yeah, I know. It's 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 just do it. Let it fail and you're going to learn quickly and then you're you're going to adjust and and then you can make the next decision. And then the side effect of that is that if you are, if you're,
Starting point is 00:10:47 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-impose our own unhappiness, is that we compare ourselves to unrealistic standards and we demand unrealistic results from our,
Starting point is 00:11:10 from our own action. This episode is brought to you by Wake One of the big things we talked about in this episode is that most of the stuff that makes us unhappy we're doing it to ourselves. The comparisons, the maximizing, the constant feeling that we should be further along than we are. And the fix is not to add more stuff to your life. It's learning how to actually see those patterns while they're happening. That's what waking up has helped me do.
Starting point is 00:11:33 Drew and I both love this app. It's the best meditation app we've used, and it's the only one that I have stuck with and kept my membership over the years. the years. It was created by Sam Harris, neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and you can feel that in the app. It doesn't treat meditation like a productivity hack or a way to fall asleep faster. It's designed for people who want to understand their own minds, their own consciousness. There's no single way to meditate, and waking up understands that. We quoted Schopenhauer in this episode and about how we never noticed the stream flowing smoothly, only the place where the shoe pinches. That's basically what waking up trains you to do. Notice the whole stream,
Starting point is 00:12:10 and not just the pinch. The guided meditations are what got me started, but it's the lessons and conversations with world-class teachers that kept me there. It's all grounded, all free of religious dogma. It's for people who actually want to understand on a deep philosophical level what's going on in the universe and in their consciousness,
Starting point is 00:12:27 not just feel better for 10 minutes. And what's more is I curated a playlist of my favorite waking-up content for you guys to check out and sample and they're giving solved listeners a 30-day trial so you can try it with no risk. And if you keep it, you'll get $30 off the annual membership, meaning it's only $119 for a year, which is an amazing offer. So if you want to check it out, go to wakingup.com slash solved.
Starting point is 00:12:50 That's wakingup.com slash solved. Try it out. Might change your life. 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.
Starting point is 00:13:08 I think it's because our audience spans from teenagers to, you know, 75-year-old retirees, I think 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
Starting point is 00:13:47 experience is in your, 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's just, it's 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,
Starting point is 00:14:21 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, you're chasing experiences that are high affective states, right? And everything's new.
Starting point is 00:14:46 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? Right. There's even any research to show that, like in brain imaging studies, younger people, there's heightened activity in brain reasons that are associated with reward and with even just emotion to, 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.
Starting point is 00:15:36 Everything's the end of the world. Everything's the best thing ever. It's awesome, right? Like, oh my God, we went to this concert and it was amazing and you get old and you're like, hey, 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.
Starting point is 00:15:51 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. Again, this is kind of a period for, exploration and emotional exploration especially.
Starting point is 00:16:14 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. I guess 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 until tomorrow, you're probably going to feel awesome for one.
Starting point is 00:16:48 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
Starting point is 00:17:03 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.
Starting point is 00:17:26 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. Yeah. No. Anybody who says that, if you're a young person, anybody who says that to you is like fucked up somewhere
Starting point is 00:17:42 because it's like life should get better. Right. Because 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, like likes you. You know, like it's just things become way more significant
Starting point is 00:18:04 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. Like, yeah, no. I mean, I think there is something to that saying, you know, youth has 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, you don't know how to use it. Right. But you go through those experience 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.
Starting point is 00:18:43 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, 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 are getting older, so you're 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, on average.
Starting point is 00:19:18 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 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
Starting point is 00:19:47 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,
Starting point is 00:20:15 you see what decisions they made and how that played out. And so there's like over decades. Yeah. And so there's way more weight to it. And it's, I think it's, I would add to this too. And this is kind of the midlife crisis thing. But like, yeah, yeah. So like when you're young, as you said, the whole project when you're young is kind of
Starting point is 00:20:35 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. 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 like, 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.
Starting point is 00:21:17 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, too, the midlife crisis you mentioned, you know. This is the middle-edged guy who goes out and buys a sports car and divorces. as his wife and, you know, tries to start hooking up with 20-some-year-olds and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:21:40 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 felt like they were on the right path. Right.
Starting point is 00:21:59 Yeah. So I know that I think there's more productive ways to channel it. You could start a podcast, let's say, something like that in middle age. try to stay relevant. Please don't start a podcast. Yeah. 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.
Starting point is 00:22:20 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 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. 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
Starting point is 00:22:55 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. Yeah. And what he said is two favorite decades? What did it was? He said his two favorite decades were his 40s and his 80s in that order.
Starting point is 00:23:17 Yeah, in that order. 40s 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.
Starting point is 00:23:31 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 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 older, 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, um, uh, a Life didn't turn out for me in certain ways and I'm okay with that and other ways it has.
Starting point is 00:24:08 And then not only that, I mean, your mortality becomes more salient. Yes. Right. And you start to, that is a clarifying, clarifying event, right? 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?
Starting point is 00:24:24 I don't care. I care that I have. You're probably not trying to maximize everything anymore. You're not. You're just like, that ship's sailed, whatever. This is good enough. And that's okay. And that actually makes you happier.
Starting point is 00:24:33 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. This episode is brought to you by Nespresso. Hear that? That's your next obsession. Every coffee, a new world. Every sip, a new taste.
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Starting point is 00:25:21 And enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. I imagine, like, 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...
Starting point is 00:25:35 Right. And you've also, you have lived long enough that you have perspective to really look back and be like, okay, well, that thing in my life, that was actually really special. And I'm, I'm, like, so grateful for that. Yeah, it goes back to the remembering self, right? Yeah. Yeah, you can look back on those. And, yeah, again, so you look back on those times and the remembering self, it removes
Starting point is 00:25:57 a lot of the emotions that happened at those periods, right? Yeah. 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 life span like that.
Starting point is 00:26:24 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?
Starting point is 00:26:51 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.
Starting point is 00:27:13 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.
Starting point is 00:27:39 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 over-optimized for exploration and effect and novelty, it's you can you can under index on purpose and meaning and 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.
Starting point is 00:28:24 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.
Starting point is 00:29:11 And it's like, yeah, you just, you don't want to end up there. Right. So, right. 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.
Starting point is 00:29:34 Yeah, shit is a hard part of your life and you're going to get through it. And then you're going to see the meaning at the end of it. Yeah. So like 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. All right, everybody.
Starting point is 00:29:48 That's it for today's highlight. If that hit the spot for you, the full episode goes way deeper. We covered the entire research landscape on happiness from Aristotle. to modern neuroscience, how money, relationships, and health actually factor in, and why most of what people chase does not move the needle on what makes them happy. It's great. Don't listen to it. And if today's episode made you want to actually do something about your happiness, I put
Starting point is 00:30:12 together a free guide that gives you a place to take it further. It's called happiness solved. It covers everything we talked about today and much, much more. We talk about what the psychology actually says about meaning, fulfillment, and why chasing good feelings tends to backfire. something you can read, sit with, and come back to when you need to. You can get it for free at solvepodcast.com slash happiness or grab it in the show notes below. Now, if you're enjoying the show, do the usual, follow, subscribe, leave a rating or review, and share it with someone who could use a reminder that happiness is not at the bottom of an Amazon shopping cart.
Starting point is 00:30:46 Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Hey, so if anything in today's episode hit home for you, don't just let it fade because that's usually what happens, right? here's something that clicks, you think, I should do something about that. And then life happens. And three weeks later, you barely remember what you heard in the first place. That's why you should check out Purpose, because Purpose is built for exactly that situation. It's a personal development AI that learns you. It takes the stuff that you're learning and helps you actually apply it to your life, to your situation, everything you're dealing with right now. It remembers what
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