Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 567: Jonathan Haidt on: The Upside of Striving, How to Build a Stronger Mind, And What to Do with Ideas You Hate

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Usually episodes of this show are organized around one big question, but today’s guest, Jonathan Haidt, is just too interesting for one clear focus. In this episode, we dig into a ton of fascinating topics, including: why it can make you happier to see your own irrationality and hypocrisy, the value of interacting with ideas you do not like, how to navigate social media sanely, how to get ahead at work (and stay happy in the process), the upside of striving, the wisdom of the Stoics, and more. Jonathan Haidt is a renowned social psychologist from New York University’s Stern school of business and the author of many books, including: The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. Since 2018, he’s been studying the contributions of social media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. One other note: heads up that this conversation includes mentions of self-harm and suicide.In this episode we talk about:Haidt’s elephant and rider metaphor that explains how our minds’ operateHow to use different techniques from hypnosis to Buddhist and Stoic practices to tame our unconsciousWhy we’ve evolved to be hypocrites and how admitting our flaws can help us come out aheadBuddhism as a counterpoint to our success oriented cultureThe deleterious effects of social media on democracy and young people’s mental health Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jonathan-haidt-567See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. Usually episodes of this show are organized around one big question. Often it's one pain point, i.e. a common problem that people might have. Anxiety, depression, fighting too much with the people in your life, etc. Sometimes, though, we book a guest who is just too interesting for one clear focus, or alternatively, I'm too undisciplined to pick a subject and stick with it. Whatever the case, my guess today is Jonathan Height, a renowned social psychologist from New York University's Stern School of Business. I've been following his work for years and I had a lot of things I wanted to discuss with him, including

why it can make you happier to see your own irrationality and hypocrisy, the value of interacting with ideas you do not like, how to navigate social media, sanely, how to get ahead at work and stay happy in the process, the upside of striving, the wisdom of the Stoics, and more. A little bit more about Jonathan. He has written many books, including the Happiness Hypothesis, finding modern truth and ancient wisdom, the righteous mind, why good people are divided by politics and religion, and the coddling of the American mind, how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. Since 2018, Jonathan has also been studying the contributions of social

media to the decline of teen mental health and the rise of political dysfunction. He wrote a Super viral article about that in the Atlantic not long ago. So we talk about that as well And here's a little bit more on what we cover in the interview We talk about heights elephant and writer metaphor to explain how our minds operate the writer is our conscious mind metaphor to explain how our minds operate. The writer is our conscious mind, the kind of CEO mind of executive function. The elephant is our unconscious, which is mostly in control. How to use different techniques from hypnosis to Buddhist and stoic practices to tame said elephant. Why we evolved to be hypocrites and how admitting our flaws can actually help us come out ahead,

Buddhism as a counterpoint to our success-oriented culture, and the deleterious effects of social media on democracy and young people's mental health. Just to say, some people might find Jonathan Heitz views to be challenging, but that is part of the point. If you want to be smarter and stronger, you need to learn to engage with ideas you disagree with. Coming up on Wednesday, we're going to hear from a colleague and frequent friendly sparring partner of Jonathan Heitz, who will take a bit of a different tack.

Her name is Professor Dolly Chug. She's been on this show before. So if you consume these episodes as a pair, that might be a nice way to make it all go down easy. One other note before we dive in here, just a quick heads up that this conversation includes mentions of self-harm and suicide. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again.

But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelli McGonical and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos. To access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com.

All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad.

Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Ski-E-Pomber on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Jonathan Height, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Dan. I'm a long time fan, so it's great to finally have you on. There are so many places I could start,

but let me just start here. In much of your work, there's a metaphor that you use that appears to have a lot of importance, and it's the elephant and the rider. Can you tell us what that metaphor is all about and why it's so important to you? So it came about as I was writing my first book, The Happiness Hypothesis, and I was teaching Psych 101 at the time at the University of Virginia, and I was trying to explain all of

psychology in 24 lectures. And so I found that if I use metaphors, my students would understand it a lot better. And a major theme in psychology is dual process theories that our brains are doing multiple things at the same time. In some ways, the brain is more like a committee that doesn't necessarily get along very well with each other. As you're looking for a metaphor, the most common metaphor that a lot of cultures have used is a horse and rider. Plato has this metaphor in the phadress that the charioteer is our reason, and the reason is trying to control these two horses, the noble passions and the base for stupid passions,

and that's what a person is. And if the reason he can get control, the charioteer can control, then you've got a rational person. But at the same time, I was dating, I was in my 30s at the time, and I would just find myself like doing stupid things, and like knowing that I was dating, I was in my 30s at the time, and I would just find myself doing stupid things and knowing that I was doing something stupid, knowing that I was gonna make the wrong decision. So I wanted something bigger than a course, and so I picked an elephant. Now, I have no idea whether I took the metaphor from Buddha.

So Buddha said something like a man must, or sage must tame his mind as an elephant trainer, trains an elephant, something like that. And I studied Buddhism in college a little bit. It was always sort of like just out of my consciousness. In any case, it just fits so well with Buddhism. And here's the thing, it fits so well with psychotherapists. Like, this is what I find from all the things in that book, psychotherapists tell me, this is the metaphor that most helps their clients. Oh, so I never said what it is. Anyway, so the metaphor is that our mind is divided into parts that sometimes

conflict, and if you think about these parts as being like a small rider on top of a large elephant, and the small rider is our reason, and the large elephant is everything else. All the intuitive processes, the emotions, sometimes less million years. We evolved the ability to think in sequence, in language, in words, in logic, but we're not that good at it. So it's weak. And if we get tired or drunk, we do it badly.

But the automatic stuff, boy, that just goes on and on and you can't stop that. So that's the metaphor. We're like a small rider saying, oh, we should go left, go right. But actually, the elephant does what it wants. And then it turns out the rider actually spends a lot of time just justifying whatever the elephant ended up doing. So why is this useful for people? So in the happiest hypothesis, what I did was I looked for all of the psychological claims

that had been made across multiple millennia and multiple continents. It had to pass those two filters to be considered a great truth. And like the first one you find pretty much is the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. So, St. Paul, the flesh, lusted against the spirit, the spirit against the flesh, so that you cannot do the things you would. And I would ask my students, you know, I showed them that quote, I say, well, why don't you just do the things that you want to do?

Like, what's the problem? You know what the right thing is to do? Just do it. But we can't because we're not built that way. I shouldn't say we can't. I would I should say is it's a struggle to do so. So that's what I was trying to capture with that metaphor of all the things I've written. Like that is probably in one of the three things that should be recorded because that seems to be the stickiest thing I ever wrote. And I believe in the happiness hypothesis, you argue that the key to happiness or a key to happiness is training the elephant. It's getting the two in harmony. So you should not think about it as though the rider is the real you and the elephant is this like difficult servant and you have to train it and make it do what you want

Like that's the wrong way to think about things and people like me who are very, you know cerebral cognitive rationalistic Are prone to thinking that whether that's the wrong way to think a better way to think is that We are multiple we are contradictory inside of ourselves and in our relationships And that what you're striving for is just a better kind of harmony just getting things working together in a better way. What are the modalities for achieving said harmony? So I think introspection is an important tool and of course that's the foundation of Western philosophy and over the temple at Delphi, know thyself, and Western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle on has been very much focused on sort of rational inquiry. So I think that's a part of it, but you have to have some idea of what you're trying to do. And then just

all these different wisdom traditions give us different tools. So from the Buddhists, we get meditation, well, Hindus before them, but especially in America, we know much more the Buddhist updates of that. So meditation is very much a way of training the elephant. The elephant is like an animal, you can't lecture it, but if you're training a dog, it learns by gradual reinforcement. And so meditation is a very powerful way to train the elephant gradually,

but it's very hard. And especially for young people, I used to assign it in my psych 101 class. I have a unit on self-improvement, and most people dropped it pretty quickly. It's very hard to stick with, but it works if you can stick with it. Self hypnosis is another way to train the elephant. Cognitive behavioral therapy is an excellent way to basically catch yourself thinking these automatic erroneous thoughts and then correct them. So there are a lot of psychological techniques and a lot of the most powerful ones were actually

discovered by either the Buddhists or the Stoics. And the Stoics are my new favorites because I think they really help you deal with the insanity of life in our country today. What specifically sticks out to you from the Stoics? We have the word Stoic. Many people think to be Stoic is like, well, you know, you're being burned at the state, but you don't scream or cry, you're tough. You don't show emotion.

But that's not what the Stoics were about. What the Stoics were about was not letting the world trigger you as it were, not letting the world set your negative emotions. A mature person has control of their perceptions. They see the world correctly. They don't let their mind run away. So one of the most important quotes, epic teedis, it is not things that disturb us,

but are appraisals of them. So just anything you're hoping for, you don't get. And instead of instantly going down a path of, you know, damn it. And why did I do that? Why did you just re-appraise things and where you are and you set yourself on a better course. I find that for life in a modern Western nation, I think the Stoics are really the best guides I've found to living a life of both equanimity and engagement. Of course, there's many kinds of Buddhism and some allow you to be very engaged in the world. But the Stoics, I mean, like Marcus Aurelis, was the emperor of Rome.

Epochetus was a slave. You could be at any level in society and you could be engaged in society, but yet still learn to manage your emotions and appraisals and live a flourishing life. It's very possible that I am not understanding this correctly, because that happens a lot. But what I heard at least was that you're kind of using the rider to talk to yourself in a rational way that might in some way soothe the elephant. Yes, that's what CBT does. So cognitive behavioral therapy is a technique which actually comes straight out of stoic teachings, it's a technique where you identify the common patterns of distorted thoughts. So binary thinking, catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, there are things that we

habitually do when driven by emotion that are distortions of thought. It's easy to see this in others, it's easy to see them in your children, but CBT is a technique developed by Aaron Beck and a few others in the 1960s. Once you have the names of these thoughts, of these discourses, it's about 12 to 15 of them. And once you have the names of them, you can label them very quickly. When you see yourself catastrophizing over some little thing and you think, oh, all these terrible things are going to happen, even though they never have before.

So just being able to label it, and you can kind of laugh at yourself. And I got a greater interest in this from my friend Greg Lupianoff, my co-author on the calling the American Mind, because Greg is prone to depression and he had a very serious one in 2007 and learned CBT afterwards. So that's kind of how I got into CBT in my 50s, I guess it was. So how do you use this stoic wisdom slash modern psychotherapeutic approach of CBT in the context of living in what seems at times to be an increasingly insane world in 2022. Well, so I'll tell you when I started it in 2017, I think it was, you know, the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. And he's making saber-addling noises about nuclear war with North Korea. And my wife is Korean American,

and she had a trip planned with my son. They were gonna go with her father to Seoul and see relatives. And at the same time, I'm thinking, oh my God, I think Trump actually wants to nuke North Korea. And I literally started reading up on prepping for, you know, what should we have in iodine tablets? We live in New York City and if Kim Jong Un

could send a missile to New York, he'd do it. And I really started thinking about nuclear as he did when I was a child. And I figured, what triggered it, but I just thought, I need to not just jump into my email first thing in the morning. I need to set my mind, I didn't know at the time, but that's actually one of the major stoic practices is just a morning routine and

an evening routine. Read great thinkers, read meditations on life, start your day off with the proper mental frame and end it with the proper mental frame. So I started reading markers are really is. But actually, maybe you can tell me first of all, how often if you talked about the stoics on your show? Exactly. One time prior to this. Oh my goodness. Okay. Good. So listeners of your show won't just be a 17th rep.

But if your show is called 10% happier, then I think you should be devoting at least 10% of your shows to the Stoics. That would be my advice. Okay. In fact, you know what? Hold on a sec. I have something for you. Okay.

So as I read the Stoics, I find that actually the Stoics warned us about social media, like they basically understood human nature, human cognition, and human relationships so well that they have all of these amazing quotes. So here's from Marcus Aureles. The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts, color it with the run of thoughts like these. Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one. Okay, so whatever you sort of immerse yourself in, that's what your mind becomes. So why would you spend any time on Twitter? Like, it just doesn't make any sense. You just put your head in the gutter and you're going to end up with a gutter mind. Here's an even more incredible one from that Matidas. He says,

if your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren't you ashamed that you've made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset? And once again, that's social media and in particular Twitter. Why would you put yourself in a place where total strangers who are using a fake name, we have no history with, who don't matter, get to say terrible things about you and that can throw you off. So either get to the point of a stoic or Buddhist who just doesn't care if people call you all kinds of names or don't spend your day on Twitter.

So is your advice no social media if you want to be happy? No, it depends what you do for a living. I mean, so, you know, I'm a professor and a writer and I follow politics. So, there are advantages to checking in with Twitter now and debt. It is an incredible tool to find things to read, to see what's going on. And because I'm writing about it, I have to actually have some sense of what's going on. But it really did kind of drive me crazy a couple of years ago. It really did throw me first bin. And that's also related to why I've gotten into the Stoics later.

So social media can be a tool that you use. And I think LinkedIn is a good example. LinkedIn people use because it's useful. Very few people are addicted to it. It doesn't take over their lives. There are very few people who regret that they're on LinkedIn. Whereas Twitter, Instagram, TikTok's a little different because it's mostly about creativity and humor and dancing, but there are now pockets of it that are really much more toxic than anything else out there. So I think it depends on who you are.

It depends on what you do for a living because there are some uses. And to the extent that you can use it as a tool to advance your ends, it can be quite useful. But the subset that are based on a business model where you are generating content for the platform, you're not the customer, the advertiser or the customers, and you are the product that is bringing other people on to the eyeballs for the customers, that business model tends to try to hook people. So I do think that no one under

16 should be on any form of social media where they post and wait for people to comment. That I think, and I've got a lot of evidence on this, social media, particularly Instagram, I do believe is the major cause or at least half of the cause of the team mental health crisis. But for adults, I'm reluctant to tell adults what to do other than just be careful. You wrote a piece in the Atlantic recently that went massively viral. I read it. It was fantastic. And it is now the basis for a book you're working on.

And my hope is to have you back on to talk about it in a full way at that time. But since we're on the subjects of social media, I do want to bring this up. Your article, if memory serves, really talked about the pernicious impact of social media on the functioning of democracy and as an itching powder on our divisions. And to bring this full circle, it really reminds me of the elephant and writer metaphor, which you use not only in the happiness hypothesis, but also in the righteous mind, a book you wrote about why good people are divided by politics

and religion. And so, given that many, if not all of us, will have spent time feeling hatred for the other tribe while glancing at our social media, I wonder if you could talk about the utility of the elephant and writer metaphor in this zone. Yeah. Okay, so let's start with the main idea of the Atlantic article. I've been a professor since 1995 1995 and I love being a professor. I love universities.

I love students. But all of a sudden, something weird, just something changed in the fabric of the social universe in 2014 and hit campus first. This weird numerality, students claiming that they were being harmed by words and organizing to prosecute people because they used a word or they said something like they didn't say something. So we couldn't understand what was happening. There were demands for safe spaces, trigger warnings, micrograces. They came out of nowhere in 2014, it wasn't there in 2012. And then weird stuff started happening, not just on universities,

then it spread to many other institutions, journalism, the arts, politics. So our politics is now really weird in ways that I was struggling to understand. I've been struggling since 2014 to understand it. And I've just been thinking of the Babel story. We're divided. And when I went back and reread the actual text, it's just a very short little story in Genesis. The key line is that God says, when he sees the humans building this great tower to make a name for themselves, and so that we will not be flooded again because this is

a little after Noah's flood. And God says, let us go down and confound their language so that they may not understand one another. And boom, like that line, and I said, wow, that's what's happened to us. So I've been thinking about that for the last couple of years and really just, it's just been annoying at me. Like, how did this happen? How are we in babble? And if you imagine the descendants of Noah, like 10, 20 generations after the flood, they build this incredible city with a tower, 50 stories tall or whatever, you'd feel such incredible awe and pride at doing that. And then boom, one day, one day out of nowhere, the tower's knocked down, not only that, but

you literally can't talk to the person next to you. Like, this tragedy has happened and you literally cannot understand the person next to you. That's what it felt like to me in the 2010s. It wasn't like this in 2012, but by 2015, it was like this on campus and by 2018, it was like this in journalism in the arts. By 2020, it was like this so much everywhere. So that's what I was trying to explain. And the link to social media that I worked out as a social psychologist is everybody looks at social media and politics in terms of fake news like, oh, it spreads misinformation. Okay, yeah, it does that, but I'm not interested in that.

I'm a social psychologist. I'm interested in how it changes relationships. And what I argue in the essay is that the key thing to look at is the democratization of intimidation. Anyone can harass or intimidate anyone at any time with no accountability, anonymously, no penalty for false accusations, no due process, nothing. This is why we all suddenly started walking on eggshells. As a teacher, I used to be able to say provocative things and leave my class through difficult ideas. I don't dare do that now.

If I offend anyone anyone they can report me, they can publicize it. All kinds of weird stuff happens. We have to all be walking on eggshells now, not everywhere in the country, but in many institutions. So what I was focusing on was how is it that institutions are getting so stupid they keep doing these stupid, stupid things, even other fullest smart people. And the basic argument was social media gave everybody like a little dark gun. You can harass or intimidate, you can accuse anywhere with anything under a fake name if you want. And then the accusation may go nowhere or millions of people could sign onto it. So it's like this game of Russian roulette and everyone's afraid of each other.

So that's what I was trying to get at. How is it that we became afraid of each other to the point where we don't speak up and say what we're thinking? We don't challenge each other's ideas, at least in many parts of the academy anymore. And that's what has made us structurally stupid, the loss of the point diversity. And while I'm rambling a bit here, I'm sort of trying to give you like seven different ideas

in this 8,000 word article. But that's what the battle metaphor is all about that social media allowed a small number of people to intimidate a large number of people to such an extent that our basic social institutions don't work anymore. That's a great summary of a complex set of arguments you were making in that article. And I think why I was bringing in the writer and the elephant is that we can't understand each other anymore and that can play out in lots of ways. But one of the ways is these tribal divides, especially here in America, as I read your

Atlantic article about the deleterious impacts of social media, I started remembering reading the righteous mind years before in which you talk about, if memory serves, that as we can start to understand that we all have our elephants, that can create a kind of empathy with other people's elephants. I see. Yes, okay. So the crux of my own research, I love to write about other people's research. I love to synthesize scholars and philosophers research.

But to the extent that I've made a contribution myself in empirical psychology, it's from doing research on haemorality various across cultures and coming up with a theory that But to the extent that I've made a contribution myself in empirical psychology, it's from doing research on haemorality various across cultures and coming up with a theory that my colleagues and I call moral foundations theory, where fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. And it's like taste buds on our tongue. We all have the same taste buds, but there are different cuisines around the world. And once you understand that, you can see like, oh, you know, if you're raised in a different culture, you have different likes and dislikes around food, and you understand why

Australians might like a vegimite, and if you didn't grow up in it, you're not going to like it. And the same way, if you are either predisposed to be on the left, because it's like everything else, it's genetically heritable. So if you're predisposed to be on the left, or if you're raised in progressive environments, you're going to have a hyperdeveloped sense for care and fairness as equality. You're very focused on equality. And if you look at a lot of the social movements on the left, it's about victims and oppression and inequality, and all those important topics,

and it's sense to left specializes in finding injustices and trying to write them. But then you're kind of blind to some other things. And if you're on the right, if you have a temperament that's predisposed to be conservative, and that's parable, and you can tell if someone's going to be conservative, because if their room is very neat, and they've always been very neat and organized, and they're on time to meetings, they're more likely to end up on the right. And they value tradition, and they value order, and they have the same taste buds, they certainly can understand care and quality. But they think of fairness more is proportionality.

You know, you do the crime, you should do the time, you should clean up after yourself, you should have personal responsibility, you should be loyal to your groups, you should respect legitimate authority, you should treat your body as a temple, not as a playground. So these are a whole range of moral intuitions. And what I came to see working in India originally, but then working across the political divide in America, is that there's a real complementarity between right and left. If you have a progressive impulse and a conservative impulse in a society that you actually get the best policy, you get the best outcomes.

Now, unfortunately, what's happened, and here maybe I can swing around to your question, which is really bad empathy, is in a country in which we used to have an active center left, and they are still the dominant force of the Democratic Party, and we used to have an active center right, and they are no longer the parties, the Republican party has become the structurally stupid party because they turned on their moderates. They've kicked them all out. They've persecuted them. They've harassed them, death threats. So most of the moderates are gone from the Republican party, especially at the congressional level. The Democrats, that's not true. And so people on the left just point to this. They say, you know, look what Donald Trump did. Look what the Senate Republican did. They're insane. They're terrible. They're evil. We can't have a democracy. And they're right. They're right about all of that

But they can't understand They can't do the reversal which is to say well, what if you're on the right? What would you say if you're on the right? What you see is not that the Democratic party is insane Restructural students what you see is that the cultural left has undergone a similar transformation into structural stupidity. You see that in universities, people are afraid to speak up and challenge the dominant view. You see that in any progressive organization,

people are so afraid to descend on anything. And so if you're on the right, you see, you have, I mean, every day, you have 50 examples in your inbox of incredible structural stupidity on the right, you see, you have, I mean, every day, you have 50 examples in your inbox of incredible structural stupidity on the left. So my argument is, most people are reasonable. Having a balance between center left center right is a good thing. Both sides have experienced a super empowerment of their furthest wings, but in an asymmetric

way that makes it hard to see both sides. But if you can see both sides, then suddenly you realize, whoa, it's not that they're the enemy. It's that the whole system is so messed up that our democracy is going to collapse. Our democracy cannot survive this way. If we keep going there, we're going. We don't have very long to live. And by live, I don't mean we're going to physically die. I just mean to live as a democratic republic of the sort that our founders gave us and of the sort we thought we had had. So I don't want to be too apocalyptic, but maybe it would help to share that I basically never get angry. I actually just try to understand what the hell's going on. And that gives me, I think,

some empathy for everybody. Is that luck of the genetic draw for you or is that upskill that the rest of us could cultivate? By disposition, I'm a central left kind of person. I was always a, you know, who's what are the Democrats. So I think anyone sort of with a temperament that sort of central left to center right can do this. What happened to me was I set out to write the right to mind originally to help the Democrats stop losing. This was after George W. Bush had won twice when I thought he shouldn't have. And so I forced myself to be exposed to conservative ideas and writings, I read national review, and I discovered, hey, actually, there's a lot of good ideas there,

especially if you read the best people. And I found as a social scientist like, wow, I'm a much better social scientist, if I actually listened to multiple sides of a policy issue. So as a researcher and a social scientist, it took me years to do this, which means that an average person who isn't doing this for a living, it might be hard. But I've taught a lot of courses and I've worked with a lot of students and the space of one semester, like they really get it. It actually doesn't take that long to understand that your fellow countrymen see things differently than you, because so many, so good at doing this for other cultures, we can be very tolerant of other

cultures. Why can't we be tolerant of our neighbors? And it turns out with just a little work you can. And so, yeah, I guess, okay, everybody should go out and just read the right-just mind that actually may be enough. And then the other thing is go to openmindplatform.org. It's a program that Caroline Mel and I created to actually teach people to do this and to understand the psychology, why it's hard to do it, but to use some psychological techniques to be better at it.

So openmindplatform.org, we designed it for you as an organization, it's actually. So if you find that your company or your school or your PTA group or anything, if you find that things are tense and there's just a lot of fear of fighting or anger, if everybody does it, you all have a book, have a common, you all learn how to get along a lot better and you'll be much less structurally stupid because you'll be able to have constructive arguments. I wonder if one of the keys here is something you said earlier, which is that we're pretty good at seeing irrationality and hypocrisy and others, but not so good at seeing our own

elephants. And just knowing that seems like a great North star for navigating babble to use your terminology. Well, it's a starting point. I mean, basically what you just said is literally chapter four of the happiness hypothesis. If you collect quotations around the world, you find a lot of this form. So here's the familiar one. Why do you see the spec of your neighbor's eye, but you do not notice the log in your own eye?

So yes, we're really good at finding flaws in other people and we're really good at defending ourselves from charges that we're the same. Here's a similar quote from Buddha. It's easy to see the faults of others, but difficult to see one's own faults, when shows the faults of others like chaff winnowed in the win, but when conceals one's own faults as a cunning gambler conceals his dice.

So wise people in every human society that has writing are on to exactly what you just said, that were hypocrites. And in the chapter, I go through why we evolved to be hypocrites. And in the chapter, I go through why we evolved to be hypocrites. So we evolved to try to win the game of social reputation and prestige. And so we're always trying to make ourselves look at it.

But here's the paradoxical effect. If you admit your flaws and you're honest about it, you actually in the long run tend to come out ahead. So yeah, understand that we're all hypocrites. We're all struggling to figure out what's true. It's very difficult to figure out what's true. And I think it's much harder now than it was 10 years ago. So yeah, a little bit of humility about how hard it is to know reality and how hard it is to even know yourself. So yeah, I think that does help. Coming up Jonathan Height on how we can be happier

in our work lives. a defense of striving, which is often denigrated in the meditation world, and the power of having an accountability partner when you're trying to change your habits. That's coming up after this. Raising kids can be one of the greatest rewards of a parent's life. But come on, someday, parenting is unbearable. I love my kid, but is a new parenting podcast from Wondry that shares a refreshingly honest and insightful take on parenting.

Hosted by myself, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brownleur, we will be your resident not-so-expert experts. self, Megan Galey, Chris Garcia, and Kurt Brown all are, we will be your resident not so expert experts. Each week we'll share a parenting story that'll have you laughing, nodding, and thinking. Oh yeah, I have absolutely been there. We'll talk about what went right and wrong, what would we do differently? And the next time you step on yet another stray Lego in the middle of the night, you'll feel less alone.

So if you like to laugh with us as we talk about the hardest job in the world, listen to, I love my kid, but wherever you get your podcasts, you can listen ad-free on the Amazon music or Wondery app. How much, if any optimism do you have that we can achieve the requisite level of optimism do have that we can achieve the requisite level of empathy and structural sanity to get through this tumultuous period of time intact. In the short term, I'm an incredible pessimist. In the medium term, I'm a pessimist. In the long term, my writer is optimistic. That is, I believe my friend Steve Pinker,

that in the long run things are getting better, and people have often thought that their world was going to hell and they've almost always been wrong. The way to reconcile all this, I believe, is to understand that there are cycles in history, and they last about 80 years, 80 to 100 years. And a society comes through a crisis, a war, a terrible time, typically,

and then they build institutions that create something new. This happened with the founding of the country in the 1780s. It happened after the Civil War, it happened after the Depression World War II. So there are cycles in history when new institutions and norms get built, and then you get greatness for a couple of generations. Never for, you don't get four generations, you get two or three, and things decay, and things change. And the institutions that were built after the Second World War worked great for the little while, but we can't just keep slowly updating them. There are many theories out there that talk about how every 80 to 100 years, things really

break, you get a crisis. And several theories have predicted 2020, 2025 as the peak year crisis. So things are going to get a lot worse, I believe. We're going to have a lot more political chaos, political violence as we had in the 60s and 70s. I don't think that, you know, five years from now, it's not like, oh, boy, wasn't that crazy? Those early 2020s, they were crazy. But man, we're done with that. I don't think we're going to be through this in five years. But eventually, we will get through it. And Amazon will always be there for you to get products like it's not like we're going to starve or die. But I think the sense we had of a stable democracy, which was the envy of the world, I think that is gone. And we're going to have to rebuild it. That's going to be the great challenge for

the next generation is to build something you knew. I know you teach a course called Work Wisdom and Happiness, and so I'm interested in talking a little bit about how we can be happier in one of the most anxiety producing spheres of life, which is work. And in particular, I'm interested in the case, I believe you make in the Happiness Hypothesis, which is a kind of defense of striving. There is a received wisdom that happiness cannot be the result of external rewards, but you take that on.

Can you say more about that? Yeah, so the Buddhist and the Stoics do generally preach a kind of non-attachment. And they lived in worlds in which they didn't even know what the weather was gonna be the next day. You could have a volcano erupting and everyone's dead. Like they really couldn't plan on retirement. You know, until the 20th century,

nobody could plan on retirement. And so they developed philosophies of non-attachment and of getting distance. And especially the Buddhists had ideas of non-striving. I think the Stoics are more comfortable with striving. And so while I was writing the Happiness Hypothesis, I was very taken with Buddhism as I had been since college, but I began to see that for different societies, there are different philosophies that would be optimal. And Americans are currently attracted

to Buddhists because it's a counterpoint to our more outgoing, aggressive, achieved, do things, discover things, get stronger, get smarter. And so we're often looking over our shoulder and saying, well, isn't there a piece of tranquility over there? But that doesn't mean that we should be Buddhists. And I've been active in positive psychology since, began in 1999 or so.

And it turns out that there are some things that really do make you happier. And it turns out that there are some things that really do make you happier. And it's especially relationships and being embedded in a community. It's having good work that uses your strengths. So it's not correct that, oh, just look within and don't try to change the world. No, the world's never gonna conform to what you want.

And so if you pin your hopes on making the world be just the way you want, you'll always be disappointed. But at the same time, it is worth striving to get your relationships, right, to find work that uses your strengths, to arrange your lives that you have a sense of control and efficacy over what you do. If you have work that you don't love, that doesn't use your strengths where you have little control of what happens to you and you've got demands placed on you randomly and you don't have friends at work.

Like, yeah, you're going to be unhappy. So by the time I finished the book, I embraced a kind of a more Western approach. Like, you know, Buddhism is fascinating and useful, but I think the path to flourishing for most Americans and Western Europeans is going to draw from multiple traditions, but it is ultimately going to be, for many people, to try to make a mark on the world, to strive, to aim high. Just don't get so carried away that you lose perspective and you let the world control your mood. That's where Stoicism in particular, I think, is so helpful. It's interesting because I wouldn't call myself a

Buddhist scholar, but I certainly have written a couple books about meditation and practice Buddhist meditation quite a bit. And my understanding of the Buddha's life is he did renounce the worldly, but spent a lot of time hanging out with merchants and kings, and my understanding of Buddhism is not that you shouldn't strive, it's that you should not be attached to the results. Yeah, there's a line in the Bhagavad Gita, you know, Hinduism, the roots of it, have that too. You should be the same in success and failure. But let me ask you, this is a question I asked, I feel which Buddha scholar I had conversation with many years ago. And I said, okay, let's talk about attachment, non-attachment. If your wife dies, is it appropriate to feel pain and loss? He couldn't give me a clear answer.

What do you think? So there's no question that if my wife died, I would feel an enormous amount of pain and loss. But is that a Buddhist reaction? Or is that just a human reaction that's not consistent with what the Buddhist ideal is? So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt because I pick things up along the way, but the Buddha is memory serves It lost one of his disciples, sorry, Putra, I think and said it was if The moon had fallen from the sky or something to that effect There's also a great story about a Buddhist master who lost his daughter and was seen by his disciples crying.

And they said, I thought, master, you said everything's an illusion. And he said, some illusions are more painful than others. Okay. So as long as there's a recognition of that human response, I mean, as long as we take it as a general guide, you should be looking at your attachments. And I just think life is richer and better if you have certain kinds of attachment, which it will be painful to lose, but you can either deal with the grief in ways that resolve it quickly or not. If there are any Buddhist scholars listening to us, they're probably

pulling their hair out. No, they're not getting upset. They're actually very tranquil about this. But so yeah, we might move on away from Buddhist scholarship. We're actually very tranquil about this. So yeah, we should move on away from Buddhist college. It's interesting on this issue of striving though, I had a conversation just yesterday with a long time friend who had a massive positive development in his work life, which resulted in a huge financial windfall, a mind bending financial windfall. I mean, mind bending financial windfall. And he said he was no happier the moment that happened than the moment preceding it. And in fact, was perhaps more anxious. And so I relate that to you in light of everything we've just discussed to see what it brings up for you.

So yeah, that's exactly it. is how close if you want to hitch your moods to what happens in life. And one school is go for it, embrace life, grab it all, experience everything. Another is no, get some distance, step back, be almost indifferent to what happens. And then a third is, how about let's try to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. And to that, I'd actually like to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff. And to that, I'd actually like to add a fourth consideration, which is your age. So the Buddha lived and then renounced. If my son is 16, if he were to take a Buddhism next year and devote himself to spiritual growth

and separate from the world, that would be a tragedy. That would be such a loss. A young person should live. A young person must get his heart broken many times, must experience success and failure. And then later in midlife, maybe you can step back. But I was a philosophy major under God. So, oh, the unexamined life is not worth living, as the Socrates said. But the unlived life is not worth examining. That's what came to the happiness hypothesis. It was a kind of a Western vision of life, but just tempered by the psychological understandings of the Buddhists and Stoics. I think that's the best way to live a life in the West. Again, many people,

many lives, I'm a John Stuart Mill liberal. We want a society that makes maximum room for people to construct lives that they want. But actually, you know what, if I could get back to a thread that we had a moment ago, which we didn't really pick up on enough, was this course that I'm teaching at Stern, a teaching at the Business School and what you've turned. And I teach a course I've taught it since 2014 called Work Wisdom and Happiness. But I've actually retooled it in the last year. The theme of the course now is smarter, stronger, happier. And the idea is this. It's actually sort of smarter, stronger, more socially skilled, happier. So far it's just been for MBA students. They've been out in the world a few years. They're coming back to school. And the idea is, let's start with stronger. How do you get stronger? And the key idea there is anti-fragility.

This is the opening chapter of the coddling of the American mind. Our immune systems are anti-fragile. If you protect them from dirt and germs, then you weaken them. They have to have exposure in order to get strong. Children in the same way. If we protect our kids from negative experiences, from teasing, from minor injuries,

then they don't learn how to deal with people or how to deal with the world. So we're all anti-fragile. And Gen Z people born 1996 and later have been so overprotected in all the English-speaking countries, it's the same thing in Canada and Britain, as it is in America. And so I talk with the students about how we're anti-fragile,

how you have to take risks, you have to put yourself out there, because that's how you learn, that's how you grow the most. And once we understand growth, how do you get stronger, when now we look at how do you get smarter? We naturally look for evidence that we're right, but if you look for evidence that you're wrong,

you'll get smarter a lot faster. If you read things that are contrary to your view, if you're on the left, read the smartest people on the right, vice versa, you'll actually get smarter really quickly. And what I find is I read a lot of different things, and I find that if I seek out people who disagree, my work gets better faster than if I seek out people who are great. So once you understand it gets stronger, now it's getting smarter. And now let's apply that to becoming

more sociable because almost everybody wants to be more socially skilled. Very few people feel that they're very socially skilled and are satisfied with it. Most people don't feel they have enough close friends, especially young people, they're very isolated. So how do you become more socially skilled? And again, you have to take risks, you have to put yourself out there, you have to deal with a lot of rejection and that will make you stronger. And then the conclusion of the class is, if you can make yourself stronger, smarter, and more socially skilled, then you will be more successful at work. And again, this is an MBA course we're focused on work. You will be more successful at work.

And if you're all those things, including successful at work, you will be happier. So yeah, that's what I've been working on in my teaching over the last year. What are the practices that you prescribed to your students in this course? So I signed the five minute journal. If you just look up five-minute journal, I forget the website name. You know, the physical book is very nice. And it just sort of guides you through a morning routine or an evening routine. So that's the first thing. And about half the students end up really liking it and continuing it, half of them drop it. I don't force them to stick with any habit, but I make them try if you have it so with the course of this very short course, just six weeks long. Then I have them read the opening chapter over the course of this very short course, just six weeks long.

Then I have them read the opening chapter or two of Atonic habits, which is all about, you know, it's a very behaviorious view of self-change, and you have to set up reinforcements and small steps. And I have them identified by the end of the first class, what is the change you want to make in yourself? And how are you going to do it? And that's what the final papers are about. What did you do?

How did you pick this? How did it go? And I don't grade them on whether they were successful. I grade them on whether they read a good psychology paper where they reflected on who they are, on what we know about self-change, and they picked some methods. It turns out one really powerful practice

was having an accountability partner. So they used to each be on their own to do this. But it turns out if you pair them up in the class, and I'm experimenting with it, it should be a friend or a stranger, something they don't know, but you pair them up with someone. And my suggestion is we meet on Monday nights every week. How about on Thursdays, you check in? Now you can adjust that, but on Thursdays, you check in, it can be just my type of, how's it go? Did you do the thing you said you were going to do? So it would be accountable to someone midweek. That seems to speed up their progress. Otherwise, it's too easy

to make excuses. The rider comes up with, you know, the elephant doesn't want to do it. He doesn't want to get up early in the morning and go running or he doesn't want to put himself out there and take risks. And the rider makes excuses for him. But if you have to face an accountability partner who's going to ask you, so did you do the thing that you promised me you would do? So, we use all the tricks that we can think of, the psychological tricks and the social tricks, to help the ride and the elephant work together ultimately change the elephant, just really what it's about. Coming up Jonathan Height on why we need adversity, his theory on the linkage between political correctness and adversity, and advice on how to participate cheerfully in

turbulent tribalized polarized times after this Last question for me and this goes to the notion of being stronger and this is a question you look at in the happiness hypothesis is adversity good for us or bad for us? being stronger. And this is a question you look at in the happiness hypothesis. Is adversity good for us or bad for us? So generally, it's good for us, but it has to be the right kind of adversity at the right time and with the right lessons. Because this is also one of those great truths that you find in almost every culture. It's really amazing. I can actually read you a couple of the quotes. The best known one, of course, is from Nietzsche.

What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. But you find this in, well, there's a quote from Mensius. When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject to sinews, bones to hard work, to et cetera, et cetera. So anyway, we need adversity to grow. Adversity for two, three, four-year-olds, probably not much.

Real adversity in early childhood can be real scars. There's a lot of research on adverse childhood experiences. That can be bad. But facing social adversity, if it doesn't go on too long, if it's not so severe, can often be very strengthening. So in the 1990s, we freaked out. We changed the way we raised kids. It's quite sudden, actually.

The amount of time that mothers and fathers began spending with their kids is for some reason it shoots up right around 1995. I can't figure this out. So we start overprotecting our kids a lot in the 1990s into the present day. And this, I believe, is the other major reason. Why rates of depression, self-harm, suicide, anxiety have

doubled for some subsets since 2012, our teens are in a terrible state, very, very bad mental health. And I believe it's because we vastly overprotective them to pride them of normal adversity, while at the same time, putting them on social media or giving them phones that they then beginning around 2012, they all got on social media, and boom, within a year, the rate of depression is up 50% within a year, or about two years, 2012 to 2014, 2015. The boys all started not doing well,

but the data doesn't allow me to connect, the boys outcomes to social media, but for the girls, the connections are pretty clear. Well, if I understand your argument correctly, this coddling led not only to the public health crises or a mental health of young people once they go from being coddled to being exposed on social media, but also if I'm understanding you correctly,

to what has been unflatteringly referred to as woke isn't more political correctness because these kids get to college and can't handle opposing views. That's right. And there's an anomaly that's not widely known. It's just discovered a year or two ago, which is that it's especially girls on the left.

They are the ones who most bear the brunt of this. Girls in the right are not doing nearly as badly. We have this long period from, I was born in 1963 to 2013, it's 50 years in which we made the most incredible progress on every possible social justice issue. The 100 years before I was born, very little progress from the emancipation proclamation to my birth 1963, Martin Luther King speech 1963. The next 50 years, incredible progress, but for some reason, young women on the left decide in 2013 that everything is and always was racism, sexism, oppression, gender pay gaps. This doesn't have

much link to reality, but girls in the left were immersed in a social media environment. Tumblr turns out, I didn't know this way, but the article, Tumblr turns out to be a real petri dish of this concern. So that might explain why it's the girls in the left who become depressed first and most, and to this day. So there's all kinds of twists and turns to the story. It's not a one factor causation. It's not just the overprotection. It's not just being on social media, and it's not just this set of ideas about oppression and victimology. It's interesting interactions. One other that I just really found in the last few days, I was reading Emile Durkheim, my favorite sociologist, who talks about collective

effort, vests, and communal rituals, and this human need come together physically, and we dance together, we drink together, like cultures all over the world do this. They have rituals that bring the group together. And it's essential that you move together. You have to use your muscles for embodied creatures, we have bodies. So as I was reading Dirk Kheim on this, and an article that was reviewing Dirk Kheim's work, and I realized, oh my God, the metaverse is the absolute opposite of what D. Kym said we need. When kids are connecting, not even synchronously, like it's one thing you know, you know, you and I are talking now, like we have at least some back and forth.

If we were together in person, it'd be much better. We'd have much more of a bond, but at least this is synchronous. What the girls are doing is asynchronous. So when all the kids got on their screens all day long, they all got iPhones around 2012, plus or minus a couple of years. When they all moved their social labs onto screens, the boys went for video games and video games are synchronous. So my son would play Fortnite with his friends

and that was at least they're working together to find and kill other groups of boys. And it was great fun and that's actually very healthy. So multiplayer video games are not bad for kids. They might even be good for them with limits. But what did the girls do? When they got on, they went for Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest. They went for the visual platforms, which are asynchronous, performative, self-presentation. But what a girl's need, what a girl's games all about. Girls more than boys are about connection. So when you look before all this stuff was happening,

what do girls do? Hattie cake, they have all these rhyme games with clapping, girls do all these things to physically synchronize themselves with other girls. That's part of growing up as a girl. Jump rope, girls games are not competitive, they're about bonding. And when everyone moves on to digital platforms, the

boys are doing okay. It's kind of more fun. But the girls are now completely starving for communion and connection. They're so lonely. And they're so insecure as they go through puberty alone. So there's a lot of pieces to this story. But the main victims have been girls born after 1995. Jonathan, I really appreciate you coming on. I think you've said a lot of interesting things and a lot of things will be challenging to our audience, which is actually part of your thesis that we should all be challenging ourselves. We have referenced many of your books and you've referenced at least one of the sort of digital platforms you've created open mind.

Is there anything else that's worth mentioning in terms of resources you've put out into the world that people could access? Yes. So, I would suggest starting either at the coddling.com, which is the website for the Codding American Mind, or my main website, which is JonathanHeight.com. My last name is HAIDT, and I've put everything there, especially I have a page on social media, put all my work on social media is on a single page. You can find everything there. And I would like to end with actually, I quote, I really love now because I know some of them I talk about democracy and mental health. It's pretty dark. But there's this quote I found from Joseph Campbell. I hope I can end with here. So Joseph Campbell studied mythology in the late

20th century. He was the world's greatest expert on myth and he wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces and he looked looked at hero stories around the world. And he had a special on PBS that really moved me when I saw it in the 1990s, but he has this quote, he says, the lesson of the hero is this, how do you live in this crazy, difficult, dangerous world? He said, quote, the lesson is, participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.

We cannot hear the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live and joy. The warrior's approach is to say yes to life, yay to it all. And I think we're in one of those cycles. A lot of things are getting worse, at least socially and politically, but it's a temporary cycle.

And we have to figure out how to live. It could go on five years, it could go on 30 years. We don't know. But I think Joseph Campbell offers us guidance for how to actually live engaged and reasonably happy lives during this period. Hey, man. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. I think that is a pretty solid mantra for these tumultuous times. Well, Dan, pleasure talking. Likewise, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks again to Jonathan Height. Thanks to you for listening. By the way, I have not asked for this in a minute,

but if you do have time to go into your podcast player and give us a rating and or a review, that would really help it only takes a second. Thank you for that. And thanks finally to everybody who worked so hard on this show, 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Cashmere, Testing Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneiderman, and Kimmy Regler is our managing producer, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonnaventure of Ultraviolet

Audio, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. We'll see you all on Wednesday when our guest will be Dolly Chug, who, as mentioned at the top of the show, happens to be a colleague and a frequent friendly sparring partner of Jonathan Hyde. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.