The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning - Lionel Page

dude I am in love with your substack I subscribe to a lot of different substacks and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year I think you're absolutely destroying it dude it's so great it's evolutionary lens on things big picture questions everybody's already asking I think it's awesome so when it comes to I guess what what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied what what is missing from that look excellent question so um in one of my post I have this um cheeky uh picture of you know the elephant and and the blind it's I think it's comes from India the story and the story I'm sure lot of your listeners have heard about it but you've got a bunch of blind people and they they they're put in front of an elephant and they ask okay what what an elephant looks like and so you know one touch a trunk of the elephant and says well an elephant is kind of you know looks like a tube and it's wet at the end and I One tou the the tals is well you know it's look as string and it's very fluffy at the end and another one touch Tusk and say well it's very hard you know it's very and very smooth um and so when you read the literature sometime in beh sciences and social sciences and when they don't have an evolutionary perspective you get the same kind of stuff you when you know I talk about the books on Self Health books on on psychology on of happiness and you will see you get a book and this book will tell you to be happy you need social connections you know the secret of a happiness is to have friends to have family okay very interesting you take another book and this other book will tell you the secret of happiness is to control your desires you know to learn not to want what you don't have um that's theism that's Buddhism and another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars you know to have very high goals and to work very hard to reach it and then you look at these different things like okay but what's you know what's the link between these different things I mean are we talking about the same things I we talking about happiness and there's one explanation what's the connection between these different stories and these books are like the blinds uh uh you know giving you a perspective of the elephant and the Elephant about happiness is that you have to consider that happiness is a system of valuation design uh and I I use the word design you know not designed by a designer but evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it designing stuff designed by Evolution to help you make decisions and so when you take this spefic Ed all these different kind of Secrets of Happiness make sense but in a big picture uh so you you asking you know what kind of stuff it explains like for instance as I say we are social spaces so we will need connections that's one fact uh but on the other hand um sometimes you you get all the books about happiness tells you well you need to know when to say no to other people you know you need to say people make claims about to to your times say can you help help me Chris can you do this ETA at some point you need to be able to send no well every system you have of um subjective feelings helping you to navigate the world has to handle that you have facing trade-offs so if you're always saying no to people you know maybe you won't have too many friends and that's not good for your success but if you're always saying yes you know maybe you'll be a pushover people will take advantage of you so a a right system needs you to balance these things if you take another uh uh things like uh the gold have in life if you if you have very low goals like you know everything is fine whatever you achieve you're very happy with it you won't be very successful and so a system of Happiness which is designed to make you successful has to push you to nudge you to try as hard as you can so whenever you're going to be successful you know the you you are going to look forward to the next challenge so now you may think oh what will make me very happy in the future is this big milestone if I or Milestone that's it you know I won't need very much to do much better than that and what happens is that let's say you work very hard and you reach the Milestone and and then say Okay that was good uh but what next you know like you're going to start looking further ahead like what's the next Milestones like if you think that being millionaire is what's will make you happy well the sad story is that when you reach the million first million or the two million whatever you'll feel good but you'll start thinking about the next thing so your system habits will keep pushing and so when you have these books they tell you you know uh either you need to have you don't need to care about um uh what you don't have or on the contr you need to H very high they kind of they just look at one side of this balance the book tells you don't care about what you don't have it says yes you shouldn't look too high it does it's not worth it for me to think in the morning oh I'm not as rich as Elon Musk so this is very disappointing there's no point for me to think that that's not going to help me being successful to have a goal which is so high that I'm I'm never you know there's no point whatever I do in the day is not going to change it so I shouldn't care about things which are unachievable but at the same point at the same time you know if I wake up in the morning and says you know I'm great I'm healthy everything is fine you know why do I stress Etc well I'm not maybe going to do the right things which is going to help me move forward so our system of happiness is going to be this kind of stuff which kind of try to find the right level to push us to do our best it's neither too high neither too low yeah there's that idea of a homeless man isn't jealous of a billionaire but he is jealous of a slightly richer homeless man exactly you know that's that's something very important because we think that um we always compare right uh one aspect of happiness is that we we may think that happiness is just objective and that we are this kind of uh we have this view about what we what we would really want and if we get it we' be happy but in truth we always compare to other people one reason we compare is that we learn from other people let's say you know you if you ask yourself am I successful in life well you can look at people like you people maybe who were in your high school when you were young your your your mates Etc and if they were much more successful than you then and I'm not saying that you're spiteful nily it's not about that but if you see that they were much more successful you may think wait a minute like you know they didn't have anything more than me when we started so why am I not doing like them you know you you extract information from that from these people who were like you who were like you and so you would want to you know that's going to be help you maybe to to change tack so okay you know I F that was fine doing what I'm doing but when I'm seeing what they are doing maybe I should do something else so these kind of comparisons it's not useful when you compare to people who are very very different so if you're homeless you know and you wake up every morning thinking that you're not a millionaire that's not going to help you move the next step ahead of where you are now right and so you will care not about people who are much poorer than you people who much less successful then you're much more successful than you you typically care about people around you and you and that's this interesting stuff that you care a lot about the people who are just like us being a step of a ahead of us and the people were very far ahead we don't even care too much about them it's so fascinating it's like uh like we're plants in an ecology and we sort of are able to grow toward the light that's nearest to us and uh yeah it's a an uncomfortable realization that our feelings of well-being uh depend Less on like absolute achievements than they do on just the comparison to other people in the Social Circles that we belong with and I guess you know that game of relative comparison and the way that Social Circles the ones that we choose and the ones that we don't impact us is um it's just it's endlessly fascinating to me yeah well I'm I'm with you like I'm super fascinated in it uh I think what's interesting is that what's fascinating me is how kind of key happiness and these questions we ask ourselves are Central to our lives and in a way how we are we are we don't really know you know we don't have the intuitions so evolution is this kind of programming process which has designed us to work well in the real world but evolution didn't care about telling us the rule book tells you know they gave us Evolution gave us the the design and and but didn't explain why we are doing what we do and so we're like following the path that our feelings lead us to but why we have these feelings and why they have the shap they have and and you know that we don't have the intuitions necessarily so that's why when we start thinking about oh what's makes what will make me happy uh why I'm not happy Etc it's actually not trivial because evolution in way doesn't care you know to make us successful we don't need to know why we have these feelings we just need to have these feelings yeah I think for you know the sorts of people that listen to this podcast uh introspective reflective you know curious people having a question uh having a why that does not have a very well-defined answer is kind of like some version of purgatory meeting hell and you're just you know you want to know and you're right that there isn't there isn't this definitive sense just going back to that uh the social comparison thing I've been thinking about this for ages and I love that insight about how people with disadvantaged social Origins might be more likely to be happy because they've got a lower reference point to judge life from it's so paradoxical but it makes complete sense yeah look that's and actually that goes back to my PhD my PhD was on that topic in education uh it sounds you know when when you say that it sounds like maybe some people on the left would say well uh you're saying that people who are from a lower social background are privileged or that people from higher Social background are disadvantaged so you know what it's true that the advantage of disadvantage yeah yeah that's right well there is there is a kind of honic a Happiness Advantage of being from a low social background and rising up because then what you have is that you know if you use your original social background as a comparison point and it's natural to do so because even as I said you know if you use your peers and you you come from a low social background and you look at people who are your friends and maybe they still your friends now you think well you know I did well and so you have this comparisons which helps you have this outlook on life you know am I unsatisfied with my life well I did very well relative to where I started from and that makes you happy on the contrary if you're born from a very highly successful uh social background well the bar is super high so you know if your father and or mother they are lawyers well you know if you don't do a super high education achievement uh let's say a very high educational achievement it's just the normal standard that you need to achieve it's not you can't be super happy it's just normal and so that's a high pressure and what You observe is that uh there is a kind of a you know that's what I'm saying I don't want say that because there's lot of question about privilege Etc but people were born in a privilege uh background You observe sometimes more risk taking and and also they want to do some different line of work because they want to escape the comparison so if your parents maybe they are lawyers Etc maybe you want to become an artist because you know you want to to be in a dimension of social comparisons where you can escape the comparison of your oh that's so interesting because if you went into law or you went into medicine there would be a direct comparison between where your father was at that stage in his life I I mean look the the the potential explanation for kids from highly affluent backgrounds having desperate outcomes in educational attainment because they are Riven and driven by this Terror that they can't keep up with what their parents expected is like it's I don't know of anyone that's factoring that into the base right and sure the material constraints the resources the access the networking the legacy admissions into these higher instit like yes there's a lot of structural things right that go on but what about the drive for the kids why are they you know working themselves so hard to do this and uh you know the fact that you have higher expectations placed on you and you are aware that anything short of Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge or Kings or whatever uh is going to constitute failure which is going to result in you being less happy uh that I think explains at least part of the desperate outcomes we see yeah I'm totally with you with that so uh when you if you are let's say you can take two kind of cases different let's say you are from you your parents moved from uh a poor country in the US they didn't have a high high school diploma you know they work hard to pay for your education and you end up in a community college in the US and you get a job and and for you that's an achievement you know you you you made it you're uh you're able to have have a house a mortgage car you know standard us uh uh way of life now if you consider from there do you want to try harder do you want you know to do a to go to university a higher more prestigious University and get a master degree the benefits psychological benefits for you is not that important because the difference psychologically between where you are now and that additional stuff is not very large because your reference point as you said was is low and so the biggest difference is between where you started in your mind here and what you you have achieved now if your parents are lawyers and they did a i League school uh you know I mean there's no way you would consider going to Community College as something like an achievement You' be like maybe dreading it terribly and so for you this step of you know the difference between going there or reaching a prestigious University is going to matter extremely and so as you say the drive is going to be there and even I would say the risk taking something which is interesting when you look at the statistics that for the same grades in high school kids from higher Social backgrounds um who have average grades they're more willing to take the risk to continue in um stard university things uh than kids from lower social backgrounds kids from lower social backgrounds says you know I'm not sure I would be successful at University I want a practical uh training who is going to give me a job while the kids from higher Social backgrounds are more likely to even if it's uncertain they would be successful to try hard and and and to go universe and that's also correlated with uh more sort of social risky Behavior drug taking alcohol fast cars etc etc yes so that's you're right because we often associate uh drug taking Etc you know to low social background like neighborhoods which are risky Etc but what we observe is that uh there is a lot of this kind of behavior also in kids who come from high social background um and one Poss so you know one conjecture is that this kind of resticking is also Associated to the pressure that you have you know I've been fascinated with intergenerational competition Theory I learned about it about a year ago this sort of comparison we have between where were our parents when they were our age and where are we now and um you know I think it it really explains maybe this is total Bro Science right but I'm allowed to do this because I don't I'm not held to the same standard of an academic like you fine it my my my theory uh at least in part is that um even though objectively when you run the numbers the current generation is better off adjusted for inflation than any generation before there is this sense this milu that we are not I think the comparison on social media contributes a massive amount here because we assume that everybody is doing better than they are and also we have expanded our Social Circle to now be so much wider it's it's you're no longer selecting your Social Circle from who you grew up around but you're expanding it to the entire world and by Design the people that you see on social media pretend that their lives are better than they are so not only are they a wider social networking you've ever seen before and selecting for people that are more popular but also on top of all of that everybody's lying so the ability for you to do accurate assessment and then when we think about intergenerational competition Theory I think it we almost use that model where are other people now as that's where Mom and Dad must have been and that I think is where a lot of this uncertainty comes up around well you know you look at um the reasons that people say about why they haven't had children yet uh I'm just I'm just not ready uh not financially not in the position which is odd because the poorest countries have the most children and if you scale it over time we are by and large on average richer more affluent more than we've ever been but the sense is that we're not and given that our social circle's being expanded to the entire world and we have the perspective everyone is doing way better than they actually are it's just it's social anxiety all the way down no look there simil things you what you say but I mean I I'll start with the social media uh I totally agree with you that social media is very strange you know environment like we were not selected to be in this kind of thing where as you say it's expander Social Circle you have as you said people lie on social media lie I mean the sense that you know uh we take selfies all the time I'll take maybe 100 selfies and I'll pick the best angle you know the one where the light is good I have a twinkle in the eye maybe I I use a filter and and eventually I put that as my social media profile and so and you do that for everything that my my videos of my holidays will be brilliant you know I mean when I have a boring holiday I won't necessarily talk about it but when I have something cocktail on a on a beach in B I'll I'll post about it and so we're exposed to these beautiful lives these beautiful pictures of all these people and as as we were talking before we can't help compare right and if this is our comparison point then it's move us you know it moves this comparison Point much higher and then we we're thinking well I'm not doing that well in comparison uh and we have to learn to Discount to learn okay wait a minute there are filters on these pictures maybe these people are not that young as they look in the pictures you know I see all the nice thing they do in the holidays I don't see all the troubles they went to go these holidays etc etc um that's difficult and there's there's a even another thing which is very interesting on social media we have I guess you have heard of it like the Friendship Paradox do you know this this thing friendship Parx tell me more okay the Friendship Paradox is a net something which happen in networks when you're in in a network your friends on average have more friends than you okay so if you're on Twitch the people you follow have more followers than you have if you're on YouTube the you know the stuff you follow on average have more subscribers than you have so that sounds strange how is it possible should shouldn't be an average like you know an average we have the same no because the people you select to follow or to uh to be your friends they are selected and they are you know you have you have not selected the people with the least friend you have selected people who tend to have more friends and you the fact that you selected them is an indication that are selected and so when you look into your circle of friends on on social media you'll find wow why don't I have you know I have so many followers and these guys are like you know super popular well I'm not as popular as so the funny thing is that whatever Network you'll be you will not be as popular as the average popularity of the people in your network so that's another thing which is is not intuitive but it will make your reference point higher and and in comparison you won't you won't look as good does this mean that people in high achieving groups kind of have a bit of a double-edged sword here because they've got satisfaction from recognition in like outside of the group but they've also got social anxiety from within their group yeah so you know that's a paradox of the fact that we always want to to go higher like we have a when we are in a peer group or in a club we tend often to look for the next Club you know the more prestigious club uh if you academics for for instance they want to be in prestigious universities well the cost of it is that you know whenever you move to University to another one which is more prestigious your colleagues they are they tend to be more successful than before right that's that's goes with it and so you join clubs of people more prestigious and what you have you exactly what you say you have this kind of let's say you know if you join Harvard as an academic well for people outside you Harvard member of staff is very prestigious but for you within Harvard the comparison now are your colleagues are super that's very stressful and so in one of my substack I described there was toas shelling you know it's a it's a story told by Glenn Lori Glenn lry when he he joined Harvard and and he got very stressed uh by the pressure of success of being successful publishing etc etc and he he goes to his colleague thas shelling a very famous game theorist and Tomas shelling like what do you think everybody here is extremely stressed they're like they all think that they're underachieving and you know when you ask what are you doing they think oh my God I'm being judged for not being performing enough and so you know you have this double- Ed sword as you say that from outside we feel all these people are very successful but because they're in clubs of very successful people they feel the pressure of not you know being up to scratch with u with their peers yeah I love the term insecure overachiever I think it captures this energy very well yes and you have this uh this term like the um uh impostor syndrome right and I think the impostor syndrome is exactly that so you work very hard to be successful in professional life to you know to be maybe um promoted as a manager in a very important function in Academia you want to be promoted professor in prge University and then you people once they there they think oh maybe maybe I shouldn't be here you know maybe people didn't see that actually I'm not good enough to be here I'm here by accidents right and so people have anxieties like that yeah uh I you don't get or at least as of yet on substack I haven't seen you get super tactical around this you're not coming out like the typical sort of personal development bro and saying and here are my 10 steps for you to be able to overcome your impostor syndrome or whatever but when it comes to the sort of Social Circle comparison thing given that you're spending a lot of time researching this and you have a a pet interest in it you must relate this to your own life and you must have tried to apply some strategy or or some tactics to try and negate this social comparison impact on your happiness so what do you do uh as an attempt to try and mitigate this effect yeah look that's a good point um I'm not sure if I I'm not sure if I have used it I've used it you know in practice to kind of uh not being stressed by uh you know not joining higher Circle so when I was actually I I was in a when I I worked for some time in London and and I had the opportunities to choose between Academia and to work in finance and I F you know obviously the wages are much higher you can imagine in London in finance and I F well from what I know from people SS I know that actually the W much looks much higher but if I go there you know next thing you know uh I'll think that I'm not paid as much as one buffet and that's actually very true you know I was talking to a Trader and the guy must have been on something like 100 50,000 pounds so something like2 2002 250,000 a year so clearly in the top of the distribution and the guy you know what this I was having lunch with me he says you know he told me I hope I was rich I was like well I mean you know you're not billionaire but like you and you're a young guy and you're already on this kind of wages like super good but from his point of view you know he's thinking of his um manager who is on two or five million a year and and then the next thing is the success story is why per so I I'm aware of this kind of thing and and that I guess you know I'm Not Looking Back and thinking oh I wish I done that Etc because I know that um I mean I think I may have been very happy there as well but but I'm thinking that you need to be aware that you know if you were to move in such a circle then your reference one would move with you and so that's a reason not to stress too much and to appreciate what you have now okay uh another source of pain probably I think I've been doing these live shows I was in Australia recently uh doing these live shows and there's buckets that at the Q&A portion at the end of the talk uh people ask and one of the most common is something along the lines of why do I set ever Higher Goals for myself why do I seem unable to be able to be satisfied with what I've achieved why every time that I score a goal do I immediately move the goal posts even further away from me why do I over overestimate the importance of my next success for my happiness so talk to me about sort of the role of of goals and and how it impacts our happiness here look I think that's obious that's a key part of my research and have a paper so so some several of my posts on Subs were on this topic recently um you know maybe I I'll use a metaphor I'll start far and we can go back in more on the topic but I'll use the metaphor let's say you can think of evolution evolu is an impersonal process right so but it's as if it was designing you and you can you can use a metaphor that if it was kind of a designer trying to nudge you to be as successful as possible so now what kind of situation we can think of where somebody tries for you to be as successful as possible um well One S situation is when you have a parent and a child and a truth that is going to be clear for every parent is that it's not necessarily always best to motivate a child to be truthful with the child to be to say all the truth and so for the child to know exactly uh what are going to be the rewards is not necessarily optimal from the pound point of view and here's what I mean let's say that you you got you you got your son or daughter and you you register your son or daughter in a competition it could be athletic competition could be a chess competition and you have no idea really how good they are okay and you want to motivate them and say if you do well you know you'll have a nice cream or what you so you give a schedule of kind of rewards say if you do well I'll bring you to the cinema if you do very well at school I'll give you a video console Etc then now you the problem is that you don't know how good they they can be uh suppose that you find out that are excellently talented they're um clearly uh go be well beyond your expectations so you told them that if they were going to do well they will have all these rewards so what do you do now do you just keep them giving them all these rewards all the time they don't need to work very hard because they exx they are very talented so keep giving them rewards if you do that it's not going to nudge them to do better because they don't need to work hard they're super talented if on the contrary you find out that your child has difficulties challenge is struggling to be very good you say oh sorry you know you're not very good so no reward for you never so that's not going to help the child as well so what you'll do is that you'll adapt you your Skittle FS if you find out that your uh your child is excessively good at chess you say okay but maybe I'm going to give you a Tor and I'm going to and if you win tournaments you know you'll have more rewards whatever depends on in Australia what we do is we have a lot of it's very athletic as a country very sporty so uh you bring your kids to the swimming pool and you see whether they are good and if they are good you you enter them in competition you may have seen in in the Olympic Games austr does very well in swimming because pretty everybody swims in this country so you know what you do as a parent here is that you won't tell your kid before oh wait I'm telling you that if you're successful you get this reward but if you're very successful actually I'm going to move the carrot further ahead you want to you don't to say that because if the kid knows that if they they do very well then you're going to move the carot well ahead they they'll be like what's the point and nature does exactly the same thing with us that is for us to work very hard we think oh you know if I need to achieve this things it's very important and and all the information tells you if you if you can achieve it we have this kind of urge uh the paper written on it the title is called um if you can you must so if you feel that you can you really get excited by the idea that you want to do it right if you can't if it's way far ahead of you know your the realm of what you can achieve you you don't want to try you won't be interested but if you think you know what I think I think I could run a marathon you will try you want to try if you think it's prestigious enough if you think well I think I can run a marathon but in four hours you know then you'll start thinking about how can I achieve that what kind of steps and it feels good to think that I think I could achieve this then the problem is like let's say you start you know you start thinking maybe I could run a marathon and running a marathon will be something which I think is an achievement you start running and you think actually I'm pretty good so now running a marathon is not enough you'll have to do it maybe under four hours or maybe more or maybe at better time so the C will keep moving forward and your henic system kind of lied to you initially because your heading system told you initially oh if you reach this goal you'll be happy you know but as you realize that you are able to reach this goal maybe you can reach better so if you can reach better now the crow has to move ahead and now it's this initial goal is not enough anymore and you want this additional goal further ahead and the problem I totally understand people in your shows who says why do I do that well it's by Design we're designed to be like that and we're designed to be like that and we're designed not to anticipate because if you were to anticipate that if you achieve the next goal you'll get to it and you think about the another goal afterwards well you'll be like what the point you know I work hard and I may I may as well just you know enjoy life as it is now oh so that's why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness because if we didn't think well once I achieve X I'll be fine if we didn't have that thought if we assumed accurately that each different destination is just base camp before the next gets unlocked and gets appeared to us we we would be much less motivated to go and do it it's exactly that if you you know if you think that it's very important to have this next promotion that's this promotion will give you status and Prestige and income that you think that's that's what you know I want in life then you work very hard for it but actually in reality once you have it you know six months later says okay what next you know uh next challenge actually I could do better Etc if you anticipate that initially if you anticipate that the cart is always going to move forward uh Beyond you beyond your reach then that's not motivating anymore to to reach the next step because you know that you know the same process will repeat what's the focusing illusion but that's exactly that so the focusing illusion is a term uh proposed by Daniel kman and his coauthors and say that you focus in life you say you tend to focus on some things and say this is really what I need and people may have different uh view about why they need to be happy maybe some people say you know what I need is a romantic partner which is attractive and and and faithful and friendly Etc and if I get that I'll be happy some other people say well what what I really want to be rich other people may say you know what I want is just a group of friends good social network so you really care you say this is what I need and usually say that when you don't have it and and you think you would be really happy you focus on that this is the key for you to achieve happiness in your life and then when you when if and when you get it eventually you come to realize that was not so important for your happiness so the key example given by Canan are people in the US who think that oh if I only had a job in California you know I would have fantastic weather uh brilliant lifestyle and so you know maybe if you live in let's say Minnesota where Winter or very cold you imagine that you'd be very happy if you moved to California now what canaman did is went to ask people who moved from Minnesota or something like that to California says are you more happy now and basically after six months a year people say yeah kind of I'm you know I'm happy but you know they didn't get the kind of change in life satisfaction that they were thinking they would when they were not there so how come we set goals to the highest level of what we think that we can achieved instead of finding happiness in lower aspirations surely that would allow us more direct access to happiness oh yeah you're totally right like uh you the a goal you can think of it we we use the word reference point before you can think as a reference point so you you you judge where you are how well you are doing as a with this goal as a reference so uh if you have a very low goal everything looks good if my goal in life is just to have a nice job uh a house somewhere not necessarily in a luxury suburb you know Etc well it's much easier to achieve that if I say my goal is to be a top manager to have a very high income level Etc so so having a high goal uh makes that for a given level if I have a low goal this looks great if I have a high goal the same thing is not going to look great so very simple path to happiness is to have low aspirations uh and if you look in history you know I talk about stoicism or Buddhism uh or epicurism as well so lot of the kind of historical um path to happiness recommendations like is very simple it's like stop Desiring what you do not have uh just be happy what you have and that's the secret of happiness and there's something very true in it is that if you're able to stop you know try to get outside of this race where the goal keep moving for forward says you know what I'm healthy um have a good meal every day uh you know got electricity warm water my ancestor didn't have that at well at all so that's a fairly good life right um I don't need to chase further success and further successes so if you're able to do that you can extract yourself from this pressure you'll feel better but then what what you have is that your head earing system is not designed for you to feel good as we said before your heading system is designed for you to be as successful as possible as successful as possible and so your headen system your brand should kind of pick all the information available to identify what you can do and if you learn that you can do something better well your hien system should just uh go a not above and says we have to do it right you're hi you're not designed to be happy and enjoy life you're designed to really to to try as hard as possible and and the that you're not designed you're not designed to be happy in life you're designed to try as hard as possible what an absolute yeah exactly because you're if you think about our ancestors uh some ancestors may be born with psychological traits where they enjoyed being on the beach and you know it there was enough if there is enough food to have enough food and fish one fish Etc and some others were maybe a bit more um uh neurotic wanted to always work harder harder well unfortunately for us you know the people were the most neurotic and keep trying harder and harder I'm more likely to be ancestors now than the people who just enjoy life we are the rogy of the most anxious insecure overachievers across time so I would say you know there's there's a balance but our honic system should be designed to keep finding the best thing you can achieve so as I said before you know it's not worth you being depressed every day because you're not Elon Musk that's there's no point into it but you should identify what is the best thing you can achieve really best thing and then aim for it and so our honic system that's that you know we we get a lot of information for what we have done before what people like us have done and and then we integrate all this information we think okay you know what somebody like me can do uh I have some psychological traits which makes me better at some things maybe if I'm very good at talking to people I should them to do a to be a manager or maybe to be a public speaker if I'm very good at math I maybe thinking you know what I should do is working in engineering or in finance so you will try to find given who I am and the traits I have what is the best thing I can do and you don't need to think you know care consciously about it you pick it up you'll pick up that wait a minute this person is like me and this person is is very successful why am I not doing this um you know and the the C will keep moving forward because it's designed just to push you not too far but as far as possible I've been thinking a lot about the difference between feeling happy when you succeed and just feeling relieved it seems that there is a regular framing that success is the only acceptable outcome and anything short of that is a failure so the achievement of success isn't it turns the achievement of success not from a cause for joy into just the abatement of fear you know what I mean oh I avoided disappointment congratulations but that's such a you know for the again for the sort of high achieving High expectation low confidence people out there that you it's a lose lose scenario I didn't achieve the goal how miserable I feel about myself I did achieve the goal well that's the only acceptable outcome yeah look that's fascinating and it's another uh you can explain it for from how happiness Works happiness is going to work in your brain Always setting expectations and and giving you feedback about whether you're doing better than expectations or lower than expectations now when you you aim for a goal uh usually the resolution toward this goal is going to take time uh to take place over time so if you're working to get a promotion in a company you know you have progressively information whether you're doing well enough to be promoted okay so your impression but whether things are going well or not you know and as things get better you feel more and more happy similarly let's say you run a marathon as you're running the marathon you getting information whether you're likely to finish or not right and so the thing is that you will consume the benefit of success all throughout as you get closer from the goal so you know if you look at uh games like like you know in the US you have American football for the guy starts being happy before they tou score the touch down they start being happy as they know that there is nobody you know in front of them and they are going to score the touch down and so they start consuming in a way the happiness of the success before the success happened happens exactly and then when you reach it when you reach really the success the only thing which could happen is that you you may be 99% chance of being successful but you could still mess up so you're running toward the touchdown and you fumble within one meter that would be catastrophy so you you have a relief because you you you have already realized that you are going to be successful you're super happy but you there's a risk that you could not and that's this final stuff that you you happy not to be failing yeah I this line from you about how uh the attainment of a goal seems when the moment of Triumph is over almost like a letdown because so few people sit back and enjoy it uh and most people just create another goal that they want to strive for but the in the sort of the implication of that is presumably they prefer the process of striving toward a goal as opposed to the state of actually having achieved it which seems completely backward right because what you're not saying why you why are you pursuing that goal for the pursuit of the goal no you're not pursuing the goal for the pursuit of the goal you're pursuing the goal because you want to achieve the goal but every single bit of evidence about the way that we behave suggests that we prefer the striving as opposed to the achieving so I think I think there's two things first you you will enjoy the striving uh because the striving is really going toward the goal is like reduce is increasing the chance that you're going to be successful uh but obviously at the very end the fact that you indeed are successful there is still an important step so if you if you look for like sports matches and let's say your team is ahead in in the game right you you start being happy that you realize you are very likely to win before the end of the match but nonetheless when the the um the whistle uh blows and you win the match you know you you're happy because that's the final outcome the success is realized now what you have is that relative to expectations relative to maybe the F about how you would feel before if you were to be successful then you have this focusing illusion so you um I have this quote in one of my uh substack about Andre Agassi it's in his book open and Andre gasi uh you know I'm not sure if people remember because it's a few decades ago but there was a lot of pressure he was a very talented team player but there was a lot of pressure that he was a bit Rowdy you know uh and people say maybe he's not this kind of guy who can actually win big titles and and then he won Wimbledon and then he think well I felt let down because I was led to believe that winning a grand slam would be life-changing I wouldn't be the same person you know uh I would acquire maybe another level of existence big world but you know you you would grow into something else having reached this very high level of achievement and he said well I felt exactly the same person and compare that to how um um depressed and sad I was when I was losing in the final of the Grand Slam I was not that happy having won and so that's a thing because you focus you would focus on thinking that the Grandam is what he needs to be happy but once he gets a grand slam surely is very happy on the day right that's that's one thing on the day he's H happy May Cry whatever but a few days later his head oning system is going to kick in and says wait a minute if you want one you can do you know you can be number one so so the next is in three months yeah gold medalist syndrome I think it's called oh yes you have the gold medalist you have the I'm not sure if you are you refering because there's a you know you have the study about the gold silver and bronze medal stu oh no I think gold medalists so yes that being bronze is happier than being silver because bronze is two steps away from winning but silver was very close I think at least my again bro signs of the uh gold medalist syndrome was that a lot of the time when people finally achieved their Championship that they want at the Olympics uh and they're left like Andre Agassi feeling uh significantly less fulfilled than they'd hoped or anticipated that they then tell them themselves well ah right it it it's because I have to do it twice it's because I have to prove that it was fluke that's that's what the problem is that's right yeah so I didn't know the term uh it's interesting I didn't know this term but yes that's exactly that and I think you know but that's what we're in a way doomed uh to to to experience because if you win one well that's a good you know it's good correlation people win one slam often they'd win more than one and So eventually you should be you know if people were like I win one slam and I'm happy now I'm going to enjoy cocktails as a hotel well that's not you know conduces to further success yeah it's uh it's so funny the the sort of curse of continuing to succeed if if you are a competent person and you break new ground each new achievement doesn't feel like a cause for celebration it simply feels like the next minimum acceptable outcome that you can have the next time you do the thing exactly exactly and and but the funny thing is that you have this uh the the fact that all people be behind or below these very highly successful people think that the people were very successful very happy so you know uh I can imagine imagine that let's say if you're on social media and you know um if you start you think oh if only had 10 followers or not 10 10,000 followers that's that's the thing I'll be very happy people who 10,000 followers she wait a minute you know why don't I have 50,000 people who 50,000 says why don't have like you know 200 and we don't know that so we think that these people are happy but these people are just looking two steps ahead have you ever looked at the research around when you ask people what their ideal level of uh annual income would be so it yeah I look I remember I don't remember the the the um the numbers but I I saw a study and maybe do you remember so I remember what the outcome was which is basically it's almost always about three times what you earn right now so people will say well I would be you know I'm at I I earn £50,000 a year uh 150 would you know that would really but the people at 150 say yeah I 450 would really be and then it just keeps on going and keeps on going and it's very reliable it's all the way up you know the millionaires jealous of billionaires the billionaires jealous of multi-billionaires oh yeah so I can tell you a few things about this C it's first on a level on very basic level you ask people let's say when they're 20 what would be a good life you know what what would be something where when you're 40 you have achiev and happy and they say I don't know I've got a house in the suburb got a car I've got a big TV you know and then you got him the 40 okay you've got a car you've got the house you got a big TV is it do you think you have a good life says well you know not trly because you know I don't have this thing I don't have that Etc so people move their goal P the kind of stuff that they said they would be happy with is not enough for them to be satisfied so that's a a first thing interesting thing and then in terms of um people always looking ahead there was I remember I listened once to an interview of a psychologist with specialist of the psychology of millionaires and he said you know when I'm saying that there psychologist of maybe not millionaires but like super rich maybe multimillionaires or billionaires when I say that I'm a psychologist for these guys people says wait wait a minute they don't have any problem and the problem is is that he says no on the contrary they often they are very miserable because you know uh if you ear uh 50 or $100,000 your next comparison point is maybe the person who had who get 150 thousand but if you're a millionaire you next comparison point is a guy who like twice the size of your house this multi-million y with all these VIPs coming in and so they are super frustrated that they are not competing well enough with the next guys uh ahead Will Smith in the Memoir that Mark Manson wrote said when I was poor and miserable I had hope when I was rich and miserable I was despondent that's a good one that's a good I like it yeah I just you know the it very much is the case that happiness is not achieving a thing it's not being rich it's being a little bit richer than yesterday consistently over and over again right yeah so so but here again it's here's a trick that is that we are we we experience positive feelings from doing better than expected so when you go up usually you know there's an a part of um uncertainty which uncertainty which is resolved usually you know if you're promoted there was not a 100% chance initially so as you you you you win and you're successful um there's an element of surprise of positive surprise and so you enjoy that but if you were on a schedule where your your the the the growth of your income for instance or the promotion is totally scheduled is it's it's uh there's no uncertainty maybe because like you know your your income is indexed on inflation it's going to increase whatever maybe not on on on seniority so as you get older and older your income automatically increase then if you expect these increases even if you're doing better you will not feel better because all these in increments are going to be factored in you expect them and if you expect them you're not going to be more satisfied that's a trick yeah the relationship between happiness and expectation of uh surprise is it feels so ruthless because by Design you can't design surprise like if you knew that it was going to happen it wouldn't be a [ __ ] surprise yeah yeah and and you know you may wonder why why why we design like that why can't we have Something like Happiness which is something like a mountain and you start from the bottom and as you more and more successful in life you get more and more happiness you know why why are we not designing that and the the quick answer is that designing a system uh which instead of uh measuring big difference like that only focus on measuring variations related to expectations it's a more efficient uh system to treat information and to uh use whatever U ctive capacity you have in your brain to produce a signal which is going to help you so it's a bit abstract but I can say that um something which we have learned in the last first 30 years is there have been a very interesting convergence between AI research and reinforcement learning and cognitive neuroscience and what some ctive Neuroscience found out is that the brain looks like when it the brain rewards you as a difference you know relative to your expectations it's pretty much looks like it's implementing optimal algorithms used in machine learning so You' have people working in in artificial intelligence trying to program how uh a program is going to learn the right thing to do and and the best one simple thing to for this program to learn is to say well from expectations about what different actions are going to lead to and then try out and when you try the the action you just you just compare uh is this action the outcome better than expected or worse than expected and then you adjust your expectation and if you're if you try a lot eventually you are going to learn to do the right thing it's pretty much exactly what we do and it's an efficient way of processing information uh it would be much more difficult for your brain to have a very a complete map about you know happiness from zero to uh the top it's better to have a kind of a local stuff guiding you locally Inc expectations exactly incremental yeah yeah how interesting so talk to me let's expand this out a little bit more into habituation uh and sort of the Adaptive explanation for habituation more broadly like why why didn't Evolution just design us with the ability to feel greater and greater happiness whenever we do better well it's exactly what I was saying before is that it's more efficient I I think a very good comparison is our visual system that's exactly the same thing so you know your visual system doesn't kind of recall the objective luminosity in a room um the objective Luminosity actually it's not measuring it the from the time where the light hits your retina the what's recorded is actually Divergence relative to expectations and what you see is that you know if you were to turn off the light somewhere so now you see things you turn off the light everything is bleck so you can't see anymore but if you wait a bit your eye is going to adapt you're going to start seeing Shades Etc and so you're going to be able to perceive difference in contrast that you were not perceiving before what has happened happen is that your eye what is that's exactly the same thing that you have kind of an expectation and You observe differences within this range if suddenly I change the range of Luminosity your eye doesn't see anything anymore so you have to adapt to eventually perceive again the differences and having this why is it useful because if you have a kind of range where you can perceive differences you want to maximally use this range in the area you are if I was to look at this ranges I have to stretch it to observe any kind of differences then the problem is that a lot of things would look the same because you have a limited ability to perceive differences so you I want to use this ability to perceive differences the most in the area where there are variations that I need to observe so my eyes I'm optimally adapting my ability to perceive difference in contrast in the range of contrast that I'm facing now and if you turn off turn the light off or put a bright light I'm going to adapt to this new range and your happiness is the same thing so your your perception of subjective values uh they adapt to the range you're facing so you know if you are not very rich selling sandwiches on a on a on a cart you know you need to be careful about not losing $10 so you'll be mindful about making not making mistakes such that you know when you count the the money you're handing in and and getting back you know that you're not losing money because this money is important but let's say that you scratch a lotto card and you become a millionaire well $1 doesn't matter anymore so you know why would you care why would you allocate some of your perception of value to difference in $10 when this doesn't matter anymore is there an implication then if if sort of incrementalism this stepbystep nature of us slowly getting toward our goals is there an implication that sudden huge leaps in Improvement of Life circumstances are actually very bad for us in that if you win the lottery how are you going to have a better day than the day that you won the lottery like it came out of nowhere um it sets this new unreasonable standard for you as opposed to you know the person who's maybe tormented by their daily grinds to move toward their goals but presumably if you're already on that sort of path and momentum you were only half a step behind yesterday and you can be half a step ahead tomorrow uh the difference between that and somebody that just has a windfall ant that dies with $50 million and gives it to them or something where' you go from there you don't even have any systems to be able to locate yourself so I think you're right that if you very successful very quickly One Challenge you face is to reset you know because we're designed for that we're designed to have goals and to move forward Etc so one is one challenge you face is to reset your goals in life uh if you're not able to do that uh if you're not challenge anymore first you may become bored you know if you don't think that you have anything to to to to achieve um but also you may make mistakes so I think I've heard that you know people win the lottery and were not speically reach before often they get counseling and you can imagine so because um if you used to have a lot of money you want to have a professional investment strategy right to gain a b more money but if you move from not much to a lot of money maybe you think why I'm going to buy a luxury car a luxury boat I'm going to and you're going to spend things which maybe the value deteriorates maybe organize luxury parties Etc it doesn't last and you may remember I think that was a very famous footballer where um I think it was best I think George best who said uh most of my money I use it on women and drugs and the rest I squandered it so you know if you have a lot of money very quickly you may not do make the best use of it so I think the challenge when you're very successful is to find your to get your St back on the ground says where do I want to go from there do we habituate less to certain things are there any categories of uh accumulation that we have in our life that we seem to be a little bit more resilient to this adaptation so so look it's it's very good question so habituation once you reach a certain level of of comfortable life which should be you know lower middle class in the US uh anything better What You observe is that people think they will get they will be much more happy or much happier if they get more and and actually you don't so happiness doesn't increase much it does increase uh within the country and one likely reason is because within the country you're able to compare yourself to others so um what we observe is that this hasn't increase bit um between countries so you take Americans now overall for instance and you ask you you look at the number of people say they are happy or moderately happy it's the same number as 1949 now think about you know all the things that happen since 1949 people have fridges they have like T color TV Etc they have internet uh things that whenever it happens people say it's amazing it's fantastic um but when you ask now they don't feel happier and that's the thing you see in most countries that when you look at countries apart from the very poor countries which you know they get sanitation they get water Etc if you from a lower middle income country to a rich country it's very flat happiness is very flat um so that is true nonetheless at the bottom end there are things which can you know improve life satisfaction so if you move from being homeless to having a house uh that improves in the long term your life satisfaction that kind of locks it locks it in in a more uh permanent way yeah so one thing which possible is that you know your head onic signals uh if you think about the Modern Life that we are living when we have food on the table when we have like you know sanitation water that's not that's a good that's a good life I mean on didn't have that so we are in the range of the good life which in a way uh the basic signal that we can get we can still learn that we can do better but uh we're already doing very well relative to the kind of things that ancestor we're doing but if you are in your life where you know your your life is threatened because you don't have a home your health is threatened because you don't have access to good food or or protection Etc um that may still give you signals that you know that's not good from an evolution point of VI so I think there's something where oh that's that's so interesting so much of what we're doing with habituation in lower to like um developed Nations is chasing down better standards of living but not removing ourselves from things that could be mortal threats to us and maybe our brain is able to detect okay there is you don't always have food on the table you don't always have a safe place to sleep you don't always have reliable water or whatever and if you if you get out from that you lock in a particular so the bottom levels of ma masa's hierarchy of needs I've always thought this about the um you know issues that many of us face am I actualizing my Logos forward is this really me reaching my udonia and making the most of my brief time it's like hey dude an existential crisis is a pretty [ __ ] luxurious position to be in for all of human history until like 200 years ago people were terrified of whether they'd make it to the next day they thought that they were going to get smited from above by a lightning bolt because they' masturbated last night or whatever it might be you know like they they just done this permanent fearful world and it's odd that uh yeah if you're asking yourself these deep questions about meaning uh about fulfillment about flourishing about udonia about reaching your goals go it suggests to me that much of the stuff that really matters you would absolutely Miss if it wasn't there has been sorted and that's why you're up here it is no Comfort I'm aware it's no Comfort because we habituate but uh I I do think it's an important frame no no exactly I think I think you're right and I I have nonetheless so so the all these vision is a bit depressing because uh it can be depressing I don't know I'm you know Kenan described himself Daniel Kenan the psychologist described himself as a cheerful Optimist a pessimist a cheerful pessimist cheerful pessimist yeah I like that because you know you you don't tell yourself stories about how the world is you know you you take it as it is so it's a bit pessimistic but actually you can still be cheerful in your life so if you know I'm as a person be cheerful and Daniel kenman was as well so um anyway the the the thing I wanted to to to say about um the habituation is that there's a positive aspect to it because I say it's a bit can be a bit depressing but there's a positive aspect to it is that uh the the rest point of Happiness where we come back to is not neutral and there's good reasons for it uh which we can come to it if you want but um you know if you take a scale from one to 10 and you ask people how happy you are people don't say I'm kind of neutral on average they won't say five they would say seven so people on average tend to be fairly cheerful fairly fine with it and and you know it's true you go to people who don't have a high income and they say well yes life is relatively fine you know I could do better but and they they will give you an answer around seven and you go high levels people will tell you an answer so we habituate but we don't habituate to measure it we haveit toate to a fairly fine level of Happiness so that's the positive news I'd seen somewhere that status is a little less subject to habituation than some of the other elements in our life you get any idea if that's true look I think it's I think it's lik be true um for and maybe that explains why your happiness in still increases when you get richer within your country because your status increase within your country so when you the whole country gets richer you know you move with the cohort of your country so you get a fridge but everybody gets a fridge so so you have each to fridge but when you get the fridge and people don't have the fridge you know you're happy that you have the fridge and relative to others who don't have it so I think status makes sense because status uh is we are very social spaces and status you know how well you are regarded by others in your community is a key indication of success so if you go to ancestors uh in particular for males like status would have much much more conducive to find mates and to have hairs Etc so even if it's something not like food or um sex or whatever status uh it's likely that it is one thing when we we feel what will primary Wars that you you feel good from experiencing status uh and that's something that you know ctive neuroscientist also U maybe not necessarily all of them but you something which is accepted by some ctive neuroscientist that status as such experiences increas in status going to feel good and and that is going to be status is super flexible like uh and you can always keep increasing status uh all across your life so when you we were talking about food Etc in a way uh once you can eat well this from an evolution point of view there is no s a big difference between the food you get in a festar michan restaurant and the food you can buy from getting supermarket and you that may seem shocking to a lot of people but the fact is that the food in the supermarket is super safe uh relative to where talking about our ancestors were freaking out Etc you don't have to fight for the food uh there's no bacteria or parasite in your food uh you know it's warm Etc so the food in the five star Mel restaurant the biggest difference is not the number of calories uh whether it's safe Etc you know in terms of Fitness effect uh it's not going to be very different the difference is the status is that it gives you status or to be able to you because you have status you can do that it's a signal of status to be able to eat in such a restaurant Etc and so while you can't you know increase all this stuff about the comfort of your life you have a roof over over your head you have food you have water Etc status can keep increasing you can keep relative to other being doing better and better the the sad thing about it though is that status is a zero some game that if if you rise in St can only be one exactly so as you rise in status who are competing with you are relatively to you going down in status and so it's well I'm just going to say it's not something that you can you know you have utilitarianism is this philosophy that you want to maximize the happiness in the country and thirdly if status is one of the key thing where you can increase happiness of individuals well you can't increase the happiness of the country because status is those who have and those who don't have it is a zero some Gap so you can't increase status of everybody okay another huge tension that a lot of people seem to have to deal with is this relationship between happiness and a meaningful life uh is is it attention is this a a fake thing what is there to know when it comes to useful definitions and differences between happiness and meaning look I find it fascinating and and once again I think it's fascinating because we have these big questions what is the meaning of life what I me what I I meant to do I mean some people don't care but you know some people care and some people think what should I do what would give sense to my life Etc um some people make big life decisions you know they go to uh foreign countries and work and Etc to do in poor countries to dedicate their lives to some causes Etc so why do we have these feelings and why why don't we understand why why are these kind of mysterious and here again we are in the thing where Evolution gives us the feelings that guides and or decisions for us to navigate the world but evolution didn't need to tell us why we have them and so part of the mystery is that because now we kind of try to think about why we have this but we have not been given the tools uh because these tools understanding why we have these feelings is not in itself helpful and actually you know I was saying before that you have a a convergence between cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence and it's exactly the same thing in artificial intelligence if you program a if you design a computer program to do a task you don't need the computer program to know why it's doing the task so if you design a computer program to win at chess or to win at go you know the game of Go you don't need to tell the program you know everything which is happening now is for you to win you just give this program this system of values it it it experiences values uh to choose the next decision and it's Rev is values depending on whether the outcome is above or below the expectations and the program can be completely myopic it ends up winning a chess it has learned to win a chess but it doesn't have a conscience saying oh my goal in life is to win a chess but now imagine this program become self-aware and start thinking what what am I doing what is my goal in life well you know you would have to find this stuff by itself because the programmer didn't need to put in the program the answer oh if which is happening is because you have been designed to win a chess and this is the same problem we have we have been designed by Evolution to be successful and we experienced all these feelings for us to be successful but we have not been given the awareness about why we experience these feelings and so we are grasping these big questions uh because we don't have the tools uh to naturally think about you know why we we're doing that so the thing about the meaning of life have these big questions um and I think there's a fairly simple answer is that the heic feelings we have uh they have to answer several types of questions one question is a right now you know uh is my meal now good or is it not good should I stop it you know is it oh it's too crazy it make me sick Etc um you know is this person I'm talking to a friendly person I want to continue the interaction with or is it a boring person I'm wasting my time or somebody somebody who doesn't like me and I shouldn't say anything private because this person is going to go sleep about it whatever so you are asking all these questions and your head onic feelings right now whether you feel that you happy because the food you're eating is good or you feel sympathy with somebody all these feelings are helping you to guide you in the right now moment now this is good but a lot of success is going to be determined about larger span of time uh you know are you in in the right setting in the stuff you're doing in your life overall is it good so if I ask you how satisfied are you with your life you are going to think about what you're doing with your life in a bigger window bigger time window and you're not going just to think about oh is my meal good is this friend good you thinking of the biggest scheme you know am I going somewhere in life which is in line with what would be successful which is like building uh maybe your standing in the community finding a romantic partner maybe raising your kids and seeing your kids grow Etc so if you can see see that this kind of stuff happening you're more likely to to experience this kind of Life satisfaction and what you can have you can have a disconnect between pleasure and achieving these goals because you can have a lot of pleasure in the short term uh but they don't lead you to achieving these goals often achieving these long-term goals need to for you to do some things which are costly now so you know if you spend your time playing video games from uh 6 pm to 5:00 am it may be very nice but if I ask you six months later are you happy with your life you may say you know what I'm not sure I'm going anywhere right I enjoy what I do every day that's why I'm doing it but I don't think I'm going anywhere something is missing this missing is that you're not doing what's right for you to feel that you progressing toward a successful life and so the when we exper when we experience when you think about the meaning of life I think what's kicking in in your head is uh this kind of intuition about am I doing the am I in the right setting am I in the right progress this right dynamic toward being successful in life something which is Meaningful is U doing things where people are happy what I'm doing so am I standing in the community is increasing I'm perceived as somebody nice and contributing to my community I have friends I have my family my partner loves me Etc this gives meaning because you think I'm doing things right I'm moving forward in a right direction and this gives this kind of feelings it seems like uh time is a really important contributor here that sort of a good life versus a pleasurable life is a conflict Across Time shortterm versus long-term and you've got this great this gorgeous quote where you say much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches where short-term honic signals conflict with long-term ones and it's just this tension it's this tension between the two I want to eat the cookie or smoke the cigarette or drink the beer today but I don't want to deal with the fatness or The Hangover for tomorrow and you know you scale this up over time the the thing that's super interesting uh I have I've had this intuition for ages that certain people are predisposed to take more pleasure from meaning and other people are more predisposed to take more pleasure from enjoyment I think people find their way they they do in life the thing that gives them the best honic signals so for me I I I actually suck quite a bit at pleasure uh really [ __ ] good at meaning like I will you know bury myself for 3 months in the hopes that something will come out of that on the other side um suck at pleasure good at meaning I have a lot of friends who are the opposite and this was that famous you you may know this story better than me but this famous conversation debate friendly debate between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Carman where Gilbert was saying that a good life could be one where you spend every hour for the the remainder of your days laid on a lilow floaty in a pool with a cocktail he said in retrospect and you look back would that have would you have considered a life well- lived well it doesn't matter because dayto day your experience was just pleasure I'm in a pool this is nice the cocktail tastes good caraman said that no what you want is a true happiness or true meaning in life comes from a life which in retrospect you're glad that you lived right and I think that at least to me this is my again another pet bro science theory which you feel free to tear apart that um uh I think that the more ruminative of a thinker that you are the more you need to optimize to be caraman not to be Gilbert whereas I have friends who are able to just [ __ ] be they don't care about where they're going with this thing they're not asking about whether it's this deeper contribution in the same way and maybe they're going to have midlife crisis at 55 and they're going to come back to me and go dude should have buried myself for 3 months you were or whatever but not that I told them to to change whatever but just tie all this tens uh shortterm honic signals with longterm ones but I think that our predisposition uh the frame that we enter the world with and the way that we're rewarded individually based on genetics and experience is I think it it disposes us to focus on one more than the other and I think that this is why one size fits all solutions to this most people will lie somewhere in the middle but there's some people that are out on the tales I have no idea what percentile I am I could be 99 I don't think I am but I'm definitely toward the I'm toward the long-term signals like they they are more Salient to me they're more powerful to me compared with the short-term ones do that make sense that makes totally sense I like how you you frame it as you know um being focused on meaning or being focused on Pleasure um and we have all we have always to make these these choices like uh pleasure right now Now versus later and our ancestors had to do it as well a lot of for instance a lot of cooperation like basic cooperation decision is being nice to other people you know sometimes you can take advantage of people now there's a benefit now but what you lose is that you lose that Goodwill tomorrow and they won't help you when you need their help so even our ancestors in very different settings you know had to these tradeoffs but something which characterize on modern world is that these tradeoffs have become uh way outside of the kind of range of we were facing before because our time Horizon has increased massively first our life expectancy has increased you know if you compare to even 200 years ago the life expectancy had doubled that's one thing but also the time Horizon is increased because now we have a lot of Institutions which give us the time to um invest in the future now we have Banks so sometimes Banks go bankrupt but very often most often they don't so you have this C crazy thing which you can put money in the bank at 20 and get money back at 60 when I say bank it's all the financial system now you think about this ancestors were not designed you know we're not facing these kind of decisions so when you are 20 60 is like way out so thinking about making these decisions we we don't have the intuitions we don't have the adonic feelings to make these decisions uh and when you think about now you know think about I don't remember when what was the age of Alexander when he conquered um his big Empire but he was super young I think he was less than 25 or something like this and think about people are 25 now they they are like often considered still like kids right we have these things where we become in a way ready to enter the world much later and it takes a lot of time to achieve leadership positions and and high position Etc so you need a lot of investment you need to work hard at school when you're 15 you need to work hard in early position when you're 25 Etc to invest to be Su if you want to be successful I say un need is if you want to be successful and the thing is we this requires a lot of uh postponing of enjoyment maybe less less video games less eating nice stuff and less holidays and more and so I don't think we have NE necessarily the this is a big challenge we face and a lot of unhappiness uh that we observe is I think comes from this tension is that the world offer of a lot of ways of being happy now you know you have uh at the click of a button you have in prob for for young uh boys like a lot of video games takes a lot of their time Etc and this designed by you know designed by psychologist to be exactly tapping into the stuff which is pretend status which they like and they enjoy Etc so you have all that but then you ask people later are you happy with your life well the problem is that all these very nice thing that you doing the short term and that you have been seduced to do in the short term they have not LED you to maybe go the steps where for you to progress in life and so you have this mismatch between what you said you know this feeling for meaning and this feeling for pleasure and in a way the problem the modern world is that it's it has designed so much appealing things which are pleasurable in in in the present and we want to buy them but it has increased the time Horizon that we face and increasing way wow waiting further that's so that's so interesting I love that so what about the the classic question the the meaning of life what do you think that misses given your evolutionary lens given your insights into sort of Neuroscience because it seems like what people are looking for is something outside of life right why is life here give me something that transcends the thing that I'm asking the question about right so um I think you're right that a lot of times when we think what's the meaning of life people wants to see that there's something objective out there which give sense to your life beyond your subjective experience so for instance if I'm H you know working in a ofan AG in a poor country helping kids you know uh learn things I feel I'm I'm doing something good and that gives sense Mak to to my life now if you you believe into meta some metaphysical reality like for instance religion if you if you're religious and you believe there is a God or civil spiritual entities out there who uh gives you a mission to do in life then I guess that's can be the meaning of your life is to follow these goals that given by your religion uh personally I don't you know I don't think that uh my my my my point of view is purely naturalistic so I'm just going to look at naturalistic explanation if you don't have any metaphysical explanation the fact is these feelings that we want something objective to give sense to give a meaning to our life it's just a feeling because you know the only thing that we have is our subjective experience and so I think that um there's nothing out there there's a denet uh The evolutionary psychologist called sky hook you know to have an explanation hook which come from the sky and hold your theory so if you don't have a sky I hook like a religious explanation the only explanation you can start with is that we have these feelings they come from our brain they have been designed to help us make good decisions um and the feelings of meaning have to come from The View that you know you are going somewhere in your life and it has to be connected with the kind of thing which help ancestor being successful and it doesn't mean so some of it often is is linked with being very pro-social so I think people often experience meaning where you know doing they are doing good toward other people and I think it makes sense because um investing in the future as I said before often being cooperative is investing in the future so it doesn't pay right now to do a lot of good things to other people but you build Goodwill and and a good reputation and that's helps you being successful in the future and I think that we would have the adonic uh system helping us to take that into consideration and you know because it's far in the future in a way this feelings that we're doing something good it bring is bringing the the um the benefit from the future in the present and and and so we feeling you know we can we can I'm not saying I'm not saying that we are consciously calculating and think oh you know what I'm going to help my neighbor today I don't really care about my neighbor but by doing that when I will need my neighbor helps you know can no we don't do that we we help our neighbor uh and we feel good about it and we and and but what it does is that it also gives us Goodwill so when we need it we can get it uh and so I think that lot of this feeling of Goodwill of of Sor of meaning that we experience when we are doing good things is because it would have helped our ancestors to actually be good Cooperators and to to care about being nice with other people contributing to the community rising and standing as being perceived as a as an altruist and positive person a trustworthy person so I think that's why we experence these kind of meanings but if you don't have a sky hook it hold has to come from these feelings which are designed to help us being successful I suppose yeah you're right if if all the happiness and meaning are as signals produced by the brain to indicate if we're on a path that's aligned towards success but the path gets calibrated by an ancestral past there's huge opportunity for mismatch now in the modern world yeah exactly no no and and I think that's you know you see um for instance a big topic now is is the challenge faced by young boys in the modern world uh young boys for evolutionary reasons are less are maturing later than than girls and so they are not necessarily ready for the kind of demanding uh push back of pleasure that school is requiring school is requiring to be systematic to be uh uh you know not not jumping around listening to the teacher doing your homework Etc for years and years and years and the rewards are very far in the future and and and what happens that we see now with um decreasing proportion of of young uh men going to University being successful Etc because the world offered them you know all these um quick um reward accessible online and as push back the uh the schedule to become successful as I say Alexander you know must have been riding a horse with his father and before he was 20 that doesn't happen anymore you before you're 20 you're still a kid in in modern world so this is a clear mismatch and and you know the perspective I'm proposing is not a normative perspective I'm not saying you should do that because there's no normative principles philosophical principles I'm just saying this is the way we work but what I what it can say is that because there is a mismatch uh it can gives a warning but you know maybe if you don't think enough about the future uh be careful because the modern society is kind of can ENT trp you with all these nice uh uh Pleasures it's offering you now in particular when you're young and it's not going necessarily to help you do the right step for you to be happy when you're 35 Lionel page ladies and Gentlemen lonel let's bring this one home dude you are [ __ ] awesome I love your writing I'm so glad that you're able to speak as well as you write uh you are now officially on the rotation of guests I'm going to hassle every year every couple of months to bring on uh I love it where people want to check out more of the stuff that you write uh where should they go well um I've got a book which is uh here optimally irrational uh nicely placed so it's about you know you if you interest in Psychology and behavior I I I highly recommend that you check it out and otherwise as you said I have my substack where I kind of continue the same name optim irrational and I continue talking about psychology with an evolutionary perspective and Game Theory perspective econic perspective and yeah the last um post were about um happiness and the incoming ones are going to be about coalitional psychological theory which I think is super interesting as well good until next time I appreciate you thank you Chris see you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode there is something else you will absolutely love right here go on give it a tap