The Wellness Scoop - Is Happy Ever After a Myth?

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Does our quest for a seemingly perfect life, a constant need to keep up with the Joneses and a series of unachievable expectations fuel our growing levels of unhappiness and anxiety? We’re looking at the social norms that surround marriage, children, careers, education, income and so much more with Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, looking at the research and the science behind the narratives.   Happy Ever After: Paul Dolan See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Ella Mills. I'm afraid my co-host is missing in action yet again this week. Coronavirus is quite a complicated one to deal with at Deliciously Ella HQ and so he is basically locked in the meeting room so I get the pleasure of getting out the meeting room for an hour and today we're talking about happy ever after and basically whether that as a concept is effectively a myth and I mean I think it's interesting to think how many of us live with a sort of when I mentality. You know, we're waiting to achieve our next goal.

We're thinking we'll be happy when we get that promotion, finish a degree, get married. But really, how long does that happiness actually last and does it actually make us happy? And I've always wondered if this quest for a seemingly perfect life, something that fits with all the social narratives that has a sense of keeping up with the Joneses and those around us, creates an achievable set of expectations that basically makes us fundamentally unhappy and arguably focused on the wrong things in our life. And to help us get to the bottom of these questions and talk about social narratives as a whole is my guest today, Paul Dolan, who is a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics. Paul's book, Happy Ever After, was described as a persuasive demolition of many of our cultural

stories about how we ought to live, which is really quite a description. So I guess, Paul, first things first, is the concept of happy ever after a myth and where do we start when it comes to dispelling the common myths around the sources of happiness and our cultural norms and expectations? Well first things first thank you very much for having me on here. Pleasure. That's a big question to start with isn't it? I know you've got to start from the top haven't you? Start with like everything. So I think the academic in me wants to be a little more measured and circumspect so let me say start by saying something that's actually should be really obvious, but we don't really seem to realize how obvious it is. That actually no one size fits all.

Yeah. There's huge heterogeneity or difference across people. And the kinds of narratives that I talk about in the book, the ones that you alluded to now, will be perfectly good for some people, some of the time, maybe even all of the time, but just not for all of us. And so what I'm asking us to do is to be less judgmental of other people who may live a life that's different to the one that we think they ought to, or the one that these kinds of narratives suggest, and actually be a bit easier on ourselves and not judge ourselves so harshly if we're not ticking off the things on the list that we think we ought to be doing based upon social expectations and where do the expectations come from because i think some of

the key ones in your book are things like success education wealth marriage children monogamy yeah kind of being altruistic and things like that and and they are things that you said like actually have withstood generations of change where we've seen so many other things in our lives and in our world change and yet those sort of key things seem to have stayed the same where we still so often do have this kind of unrealistic expectations so let me break it down then so let's deal with the reaching narratives which are the ones around money success you know status education and it kind of makes sense where those narratives come from because if you if you Let's deal with the reaching narratives, which are the ones around money, success, status, education. And it kind of makes sense where those narratives come from. Because if you're poor, if you have very little or no social standing, if you're uneducated, life goes pretty badly for you and you're not very happy.

So it makes sense for us to wish to reach for more income when we're poor, more status when we don't have any, and some education when we have none. The problem is that it becomes like an addiction. So you sort of reach forever more and more irrespective of where you are. And you're expected to reach for more and more irrespective of where you are. So if you're a very highly paid individual and you move to a job that pays less money than the one you had before people will look at you as if there's something wrong with you right you'll have to sort of explain you know why you might be happier somewhere else why you might not have to travel so far to work why you might have nicer people to work with why you can see your family more all the things that would really contribute towards your happiness but you're kind of expected to still continue to

pursue more and more and more like an addict would yeah So what I argue in that first part of the book is that, again, to restate, I mean, it's very important I say this, that poverty makes people miserable, but being rich doesn't make them happy. So you reach a point at which we have just enough of income, of status, of education, and sort of working out for ourselves where that is, is really important, I think. And so, yeah, you're a big fan of the idea of focusing what your just enough is rather than you're more. Exactly. I talk about this more in Happiness by Design, but paying attention to the feedback that you get from your experiences and sort of realising the point at which you may be

sort of trading off too much to get a little bit more, right? So if you are taking a higher paying job, that is much further away from home. That does mean that you work with people that you don't like as much. That means that you don't have time to hang out with friends then you know you might want to ask yourself whether that's pursuing money or success a little bit too much and there's the thing I mean the whole book's absolutely fascinating but there is like there was one thing in the book that stood out to me more than anything else which is how as it obviously it's not true for everyone but as a general society we value the narrative and the way that other people see us so highly to the extent that if in a

questionnaire that you did and you said to people you can have life a or you can have life b and life a is you and forgive me the wording is not quite correct but you have a job that's held kind of in highest high regard and you're you're but you are miserable. And life B is you don't have a well-respected job, it's quite a mundane job, you are not wealthy and you are happy. And more people chose life A for themselves because they felt that that narrative was what they needed. Yeah, so to be clear, so still you get more people choosing to be happy rather than successful. But interestingly, as you, as you allude to there, the difference is that we are more willing to be miserable for ourselves than we would like our friends to be. So if I'm thinking about a friend and offering advice

to them, essentially to have a less successful job and be happier rather than a more successful job and be miserable, I'll guide them towards them towards being happy but for myself it's much harder for me to do that and that's because we're wrapped up in these stories you know I might really honestly appreciate that I'm going to be happier doing something that is held in less high regard by others but it's really difficult to do that because I feel judged by them and by myself that I might be not as successful as I might otherwise be. So I think those reaching narratives are interesting because of the judgments that we make about other people, but especially interesting because of the narratives we have about ourselves.

And we expect people to aspire and to get promotion at work, for example, and to achieve more. And that can sometimes be quite pernicious because it means that we judge people that are in what we would otherwise regard as low status jobs, sometimes called low skill jobs. And I'm a bit reluctant to use that term anymore now because people that work as care assistants, you know, labourers, porters, they actually, that's actually quite, you know, there's quite high skilled levels in some of those jobs. They're just not seen as being high skilled from the outside and the judgments we make about status. And the

sort of language of this is very much tied up with this, escape your conditions, escape your circumstances. And so imagine you're sort of being told from a very early age that your working class background or your life and your family and friends are not good enough in some sense, right? So you kind of need to be escaping and getting away. And so while social mobility, if it were genuinely social mobility, would be a good thing. But what we're really talking about is occupational mobility, where you're expected to achieve more by getting a better job, often in jobs that don't make you feel happier, often in jobs that means that you might lose a sense of identity or remove yourself from the family and

friends that you like being surrounded by. It's kind of often a lot of costs associated with that, as well as the obvious benefits that might come from higher status and income. And if you look at the stats, what is the correlation between kind of income and satisfaction or happiness? Yeah, so what I'd love to be able to do is to have randomized controlled trials where i can allocate different amounts of money to people and then see what causal effect that has on happiness sadly we don't have those data and so it has to be very careful looking at correlations yeah but you know correlations can be interesting at least for conversation so one of the things that i find

interesting is that in the correlational data, in some data that we've looked at from the US, which is for people to report their happiness associated with what they're doing, activities that they engage in, including how meaningful those activities are, as well as how pleasurable they are, that you see increases in happiness as income increases. But then when it gets to sort of middle levels of income, about $70,000 a year, you kind of then start seeing not just happiness not rising in higher incomes, but actually falling. And that's quite interesting that maybe people are not using their time as

well, right? They are spending longer commuting to work, or maybe their expectations are raised. You know, once you get on this expectations treadmill, you can never have enough, you can never be satisfied, because I'm going to be happy, as you can never be satisfied because i'm going to be happy as you said at the start i'm going to be happy when i get there because when you get there there's someone else somewhere else to get to next and are we just wired to think in that way like is that part of kind of human biology or is that social is that kind of created by our social constructs yeah it's a very good question i mean we the trouble with evolutionary stories is that they're alice in wonderland stories i can tell you a good evolutionary explanation for something but you can't falsify it, right?

So it becomes a good narrative in itself. But there probably are good evolutionary reasons why we want status and standing and to compete with one another to get better mates. But we as a society, I think, can define some of the dimensions across which we compete. You know, we publish rich lists. So strange that. We should be publishing know, we publish rich lists. So strange that. We should be publishing alongside highest taxpaying lists. So if you put into Google, you know, the world's richest, well, it is man, the moment person, you know, you get sort of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos flying for number one spot, very easily identifiable. If you put who

pays the most taxes, you get tax avoidance schemes, where to put your money to not pay any tax. So, you know, we could compete around pro-social acts, around other things that would signal our status that aren't necessarily and only defined according to how much we're worth financially. So that's constructed, I think. That's partly constructed. You know, what you post on Instagram as a way of showing off your success, that's a construction. The fact that we might be in some sense innately wired to compete with one another is probably not constructed. And do you feel like, for example, you just raised Instagram, but kind of social media and the internet as a whole, only further fuels people's need to keep up with the Joneses and to create this life that they feel is expected of them? Yeah, it's interesting. Again, very few randomized

controlled trials of the impact on social media. What you'd really want to know is not just how much time people are online, but what they're doing whilst they're online. I mean, it could be that insofar as dealing with the very first point I made, which is that there's no one size fits all to being happy, is that social media and online activities enables you to find more people like you that are different. So before you were the only one in the village. Now you can find lots of people who share similar preferences and tastes and whatever. So that's a good thing of social media. It could create more diversity.

What it probably does more than that is to magnify existing norms. So when I get married and show off how much I love my spouse by posting all the pictures of the wedding online not only am I showing off to the hundred people that turn up at the service but I'm showing off to the hundred thousand followers that I have online so so it kind of can magnify some of these stories and I think probably on balance it does the magnification more than it does the diversity yeah I think that's true it's interesting because I feel like social media has lots of potential but sometimes exactly it can suck us into the into the negative again and just on before we move on to marriage and children and things like that on education i know you said

we're more educated than ever and there was a stat that really actually really surprised me hadn't quite appreciated this but that there were about 500 universities in the world in 1945. And now there are over 10,000 and almost 50% of the UK population goes to university. In the 80s, that was closer to kind of 14%. But then 44% of students at Oxford report that they feel stressed most of the time. And 40% of students reading English at Cambridge were diagnosed with depression. So that's kind of fascinating. I know Harvard always gets kind of cited as well as somewhere that has incredibly high depression levels. Yeah, well, we've seen increases in mental health problems and increases in perfectionism, right? The idea that you kind of have to be

perfect, which is really debilitating, because you're going past the point at which it's optimal, and you're very self aware and conscious of being judged for not being able to be perfect. So that's kind of partly why we see those anxiety levels increase because people are kind of in this arms race that you need to be the best or top of class, which, of course, not everybody can be. But also that increase in number of people going to university, you know, there's still, on average, good returns to going into higher education compared to not going, right? So you earn more as a graduate than you would as a non-graduate but it's really less about getting a degree to then enable you to be i don't know more rounded or or get a better job it's just a sort of signaling device that you can go through university yeah that's really what what most of it does and whether you're actually learning anything in some of the degrees that people do that will be of value to either you personally or to the marketplace is questionable. But I'm

really interested in what we do with the people that don't go. And again, the narrative that we judge them very harshly, it's kind of like, almost like we've moved the old 11 plus up to 18. You either went to a grammar school and you were a success or a secondary model and were a failure but now it's like you either go to university and you're a success or you don't and you're a failure yeah and actually of course there's lots of apprenticeships and skills and training that you can develop and and use outside of university that would make you much more of a success however measured than going to university because that's what's expected of you i mean i don't think i learned in university that's helped me in my adult life in any shape or form. I mean, it was really fun.

Yeah, you should go for a good time. I guess that's actually a really good reason to go to. But it hasn't furthered my life, I don't think, actually, in reality in any capacity whatsoever. So with perfectionism, that's, I guess, something that you see in all of these areas. It's not just an education. That's basically something. And do you think that's something that we're getting increasingly obsessed with? Or is that something that as human beings, we've always been? So one of my academic colleagues

in our department at LSE, Tom Curran, has been doing some research on perfectionism. And he's showing descriptively that the numbers of people that have those characteristics has increased. And what are those characteristics? Well, I think it's, again, I'm no expert in this area, but it's this idea that you have characteristics has increased. And what are those characteristics? Well, I think it's, again, I'm no expert in this area,

but it's this idea that you have to be perfect. You have to do something to the very best. And of course, what you should be doing is something optimally, which is at the point at which to an economist like me is the point at which marginal benefit equals marginal cost. So that extra unit of expenditure of effort is equal to the extra benefit that comes from that effort. But what a perfectionist will do is go way beyond that point. And so you have to kind of be the best, you have to be perfect. And

any slight perturbation away from perfection leads to anxiety and concerns about how you're judged by others and, you know, makes the individuals feel worse. But it's interesting that if you go for a job interview, people will say, you know, what's one of your three weaknesses? And people say, I'm a perfectionist as if it's a good thing. But actually, psychologically, it's quite harmful. grown-ups and we behave responsibly and we're kind of very altruistic so we're motivated by selfless acts by some extent we feel like we you know we need to be healthy we need to be accountable and again that feels like a lot of pressure for people to live in in a moment by moment basis it feels like you're creating a perfect sense of a human which I don't really feel like as human beings we're always set up to be no we're not and you know I think sort of the the fundamentally flawed nature of the human condition is both interesting and a statement of fact. And we do set these false expectations. It's not just false expectations, but actually harmful expectations.

So if you take the altruism example, that there is a suggestion, it's a narrative that at least some of what we do ought to be motivated out of selfless intent. So I should do something not because I benefit from it myself, not even or only because I benefit from myself, but because it directly contributes towards the welfare of others. Now, helping others is a really good thing to do. That's absolutely categorically the case because they're helped. But there's a huge amount of personal benefit that comes from that in recognition sometimes, but more importantly, from the internal reward that you get, the sense of feeling good, the moral satisfaction, the warm glow that you get. You just walk a little bit

taller, you feel a little bit happier about yourself. And we should be celebrating that much more. And when you do do that, that's actually the chapter of the book that's got the most causal evidence in it from randomized controlled trials, that when you tap into the selfishness of selflessness, you get more pro-sociality basically you get more charitable giving you get more volunteering because there's something in it for me as well as in it for other people and if we really are genuinely interested in helping other people i think we ought to be we should be trying to do more for other people than we do currently then in a sense or taking advantage of the fact that i benefit from doing that is a good

thing not a bad thing if you cleanse pro-sociality of the self-interest, you get much less of it. That's so interesting. So again, it's about taking away that sense of perfectionism. Yeah, and the narrative that, you know, it's a kind of almost like a self-flagellating exercise. Well, if you make it like that, no wonder people don't help other people as much as they might, because kind of like, well, I'm not, you know, I'm going to actively harm myself. actively harm myself no thank you but as all of us know everyone experiences this when they help somebody else you just feel a little bit better about yourself completely completely and what about the idea of like always feeling that we need to be accountable and responsible on a kind of minute well this is the idea that this is a narrative agency you know the idea that we have free will

yeah and that we choose stuff we choose our desires We choose the degree to which we act upon them. Well, I mean, do we? I mean, really? I mean, when we take a look at life's outcomes, what we do, how we feel, a huge amount of those things are explained by genetic predisposition, the environments that we grew up in and are exposed to the interaction between genes and environments randomness context when you account for all of those things the wiggle room for free will becomes incredibly small and i mean i'm very interested in the narrative around luck in particular yeah because that's a horrible story for people if you say that you're successful or otherwise because you're lucky that's not enough that's not that's not a good story for people if you say that you're successful or or otherwise because you're lucky

that's not enough that's not that's not a good story what we want is some agency from it right so when i if i get asked is i got asked a lot with happiness by design when it uh when my first book was out was how did this kind of working class lad from the east end become a professor at the lse and i just said i was clever and lucky like really lucky that's really fundamentally what explains it people you know they want the story of challenge and the narrative that I worked hard and all those things which are which is true I can create that story and I have worked hard and you know I can I can tell you a story about how I dealt with adverse circumstances in my life and came through those and achieved but fundamentally it's because I'm lucky yeah but we just don't like that. So what

people say is they say things like you make your own luck. Well, you can't make your own randomness. That's not logically possible. What people mean is you can put yourself in the way of opportunities, but your ability and capabilities of being able to do that will themselves be genetically and environmentally determined. I always say I'm lucky to have my career and people say it's self-deprecating or, you know, at worst, kind of a bad representation of feminism. But it's true. There's a lot of right time, right place in life. There is. But the important point from a sort of more societal level of that is that it makes us less willing to judge harshly people that fail and reward so lucratively people that succeed. Because whilst we still have that narrative of it being agency,

we can do that. We can say you've got to your position in life because you've worked hard, which you've chosen, or because you're lazy, which you've chosen. When actually, if you look at what things explain effort, how hard people work, the quality of your relationship with your parents and how hard they worked. If these other things are determined largely for us, then it would be surprising that

effort, this one thing, was the only thing that would be determined by us. Well, it's entirely likely that effort, i.e. how hard we work, will be something that is also determined for us. And I want to pick up on what you said about judgment because there was something that I thought was fascinating and you were saying that studies show that many of us actually truly dislike it when other people don't conform to the expected social norms and structures. Yes.

Polygamy was the most interesting bit for me with that and it's because obviously that's not a normal part of British, for example, life. No, of course not. And yet it kind of makes two things. Brits actually don't even have sex. No, I really appreciate it, actually. It was one of my questions that that you said sexless marriages is actually one of the most commonly searched terms on Google. It is like eight times as many searches or something as loveless marriage or unhappy marriage or something is or something is not searched for anywhere near as

much as sexless marriages. And is that, again, a social construct that we don't want to admit it, that we don't want to talk about it, or is it that monogamy isn't for everyone? I don't know. In the monogamy case, which I think is super interesting, I think there is a narrative that men cheat, women don't. I mean, that's's kind of or that we're more accepting of men cheating and we're less accepting of yeah i think 100 and people often say oh men you know if men especially like sleep around a lot when they're younger in their life and say oh it's really good for them they need to get it out their system and i've never ever ever heard anyone use that about a woman they'd be like oh she's a slag yeah yeah so one of the suggestions from evolutionary

theory would be that you can identify your offspring and i can't right so i would be then incentivized in some evolutionary sense to have sex with more women because i don't know that you're actually carrying my own children whereas you do know obviously for a very good reason that they're your kids but what the latest evolutionary theory says which i talk a bit more in the book about is that actually there's essentially a distribution of and this is putting it very very crudely and bluntly that men and women sort into one of two types for the men you're either a cad or a dad which makes you more predisposed either to being to having to be more you know sexually active or someone who's more monogamous women sort equally into what we might call lovers or mothers right so women that are more likely to enjoy sexual variety women who are more likely to be monogamous now if you look at

the the ratio of your uh second finger to your fourth finger it's called the 2d 4d ratio it's basically your your ring finger and your pointy finger. The relative lengths of those two fingers is a measure of exposure to testosterone in the womb, in vitro testosterone. And so basically the longer your ring finger is relative to your pointy finger, the more testosterone you are exposed to in the womb.

Now, what it looks like is that, as I say, that based upon that 2D, 4D ratio, is that that is predictive because of exposure to in vitro testosterone. That predicts later life behaviours in relation to risky behaviours, attitude towards promiscuity, likelihood of having more sexual partners, essentially those with higher levels of testosterone exposure in the womb, more likely to be people that cheat by our conventional standards of that term. You find that men sort roughly in proportion like 60-40. I can't remember the exact numbers from the papers, but you've got slightly more cads than you've got dads.

It's kind of what you might expect, right? More men cheat, put it about whatever you want to call it, whatever language you want to use compared to those that are more monogamous women the proportion is slightly more in favor of the mothers over lovers but only slightly so so about 53 47 split which means that there are essentially more this is again putting it very very bluntly more promiscuous women out there than society would expect and the explanation is that genetic diversity in offspring is evolutionally advantageous so again putting it very simply you i might be a dad you're a lover you have your first child with me yeah then you go and have

the second child with somebody else yeah i bring it up as if it is mine and we've got genetic you've got genetic diversity evolution has got your genes have got genetic diversity in the offspring it makes a huge amount of sense so it makes a lot of sense though equally for me not to want you to do that right because i'm going to invest resources time and effort in my offspring i want to be pretty confident that they're mine yes right i want to stop you behaving in ways that make that less likely. So I constrain your sexual behavior because, as I say, you want to know about their offspring. But what it fundamentally suggests, which I talk about in the book at some more length, is that compared to the narrative, women like sexual variety and diversity. So when husbands say about their wives, she's gone off sex, what you really should finish that sentence with wives she's gone off sex where you really should finish that sentence with is she's gone off sex with me yeah because because if if if we

were to allow us to break free of the narrative she may be more inclined to then have you know sex with men outside of the main relationship that she's in. So basically, fundamentally, there's not that much difference between men and women in their proclivity to be promiscuous. But can you change the social narratives? Because it's incredibly constraining that women are expected, obviously, to behave in a certain way and are judged very harshly. As I said, people say, oh, that's just boys. And with a girl, they'll be like, she's a slag, she's a slag.

You really kind of derogatory language. You don't really have the same really coarse words for men, do you? No, it's almost celebratory, like they're a player. And Kat, do you think, from a behavioural scientist's perspective, is it possible to change that view? Well, you know, again, I think i think that most like considerably large numbers of people will choose to be monogamous yeah well we'll ideally want relationships that are monogamous but considerable minority of people will not and they can coexist that's the point i mean it's not

like there's no you know i remember obviously i've sort of seen in a generation homosexuality going from something that was disgusting to now having gay marriage. I mean, that's been a huge transformation in our judgment. But one of the things that people were saying about why we shouldn't let these gay men, mostly that's really what they meant, be together is that the floodgates are open and everyone will be gay. Well, of course they won't be. I mean, of course they won't be. They're not gay, are they? So all we've done is actually just accept gay people. That's the only transformation there's been. We've never suddenly got sort of, you know, loads more gay people, as if that'd be a bad thing. But, you know, and equally, I think if we were just more accepting of polygamy, consensually non-monogamous relationships, those relationships types would coexist. Maybe I'm just optimistic, but those relationships types would coexist alongside monogamous ones.

No, I think it's actually really, I'd never thought about it like that. It's actually a really nice example of the fact that actually, obviously, societies can change, you know, it might be slow and it might take time. But as you said, gay marriage and things like that has been accepted and celebrated, has changed so fundamentally in a relatively short space of time in a relatively short space of time you'd like to think that could happen for women you would like to happen but what's really interesting about that is that part of that is potentially because of the marriage bit right so yeah you know you can be gay right but as long as you're married right so we so we've got the

marriage bit that wraps around our tolerance of homosexuality right and that makes us feel more comfortable and that's where i wanted to sort of move to was the was the comfort that we get in people conforming and the judgments therefore harshly that we make about people that don't conform is that there's a suggestion that you, we like societies to have order and actually our lives to have order, right? I mean, it's pretty chaotic. The world's a chaotic place and our lives would be chaotic if we didn't provide some structure and order and organisation to them. And those narratives give us that. So, you know, marriage as an institution sort of, I don't know, grounds us, gives us some framework and basis on which to live.

So interesting when you kind of create system threat, like you prime people to think of their economic circumstances, political situation being fragile, it makes them more committed to marriage as an institution. It makes men actually more committed to marriage as an institution. The effects in that study are weaker for women than they are for men. So it kind of gives us like, it's the life raft to cling to.

The rest of the world might be going to hell, but at least we've got marriage. And I think that's part of the comfort that we get from it. So when people break out of that, and if they have the fucking audacity to be happy at the same time, then we don't like them. Because not only are they breaking free from

something that they ought to be doing they're fucking happy doing it as well and maybe we're unhappy well and also if we are people that would ideally like to break free as well then we overlay that with jealousy and a bit of envy yeah and and i love there's a great study where men were classified as either being more or less homophobic yeah and then they're shown gay porn and they measure penile blood flow. And you see more penile blood flow in the homophobic group than you do in the non-homophobic group. Oh my goodness. Because if I, like, why do I hate gay people so much? Well, because I'd like to be gay myself, but society or church or whatever my family won't allow me to be.

So I'm going to really hate those people that are living a life that I would ideally like to, if only I could. That's absolutely fascinating. Wow. And I've always been, I have to say a lot, that it's one of the things that really, you can see I'm getting excited. This is a lovely conversation, but I am really genuinely interested

in just how much we care about how other people live their lives. It's disproportionate, really. We're obsessed. To any effect that it has on us. Yeah. We're completely obsessed. We're completely obsessed. We're completely obsessed.

But that's what celebrity culture is, isn't it, basically? It's like all we want to know is how Kim Kardashian is living her life. We just want to watch reality TV all day. We want to watch Love Island. We want to watch Big Brother, Celebs in the Jungle. We're obsessed with other people's lives. We love the Daily Mail because we want to know what Brad Pitt's and you know we do we want to be able to put them into pigeonholes you know so brad pitt obviously reminds us of jennifer alliston you know jennifer alliston

could only ever be happy once she got married and had kids right i mean she could she couldn't be she couldn't be happy until until such time even as one of the most successful yeah bless her she hasn't you know she hasn't had kids as she she a shame? You know, but that is the narrative. But when you boil it down, it just sounds so absurd, doesn't it? It is completely absurd. We just don't trust. You know, it's really, so it sort of speaks to all these stories, really, is that you're better to try and fail than you are to not try at all

in how you're judged by other people, right? So if you present people vignettes of people that aren't yet married or had children but want to, they're judged better than people who have actively chosen not to. Because at least you're playing by the rules if you try and fail. So it's okay to feel sorry for people because they failed, but it's not okay to celebrate them that they've actively made that decision. Exactly. And that also applies to jobs and status as well. And particularly, you know, working class people, you'd be judged very harshly if you want to retain some of the characteristics and behaviours of your background, whilst at the same time being successful in your occupation. I mean, you really have to when you

go through universities and beyond, it's either, you know, to put it bluntly, it's either fit in or fuck off. Yeah, you know, you have to, because if you want to join the ranks of the middle classes, that's okay. But you have to play by the rules of the middle classes yeah and if you're someone like me that swears for example right i mean it's naturally it's all every time i don't know whatever three or four times i've swore it's always been for emphasis it's always it's hopefully more engaging but yet he swears you know that's like that's immediately then dismissed what and people see you as a kind of professor at lse and lse professors it's really discordant for them you can't be a professor people see you as a kind of professor at LSE and LSE professors wouldn't do things like that. Well, it's really discordant for them. You can't

be a professor at the LSE and that's not a pigeonhole that I have a box for. That's not a person that I can fit into that box. So I have to then, it's very cognitively difficult to find another box. And why does that frighten us? Like, why does it frighten us when someone is different? I think for the conformity thing, because it's comforting. There is comfort in conformity. And the idea that society is ordered, it's hierarchical, that provides us with the comfort around the chaos.

Particularly if you're in those groups where there's a threat of infiltration, right? So not only are these working class people joining our club, they're sort of changing the nature of what it means to be in the club. Yeah. And that's something that you can join. Yeah, if you do what we say.

You know, you can join the tennis club, but you've got to wear whites. I mean, that's, you know, that's, that's, yeah. So basically, as human beings, we actually quite thrive off the social constructs, even if they kind of actually suppress elements of who we are naturally, because it gives us a sense of comfort. Yeah, and we all judge people. I mean, we can't, it's a natural, it's kind of interesting, that natural judgment. But it's the sense in which we are so affected

by the lives that other people lead when they're different to the ones that we think they ought to be leading. And I think we're just, it's very difficult for us to accept this heterogeneity, this difference across people. That what floats your boat might not float mine. And that's very difficult because we're constantly looking for rules

of essentially a one size fits all nature. And can that change? Like, will that change? Can that change? Or are we basically just stuck with that? Well, I'm an inveterate optimist, which is what Kahneman put in in the forward to my first book but i'm pessimistic in relation to marriage because it's interesting that as we become more progressive we've talked about

gay marriage and so on our views about marriage and infidelity in particular haven't changed really if anything they become more entrenched which is super interesting you know we become more progressive and liberal and open-minded, yet if you cheat on your husband or wife... Yeah. We still think you should be flogged. We still think you should be flogged. And especially if you're a woman.

I mean, that's just the worst. I mean, you know, the worst thing a woman could do is not only cheat, but then probably not really enjoy her kids, right? Yeah. Maybe even leave, right? That would be, I mean, mean woman that leaves her kids i mean it's bad it's bad for the kids for not something in their life and there's you know impact on children but the judgments that are made of women who find it difficult to bring up children

are much much harder than the men that disappear and then come back and sort of dip in and out of their kids lives but the marriage thing again you know most people aspire to something that people aspire to so i think monogamy will remain as something on marriage. Yeah. Monogamy that may come within the marriage for at least some considerable period is something that people aspire to. And so that's OK in one sense. But it's the judgment they make of those that don't want to live their lives like that or can't live their lives like that. And I guess as we kind of start to wrap this up, it kind of leads me back to your the original question right at the

beginning obviously the title of the book which is that i mean i've seen this i guess it's just maybe the age that i am lots of friends sort of getting married getting engaged at the moment or have done you know quite recently and i have also i got married really young as well and there was a lot of people how old were you 23 oh my god you're a child yeah child bride I know and I made a real joke was he the same age no no older

a lot older he was 8 years older oh 8 I suppose that felt quite a lot at the time yeah and I made a lot of jokes about it because people were so judgmental

of me being so young yeah yeah we run our business together we do everything together yeah so far so good do everything together but it's it far so good. Do everything together. But it was really interesting.

People were so judgmental of it being so young. Yeah, yeah. But again, just seeing a lot of friends now, I've seen especially marriage being something that people put so much pressure on themselves for. And, you know, you've got a few friends who kind of feel like they won't be happy until they got married.

And I guess for me personally, like I'm incredibly lucky, like we do genuinely have an amazing marriage. But I think I've never learned something more that happy ever after. And these things aren't the answer to the question. I mean, we got engaged, how exciting three days later found out that my parents were getting divorced. My dad's actually gay, had a very long term boyfriend. And you know, that was obviously quite complicated. Kind of everyone sort of recovered from that and very soon after that we found out that my mother-in-law was dying and it just you

know I only say that because I guess for me I realized immediately that like these these goals in life you say that's what you want to achieve and obviously it's lovely being married but like being married didn't solve everything else actually 101 new problems came and I guess to wrap it up is that true is you know you can't be happy ever after can you can't sort of fall in love be married get the promotion and that's it there's no full stop is there no and also the the fact that you sort of imagine that other people's lives are lived according to paying attention to that in some way you know so that you're you're not spending like we're obviously talking about it now but you don't spend much of your time thinking about oh my god

i'm so happy i've been married for eight years do you i mean that's not you're just getting on with living your life yeah and paying attention to the experiences that you have that fall out of that and so i think that we sort of get mistaken by focusing attention on something that on things that actually aren't what substantively matter and as if that once that's achieved that becomes it yeah when of course you've still got all the anxieties and the stresses and also the joys that come from from the experiences that you engage in so having i would imagine that you don't have the expectations that he or and and him for you are like the perfect person that satisfy all of your needs i mean that's like

of course they don't you've got friends and you've got yeah sort of other things in your life that bring you happiness in other ways and i think that sort of fixation on on one thing be that a promotion be that a marriage not only means that you are very unlikely to be happy if ever you got there but you're but you're not paying attention to all those other things that contribute towards your happiness in the meantime. So if you were going to wrap up with kind of, we always ask our guests to give us three things for listeners to kind of really remember or share with others. I guess three. That's pressure.

I know. Maybe sort of three surprising facts about social norms or. Oh, I don't know. I was going to say the most thing, the theme of this is just fucking chill out. I mean, that's like, no, but chill out, you know, get actually get over yourself. I mean, that would actually be get over yourself about yourself and chill out about how you judge other people. I mean, they would be the two things that actually just relax. You're going to be you're going to mostly going to be all right anyway and allow other people to be different. So to stop the judgment is OK if we don't conform to the same social norms. It's OK for us to be different. It's really OK for us to be different. So to stop the judgment is okay if we don't conform to the same social norms.

It's okay for us to be different. It's really okay for us to be different. And that's, you know, that's genuine diversity, isn't it? Actually, you know, we can talk about diversity across characteristics that we might easily measure. But diversity of thought, diversity of behavior. Yeah. That's the kind of richness. And actually seeking out people in our lives that provide difference,

I think is just good for us. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And we will be back again next week. And have a lovely day, everyone. Thanks so much. Bye. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.