Want to ‘Optimize’ Your Happiness? This Happiness Expert Says: Don’t.

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So that's hard for you, you can find it wherever you get your podcasts. From the New York Times, this is the interview. I'm Zulu García Navarro. Are you happy? It's a deceptively simple question, right? But for me at least it's a really difficult one to answer. Another tough question, why is it so hard to be happy for so many people? Despite a culture of wellness influencers with their happiness hacks and mindset tricks,

“all of the indicators show that we Americans are less happy than ever. What is going on and what can we do about it?”

I put those questions to Dr. Lori Santos. Santos is a cognitive scientist whose class on happiness quickly became the most popular in Yale's history

and through her podcast, the happiness lab, and her free online course called the Science of Wellbeing, Santos' reach has extended well beyond the classroom. I wanted to understand what the science says happiness really is, how our understanding of what it takes to be happy has changed over time, and why with the pandemic in our rear view mirror, it's still been so hard for me and many others to do the things that will actually make us happier. And which told me was surprising. Here's my conversation with Dr. Lori Santos.

Thank you so much for being here. I'm so glad you could join me. Thanks so much for having me on the show. I am going to start in a bit of a strange place because like so many people in the world, I was really obsessed with the story of Punch the Monkey, and that little monkey and Japan whose mother sort of rejected him, and he had no one to socialize with, so he adopted that IKEA Monkey toy. And I have a theory about Punch that connects to happiness, and I wanted to put it to you because apart from being a happiness expert,

you also study animal cognition and you started your work with monkeys. Really everyone that I know sent me information about Punch, I was like getting in real time, what was happening with Punch. I was really thinking about why so many people around the world connected with Punch's inability to form relationships.

And you've long said that the bonds with other people are one of the building blocks of happiness. It's one of the most important things that we can do.

“But especially here in the US, those bonds were freeing, and I think we just saw some of ourselves in Punch. Do you think I may be right?”

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it was fascinating to see just how much emotion people showed about Punch. Which I think is funny because sometimes we see news stories about the pain of other actual humans, and we don't show that much compassion, right? But I think talking about the loneliness crisis through a monkey, like through this poor little monkey that didn't do anything, it wasn't really his fault. I think that really allowed us a way to talk about the loneliness crisis and to feel it and admit it in ourselves in a way that wasn't as shameful.

You know, I spent a lot of time in advance of this conversation really thinking about the nature of happiness. And I want to start by digging into just what happiness is, and maybe do some basic defining of terms, because I went down a few rabbit holes. You can. It's very easy to do with this turn. Yeah, and so as I discovered lots of philosophers have tackled the question of happiness going back to ancient Greece, and there's two main types of happiness, according to ancient Greek philosophers, as far as I could tell.

And one is hedonic and the other one is eutomonic.

“Can you explain what that is, what the difference is, what they were looking at back then?”

So he don'tic happiness. I think is a lot of laypeople mean when they mean happiness. That's just like a sense of good feeling, right? That's your personal pleasure. That's like the difference between eating a hot-foot Sunday or stubbing your toe, right? Like there's something that it feels like to feel like things are good. And often when we're thinking of a hedonic pleasure, we're thinking of the real basic stuff, the evolution, built in, you know, good food, good sex, a feeling of like accomplishment.

Like these are the things that matter for us. You dimonic happiness is bigger. It's really about living a good life. It's about happiness that comes not just from your own success, your own pleasure, but from other people, from like actually building character. And if you look back at the ancient, it's folks like Aristotle and so on. They knew about both, but when push came to shove, they were like, go for the eutimonic happiness, right?

Doing nice stuff for others, civic virtue. It was much more like happiness as virtue.

“And when you look at the modern science, like this tension comes up, right?”

And a lot of the interventions I talk about with my students and maybe we'll even talk about today. There's a real question about which type of happiness we're building up. And I think where the research falls is saying that like, if we want to do this well, we should probably go and be going more for the eutimonic stuff. Like that's the stuff we don't get used to. That's the stuff where we get kind of more bang for our buck in terms of interventions and time and so on. But all too often when you look on the internet, if you look at social media influencers, when they're talking about happiness, they usually mean the hedonic stuff.

And that's great. I mean it's great to have you know, great sex and hot fudge Sundays, but ultimately, you know, true happiness probably comes from what we do with others and building a broader good life. In ancient Greece, the big philosophical debate was also if happiness is nature and nurture.

What does the science say, are certain people more predisposed to be happy? Is it biological?

Yeah, so the way scientists study this is they do these classic studies with twins. And the reason scientists are so obsessed with twins is that you get two kinds of twins. You get identical twins who are genetic clones of one another. And you also have fraternal twins who are as related as regular siblings, but you know, they were in the same womb. They probably grew up the same way and so on.

And so what scientists do is they say, well, if there's a genetic component to happiness, if something about the variance that we see in the population is controlled by our genes, then those identical twins should look more similar in terms of their happiness than the fraternal twins. And like lots of studies have looked at this. And what they generally find is that happiness is heritable. In other words, that doesn't mean there's a gene for happiness or anything like that.

That means that some of the variance that we see in the population is due to the fact that somebody has one set of genetics versus another set of genetics. The important thing to know about those heritability studies, though, is that the heritability factor is pretty low. It's about the same rate as would you see for the heritability of something like religiosity or risk taking, right? I mean, religiosity is probably, you know, if your parents were super religious, maybe you're more likely to be super religious.

It's not set in stone, same thing with risk taking, and I think that's the message of happiness. Yeah, there's probably some component that's a little built in, but so much more of it is under our conscious control. So we can learn to be happy. I think that's the premise of my work, honestly. It's that we have much more control over it.

And interestingly, this was something that the ancient Greeks didn't totally realize. You know, if you look at Aristotle, he's like, we should cultivate virtue, you can do it, but it's going to be hard. Aristotle talked about the happy few. It's like, you know, you can go for it, but it's going to take a lot of work and probably a lot of folks aren't going to be up for that level of work.

“I think we think it's a little bit more malleable scientifically today, but we still share with Aristotle this idea that like, if you want to be happy, you can do it, but like all good things in life, you got to put some time in.”

When we think about happiness or well-being, is there a goal or is it just in the way that Aristotle said an endless pursuit?

I mean, can we reach the mountaintop and we just sit there or is it just always searching for that place?

The pursuit of happiness is not like a destination, like if I hopped on a flight and I got to LA. If I hopped on a flight to LA, I'd just be in LA and I'd be like, "All right, LA, I'm here." You know, I had the ability to stay, I get to stay there for a whole time, but like happiness doesn't work like that. It's not really a destination. And I think that it's funny when we think about happiness, because I think we do kind of think of it as a destination, but we don't think of that with other good things in life.

You know, take fitness, like say you're trying to get fit. I'm going to go to the gym. It would be awesome if you took like one really hard hit class, and then you're just good. Like you did that in your 20s and then, you know, all through midlife, you're like, "I took my hit class. I'm good." It was a fitness was a destination. No, we kind of get like, you got to keep doing it over time or those kind of benefits don't stick.

“And I think that's the way to think about happiness. You can get there, but it's active. It takes work, like so many good things.”

Can I ask you what exactly you mean when you say happy though? Because I was thinking about the nature of moments when I felt happy. I lived for two years in Rio de Janeiro, and I would wake up every morning, and I would look out the window, and you couldn't be unhappy there because it was just so beautiful. And I had my young daughter, and she would go to the beach every day, and I had good friends. And, you know, it's not even like looking back, I was happy. I knew at the time that I was experiencing sort of happiness.

Is that different than just general well-being? Yeah, I think there's so many of these terms, and it's so frustrating because we have so many of these terms. I also think that what lay people mean my these terms is often a little different. Yes, they're actually studies on this. If you look at what lay people mean, they tend to mean a particular kind of happiness. And it's kind of the one that you're getting at, which is sort of being happy in your life, which we might think of as like an affective part of happiness.

It's awesome to live in Rio de Janeiro. It's awesome to stick your feet in the sand, like that just feels good.

“And that's half of, I think, what social scientists mean when they talk about happiness.”

They're talking about the feeling, how it feels to be in your life. It's kind of the ratio of your positive to negative emotions. Maybe we'll get into this, but happiness isn't about getting rid of your negative emotions. I think that's toxic positivity. That's not what social scientists mean. But it really is about having a decent ratio between the positive to negative emotions. That's kind of being happy in your life. But happiness, according to social scientists, is a second component, too, which is this idea of being happy with your life.

And that gets more towards these U-Dymaniac components. That's that you're satisfied with your life. You have a sense of meaning. You have a sense of purpose. It feels good to be you because of how you think it's going. So it's kind of the cognitive part of happiness. And I think the work of what we should be doing when we're trying to pursue happiness the right way is to, in theory, try to boost both of those.

Use the word toxic positivity. I mean, I think you're referring to this idea that we always need to be feeling great and exuding optimism.

Is that what you're pushing back against? Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's really summed up by the phrase that you see on social media all the time of good vibes only. If there are any bad vibes, some things really off, right? And that just doesn't make sense from the perspective of evolution. When I talk to my students the way off and talk about negative emotions is as a signal. Just like other negative sensations, right? You put your hand on a really hot stove. It's going to hurt. It's going to burn.

And the reason you have that feeling is it's a good signal. It's like get your hand off that stove. So many of our negative emotions are doing that for us. We should be so grateful for them because they're helping us, right? If I'm feeling lonely, that's a signal that I need to change my behavior. I need to seek out some social connection. If I'm feeling sad, that's a signal that some things amiss, right? I might need more positive things in my life. A big one for me that I notice myself is I'm feeling overwhelmed. That means I've way too much on my plate, right? I have to make some changes.

And those are signals. Just like the signal we get from a hand on a hot stove that to get back to equilibrium, we need to make some changes.

“And it would be sad to get rid of those. If you only had good vibes only, I feel like you couldn't live a positive life because you'd be missing out on these cues about where you're going off track and what you should change.”

Do you worry if this idea of pursuing happiness always striving for more actually creates unhappiness?

Oh, definitely. Yeah, I think this, there's really lovely research on this from the researcher Iris Malice at the University of California at Berkeley. She actually has a paper about the paradox of the pursuit of happiness. That the simple act of pursuing happiness often makes us feel unhappy. But that gets back to this fact that we just don't get happiness right. When we think about the pursuit of happiness, we think, He'd on next stuff. We think, good vibes only. And whenever we're off track with that, we think something's gone wrong. And when things go wrong, we tend to have a different set of emotions.

What nerdy psychologists like me call meta emotions. Those are emotions about emotions, right? You know, so I don't know. You go on some really cool trip to Rio de Janeiro and you're like, I'm annoyed with the sand like it's a little too sunny. I'm not feeling happy. That's emotion number one, but then the meta emotions come in. You're ashamed. How can I be in Rio de Janeiro and not feeling happy? You're disappointed. Like, oh, I spent all this money on this stuff. You're judging yourself. What's wrong with me that I don't feel so good.

Those emotions come up whenever we feel like we're off the path of pursuit of happiness.

And the problem is if we're really into pursuing it, this is why Iris has data show.

The more you value happiness, the more you think you're supposed to get there, the more these negative meta emotions come up whenever you feel like you're off track. So yeah, it really does seem empirically that it's a paradox, right? That the more we go after at least one kind of happiness, you know, the kind of hedonic in the moment happiness, the more we think we're supposed to pursue that and something's really off if we haven't. What's going on? Good vibes only. The more we kind of don't ever get there.

Keto is that the paradox doesn't come up as much if you're pursuing the healthier kind of happiness. You know, when I was thinking about this initially, I was like, ah, this is such a modern idea, this idea of happiness. You know, this pursuit of happiness is something that I'm sure they didn't care about in the Middle Ages when they were struggling to eat. They weren't worried about, you know, maximizing their sense of joy and aspiration to live the good life. And then I was sort of struck by the fact that this has been something very human for a very long time.

Yeah, I mean, I think we have cared about happiness for as long as we've been humans and could reflect on our own emotions and reflect on the state of being a human, what it means to be a human.

“But I think culture is really shift how we think about what we should be doing, right?”

So I think if you look at most of human history, sorry, I'm going to nerd out and do like a nerd out happiness history lesson. Okay, this is great.

You know, I think even Shakespeare said, "Happ what happened? May" or something like that, right?

“It's like, it's just luck. You might get a bolder might fall on your head or it might not, but you can't control that, right?”

That is for most of human history how we thought about happiness. Like it's good if you get it, but like you can't do anything about it. Then we get to the classic Greeks, right? Folks like Aristotle and others. And they had a slightly different view. They also thought, you know, it's, it's, it's got a lot to do with luck and so on, but you can actually go for it. If you try to build up your virtue, if you try to go for that eudaimonic happiness, then you will get closer to it. You might not. You might not get there, right? The happier, the happier you, but you can try.

I think we had that classic notion for a long time until we get to more of the modern day, until we get to the 18th century. And how is where a few things started to change? And these really interesting ways, right?

One is a, is the first time where we're not having all the, like, middle ages stuff that you were just talking about, right?

This is less, 18th century again, a little less pestilence, a little less terrible stuff going on.

“Life is starting to feel more controllable, like even in really stupid ways, right? They could control the smoke that was coming out of their chimneys.”

They made bedding that was, like, a little bit softer. They had better lighting and their houses, right? Better food, right? It started to feel like, oh, I can, it's reasonable to think I might be able to control my hedonic happiness, because I've seen some evidence that my actions can do that. And at the same time, you get cultural changes that fit with this, right? This is around the science e-time of, like, Isaac Newton and others.

We're learning, like, objects just move in certain ways, you know, gravity pushes objects towards one another.

Scientists are also starting to think, well, what does that mean for humans? Oh, we're, we move towards pleasure and away from pain. These are, like, Jeremy Bentham type arguments about this stuff. So ideas like, oh, we're built to seek out pleasure, like, this, this is a thing we should go for. So, yeah, so I think every generation has wanted to feel happy. I mean, I think, you know, Bentham was right. We are built to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but the cultural context in which we think about that can be different over time.

We are in the notion of, like, it looks maxing, you know, like getting all your pleasure right now, and, you know, spa pedicures and this kind of stuff.

“I think we really just definitely think of happiness as about Mimi, Mimi.”

And so much of the science and so much of this classic wisdom tells us, no, it's not. Like, that's the way you get off track. That's the way you pursue it in the wrong way. All right, so that brings us to what we deal with today. Yes. And I really want to focus on social connection because the pandemic, I think, showed us that if you don't have it, you're really really going to suffer in ways that were perhaps not clear. And I have been trying to figure out what happened to me during that period, honestly, I became a lot more insular.

And I had to sort of relearn how to make those social connections after that period. Am I typical? Yeah, no studies bear this out. Pretty much every survey I know of the ask people about COVID, like, was it smooth sailing when you jump back into it before, like, no, right, there was some friction to this. We kind of got out of practice from it. And that makes sense because even though we're built to be social, right, even though in some sense this should be easy, social connections hard, right, there's another mind there that you're trying to like navigate and predict and you don't often get direct access to it.

So it is clunky and it does have some friction. That friction is one of the reasons that, you know, as a professor whenever I go into the dining hall, I'm shocked at how few of my students are just talking to one another. This is something professors remark about now when I walk into my classroom, say a seminar room where all my students are sitting around a table. They're not chatting with one another. They're all on a screen looking at it. And I think the problem for them is there's like, there's a little bit of friction, like it's hard to get that going.

And when you didn't do it for, you know, a year or a year and a half, however long it was, yeah, it got harder. You were simply out of practice from it. And I actually think that this is one of the reasons that our young people, I mentioned my students are so lonely right now, is I think just like over their developmental time, they just had less practice at it. Like the modern world is taking away all these subtle ways that we talked to one another. One of my favorite articles that looked at this was by the talking heads front me on David Bern.

He wrote this article kind of professionally. I think this is back in the 2010s called eliminating the human. And his idea was like, if you look at what pretty much every technology is done, it's taken away the human. From something as simple as like, we go to the ATM now. We don't have to talk to a teller. We don't go to a record store and talk with people about records to get our music. We just have an algorithm deliver it to us.

And I think we forget like the subtle ways that this keeps coming up. What do you think AI's going to do? Because they really are trying to eliminate the human. Yeah, no, it's going to get way worse because the friction of talking to an LM.

“I mean, we're already seeing this isn't there. The LLM is there whenever you want to talk, right?”

If you're feeling up at two in the morning, you can say that. The LLM is really not judging. You know, if anything, the current iteration, when you and I are having this conversation, we're learning our two-cycophantic, right? They can almost create cognitive delusions in people. But yet, that is what our young people are turning to. I just had Gene Twengie, the kind of technology specialist on our podcast, who's talked a lot about phones.

And she's really shifting to the dangers of AI. One of her data points is just how many young people, and we're talking like 12, 13-year-olds,

are having their first relationship with an LLM.

But their first boyfriend and girlfriend is an LLM. And so what's the friction going to look like when they have to ask a real human out on a day? Navigate a sexual consent conversation with a real other human with preferences and so on. Yeah, I think AI is going to change this in ways that are likely to make it worse. It creates this cycle where it becomes harder and harder to overcome that little friction to talk to someone.

Yeah, I mean, my daughter asked me recently, how do you start a conversation with strangers? How do you go up to someone that you don't know and just start to talk to them? And of course, that's a function of their age and that's totally normal. I mean, they're learning how to interact in the world. But I also realize how much harder it is totally.

To do that nowadays, because you're not only interrupting maybe a social dynamic, you're also interrupting people's interaction with their devices. And I noticed that in my own family because she comes up to me and I'm on my phone.

And I feel annoyed sometimes.

“I'm like, I'm in the middle of reading, can't you see?”

Yeah. And so all these cues that it's appropriate to talk to someone, right? That they're making eye contact with you. They're smiling with you. That doesn't happen when your eyes are glued to your phone.

And they're such interesting research on this. Liz Dunno is a professor at the University of British Columbia as a study I love. She puts people in a waiting room, strangers in a waiting room. And just either has them have access to their phones or not. And she just measures a really creative, dependent variable,

which is how often they spontaneously smile at each other. You're sitting there, you just look over in smile. 30% decrease in smiling. No. Yes.

Multiply that by what's happening on the streets of New York, right? What's happening in New York? Let's not use New York.

People are never smiling in New York.

Well, it's happening in Boston. It happens in Boston. I mean, what's happening at your own dinner table, right? Where your daughter is about to tell you something about your day, but your eyes are glued to your phone, right?

“And you should talk to about it all the time.”

Yeah. And you just don't notice, right? And, you know, we're not like harsh on people for their phones. Like they're built to be interesting. They're built to have every interesting thing in the history of the universe.

But the consequence of our eyeballs being glued to them is really dangerous. It dangerous for the social connections we care about most. I mean, this speaks to the wider situation in which we find ourselves. Because I was looking at some data from 2012 to now. And there was a recent report by the American Enterprise Institute that shows that across all age groups,

people are now socializing with their neighbors less. And the authors blame a lot of things like technology, political polarization, post-pandemic issues. But do you think we've just become sort of as a nation in door cats instead of outdoor cats? Like we just have lost the ability to roam in the wild? Yeah, I mean, I think there's something to that.

And this is something that scholars have been worried about for a while, right? We wind the late '90s early 2000s. And you have Robert Putnam's, like, seminal book on bowling alone. Where he argued, like, back in the day, we'd go out to bowling alleys. And people would bowl with their friends and bowl together and bowl with leagues.

Nowadays, nowadays being early 2000s, nowadays people just go and they bowl alone. They're not part of a league. They're not talking to their neighbors. They just talked to their immediate friends. I talked with Robert Putnam for my podcast. And he had this interesting idea of, like, I wrote that before the internet was in baby days.

We didn't know that viral TikTok videos were coming, right? We didn't know that there was television, which he was worried about, right? That's one of the factors he talked about. But we didn't know there was going to be, like, streaming services that picked algorithms to get you exactly the best documentary. The only you who would love, right?

We're fighting against technology that makes stuff interesting and attractive. Like, their whole companies that are built to keep our eyeballs on that stuff. Of course, regular social connection with my friend at the bowling alley might suffer. Like, in the face of that kind of competition.

But I think a lot of people feel like they don't have time for that in between work and caretaking.

They don't feel like they've got time anymore for those kinds of labor-intensive social connections. Yeah, and this is something that social scientists are also really clued into.

“I think one of the coolest bits of work coming out of modern-day social science is on this concept of what's called time affluence.”

This is a lovely work by Ashley Williams at Harvard Business School. Time affluence is feeling wealthy and time.

It's not how much of objective time you have, but it's the subjective sense that you just have free time for yourself.

It's the opposite of what so many people listening right now. I'm guessing our experiencing, which is what's called time famine, where you're literally starving for time. And this term famine, I think, works physiologically because when we feel like we don't have enough time, it's almost like famine increases inflammation. It does all these bad things to our body, but there's lots of work showing that it does bad things to our social connection. You just prime people to think about times.

I call it just do these in these cheesy ways where you unscramble words and all the words you're about times. You're kind of implicitly thinking about time. And then you just look at how many people folks talk to in a coffee shop and what you find is that they talk to less people when they're feeling like they don't have any time.

“And so I think this time crisis that of course is worth saying is worse for marginalized people and people who don't have enough income and are worried about putting food on the table.”

That crisis is linked to the loneliness crisis. That crisis is linked to the fact that we don't have a lot of social connection. Let me ask you though, is the time crisis real? Because I sometimes think about where I choose to spend my time. And it's not in making the effort to go out and join a club. It's in watching a Netflix show sitting on my sofa or bed rotting as it's called on social media.

Yes.

The way to quote unquote relax when it's really not that relaxing at all and I always feel much better when I actually make the effort to go out and make a connection.

“But is there time crisis real or is it manufactured just by our bad choices?”

Yeah, I'm going to say yes and on that one, right? Yes in this sense that if you look to other countries that allow people to have a little bit more time affluence. I'm thinking of like the Netherlands, a lot of these countries that come up like very high on the happiness list and Scandinavia and so on. They, you know, have a 35 hour work week. So people have time to do stuff with their friends and what you find is that in those countries Denmark in particular club membership is huge. People have like, you know, they're a record ball club and I don't think they pull that much.

I don't know what Boeing and Denmark, but that is like they're joining their joiners right they be in part because they have time structurally we've set it up so that they have time. I think that does matter and I think if we set things up structurally to have more time in the US maybe with a four day work week with people like Juliet sure have shown us like, you know, by all accounts is happiness inducing good for companies and so on. I think we could get there right so I think there, there's something about the time crisis that is real there are structural factors that are stealing our time but.

If you look at the data what you find is that people today interestingly actually have more free time than they did 15 20 years ago this is again Ashley Williams lovely work right doesn't feel like it really does not really does not and there's a reason it doesn't feel like it which is that the amount of time we have the kind of blocks of time have shifted. They've turned into what the journalist Bridget Shult has called time confetti he's five minutes one year you know if our conversation ends a little early or ten minutes when your kid falls asleep a little unexpectedly quickly you know some work meeting ends is not a big chunk it's little chunks we have more time because we have more of those little chunks but those little chunks don't feel like a lot of time so what do we do with the little chunks I know what I do before I knew about this research I check my email I scroll something quick on Instagram right like I look at something dumb on my phone.

Right I don't do any of the things that would make me use those free to five minutes ten minutes in like a positive way and that gets to your point right which is it in practice we do actually have free time it's just like we're not using it that well the other thing I hear a lot of people say about why they don't interact more socially is that they enjoy being alone you know they interact with people all day for work or they. They you know have to be in complicated social dynamics in other spaces and so they just.

Prefer their downtime to be more calm or peaceful I do sometimes wonder if people are just kidding themselves though and if that's not a real thing. Well, there's actually some lovely new work on this on this topic by McKayla Rodriguez so I'm excited to say isn't going to be my new colleague yet her work focuses on this flip side of the loneliness crisis.

Those folks were into contemplation they were into solitude they were into the benefits of like having the time and the bandwidth to notice what's going on with yourself to think to be bored all these things.

They knew that there was some benefits to being alone to alone time second things she worried is like.

We know from so much literature and psychology that your perspective on things what psychologists call your construal but this is basically how you frame something that affects how you experience it.

“You know if I'm a student who's like alone in the dining hall and I sit down and I think oh my gosh this is my me time I can contemplate I can think of what what's going on or I can kind of gather my thoughts before I go to class.”

That's great but if you're seat and everything that social scientists like me have been saying it's like this is the loneliness crisis look at you you're sitting in the dining hall by yourself. You can feel crappy right you're going to judge yourself you're going to have all those nasty meta emotions that we talked about before. And Michaela was like there's something damaging about this narrative and we need to bring back the idea that contemplation might be helpful. And so she's been doing all these studies first showing that yes really hearing all this bad stuff about loneliness having a negative construal about being alone makes it worse.

But she also finds that if you have the right construal lots of benefits to solitude great time to emotionally regulate right if you've been having really terrible week at work. You kind of need that night alone maybe not to kind of Netflix but just to get your bandwidth about you just to have a tea say with your cat process right like that helps you get back on track when you're feeling overwhelmed or anxious or so on. So I don't think we necessarily want to justify it fully right pretty much every available study of happy people suggest that happy people have some strong relationships but that doesn't mean.

Be in social connection all the time we can also enjoy and really positively use our alone time. After the break I asked Dr. Santos if the trouble that some young people have socializing has anything to do with their parents. I can't tell you how many parents like are proactively trying to prevent their kids from screwing up which on the one hand yeah you don't want your kids to screw up but oh my gosh is screwing up such a wonderful teacher. [Music] Hey I'm Robert Vinlon from New York Times Games and I'm here talking to people about where to and the where to archive. Do you all play where to?

I played every day. I have something exciting to show you. This is new. It's the where to archive. Wow. Okay that's awesome.

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What day would you pick? Let's go back to my birthday. My first guess is going to be birth because it's my birthday. What made you guys do an archive? It's one of our most requested features.

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Oh cool. Now you can do yesterday's wordle. If you missed it. Thanks so much for coming by and I can also play. New York Times Games subscribers can now access the entire wordle archive.

Find out more at nwytimes.com/games.

My default words always bread.

Why? I like bread. I want to focus on young people because all the sort of happiness reports show that happiness for young people has really cratered. Is there something different going on with Gen Z?

Are they sort of a different generation? Or are they just facing a more extreme version then perhaps other younger generations have felt? I think they're both different and not. I feel like I'm hedging too much on your tough questions.

But no yes I know right? One of my upcoming episodes of my podcast has an interview with Alexis Reading.

“Who's a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education?”

And she happened upon these very fascinating data sets of mental health interviews

with Harvard students from the 1970s that were never published.

They were actually just lying around in some attic somewhere and she found them. And she went to these interesting interviews from the 1970s thinking the following thing. Oh my god. This is great. We have a treasure trove of direct evidence of how these kids from, you know,

my parents' parents' generation are different than the kids of today. And she went through and she analyzed it and she found there's absolutely no difference. What? There's no difference. If you look at the things they're saying, they could be my yel students in my office.

Oh my god. I just haven't studied from my orgartes. I don't know what I'm going to do. Like I just haven't been in a class. And like the test is today.

I'm just going to sit in bed and listen to music because I can't get out of bed. And I was like that is literally bedrock.

Another one was student saying like everyone in my generation just knows they're never going to get a job

because of technology. And I was like, oh my god. This is like, you know, like, many, 50 years before LLMs. What's going on? And so what's the story there?

“I think the story is a kind of yes and no story, right?”

It is the case that rates of depression, rates of anxiety, rates of suicidality. Those things are higher now than they have been. The like true clinical track of student suffering. That has gone up. We need to address that. We're not addressing it well right now.

But the garden variety, feeling lonely, feeling scared about your future. Like feeling worried about what's happening in classes. College students have been doing that for as long as they've been college students. And I think we as adults forget that. I want to take a little culpability here because I've seen you talk about something called

lawn mower parents.

And I'd never heard of this phrase before.

Is my generation of parents also to blame for how kids are dealing with social interactions that are hard? Um, probably, sorry, maybe, yes. So lawn mower parents. So most of our listeners probably have heard of helicopter parents.

Which is sort of parents that whenever there's trouble swoop in to kind of help. You know, your kid, for I guess they're backpacked to their soccer game. You drive home and you go get it. You know, they're having trouble at school. You go in and talk to the teacher, right?

The lawn mower parenting is like a even worse step of that. Where the idea, the metaphor is that you're mowing the lawn to make everything flat. So you kids don't trip. You're like getting rid of the weeds that could get in the way of anything. And I definitely see this with my yellow parents, right?

Who are, you know, checking, calling to make sure their kids are getting into their right classes. Um, calling to complain about grades. I've had parents send me emails about a student's grade. Um, another one that I was shocked by, but is more common than you think, is parents who are their college students alarm clock.

Like, so, you know, if they have a big test, the parent will call and make sure they got up. You know, it's like, you know, there's not that not like they missed it. We're just kind of making sure, just checking into make sure. And those things are well-intentioned, right? Like parents have to care about how their kids are doing.

“I think parenting didn't used to be a verb, but like now it is a verb, right?”

You really have to actively take steps. But some of those steps are removing the friction, the high grass that's there.

That's an essential teacher for kids developing social connection,

for kids developing the ability to get through conflict. Um, for them screwing up, right? I can't tell you how many parents like are proactively trying to prevent their kids from screwing up, which on the one hand, yeah, you don't want your kids to screw up. But, oh my gosh, screwing up, such a wonderful teacher.

You know, if I had to think about the things that taught me how to do things differently in life, oh my gosh, screwing up teaches me way more than somebody doing it for me. Let me ask you something that might be connected or might not. Is there anything about our happiness that you think is uniquely American? Oh, for sure.

I mean, we're such weirdos. That's the happiness. I mean, we're really into happiness, first of all. Um, you know, we care a lot about it. And that means that we tend to have more of that paradox of pursuing happiness that we talked about before,

this idea that when you go for happiness, the more you go for happiness, the more unlikely you are to get it. Um, and this is one of the things I find most fascinating about Iris Mouse is research. She's actually, she works at UC Berkeley, but she's a turbine.

“And I think one of the things that drew her to this work is that, you know,”

she'll claim that like Germans have just like a different relationship with the pursuit of happiness than Americans do. And there's some data on this. You know, there's studies that have analyzed, for example, like condolences, cards in Germany and other parts of Europe and the US. And what they find is that, you know, all of them mentioned grief and something, but like the German cards stop there.

They're like, you know, an deepest sadness or something. Where's the American greeting cards are kind of like, but, you know, silver lining. They're in a better place or something. And she's like the German stuff to stop at what? It's like somebody died and you're sad, just like, be cool with it.

So, I think Americans are kind of weirdos when it comes with happiness. You know, it's also focused on like optimizing, right? And this feels like very right now. This feels very TikTok, but, you know, this is something, again, Americans were thinking about for a long time, right?

Like rewind to the early 19th century. And you have scholars like Alexis de Tocqueville, right? It was his French scholar who came over to the US as like this anthropological experiment. Like, what's going on with the new country? And what he remarked about was that like, Americans weren't just constantly pursuing happiness,

but they were like, never satisfied with it, right? He had this phrase or something like, they know, Americans were like, make a house.

Because they really want to like, make sure it's even better than it was before.

“And I think it was just this like kind of obsession with going after stuff and optimizing that was there.”

Even back then. And my guess is, you know, to talk full show up today. So go around and be like, oh man, this is even worse now. It's funny you mentioned this because I've noticed that there's a lot of interest in your work from what I'd call productivity dudes. Oh yeah.

People who are obsessed with really practical tips and clear cut answers for how to always be improving.

You know, like, always be getting better. And I've heard you tell them things like, the science backs up that your employees will be more productive if they're happier. Do you have misgivings about productivity and this idea of optimization? Yeah. No, I think a couple of things there.

Yes, I definitely have misgivings as the answer. But I think one of the things that we have to pay attention to is like, how we're optimizing. Again, we're trying to optimize in many cases for like happiness. But another thing I worry about with the kind of productivity culture is that we're like just never going to get there. I recently interviewed Oliver Burkebin from my podcast to this kind of productivity expert.

You know, he was a review like time performance apps and so on.

And he had this realization which is like, it's never going to be enough.

I could get the perfect app and it's never going to be enough. I'm still a finite human. There's still too much stuff to do. Like this fantasy that I have about eventually optimizing my schedule is just going to be a fantasy. Like we're just never going to get there.

And one of the ways you can productivity hack is to have radical acceptance about that. There's always going to be too much stuff. You're never going to be perfect. Like it's always going to be hard. And we can just give us some else have some grace and just radically accept that.

“It's not the usual move for the productivity hack bros, right?”

Like self compassion, realizing your limits, like recognizing your common humanity. But it's what the data suggests leads you to happiness. And perhaps given all those data on, you know, if you're happy or you produce more and so on, might actually lead you to more productivity, too. Let me ask you though, because I can hear a productivity bro.

I hate to use that term necessarily. I get a lot of freedom. Non-bros. Non-bros. Yeah.

But productivity people or just people who are interested in economics and say actually the foundation of the American experiment.

The foundation of our uniqueness and our power economically comes from what Dutokville saw back then, which is this idea of always being more perfect.

A more perfect union. Yeah. But we can improve ourselves and make ourselves better. And that in work we find joy. And we can find this, you know, kind of, Miracle economic experiment.

And that Europe is stagnant. And that, you know, is maybe happier than us, but certainly not as productive. Yeah. I think there has to be a balance here.

“And I think the problem with American societies that we may have pushed ourselves into the point of being so burned out that we're no longer being productive, right?”

And this might be the position that I sit, right? I see a lot of my students who, you know, to get into Ivy League school like you have worked incredibly hard to get there. But they show up and they have incredibly high rates of depression and incredibly high rates of anxiety and incredibly high rates of burnout. A lot of students say that they're miserable that they got there. I think we can shoot for a little bit more balance. And the reason I think that is that so many studies show prioritizing your social connection, prioritizing your sleep, giving yourself rest, right?

Those are things that make you more productive, right? Even if all you care about is what the economist might care about, the capital is bottom line, right? We want, I don't know, higher GDP or get into the perfect school or whatever your bottom line is. Most of the time you get to that bottom line better if you give yourself a break, if you take some time off. Yeah, and you know, we've been talking about sort of people go to Yale, people who are in demanding, perhaps office jobs.

But of course there's the structural inequality that comes from American society where people are having to work two or three jobs just to make ends meet, plus raising families, et cetera, et cetera. And I guess that feeds into the lack of a social safety net and all the other things that you see in other places, where the same holds true no matter where you fall on the income scale, right? Yeah, no, I think a couple things there. One of the reasons that countries like Denmark and so on are happy is because they have those social safety nets, right?

It's one of the reasons people can pick careers that they like your tax so heavily that doesn't pay you to be like a finance bro because you're going to get taxed anyways. So you're like, well, you know, being artists, if I want to be an artist, our might as well be a teacher, right? There's the lack of income inequality means people have an excuse to follow their purpose of what they really care about, which can allow people to feel like their life is better.

you should gauge in social connection or you should write in a gratitude journal or meditate and people think that, well,

don't we also have to have social safety net? And I'm like, yeah, of course, like this is a yes and situation, right? Like all these individual things that I'm suggesting are supposed to complement not substitute the stuff that we should really be doing. But another thing we know about individual action is that it just makes us more productive. It gives us emotional bandwidth and that can mean the resilience we need to fight for stuff.

“I think people mistakenly think that these individuals strategies sometimes build up the resilience you need to just like put up with being in a bad society.”

But I think the real goal of them is to give you the resilience to like fight the bad society. And there's data on this. I'm Constantine Kushleff who's at Georgetown as this lovely paper that he talks about the Polyana hypothesis, which is this idea.

Like, it would just make people happy.

They're going to be like this Dulu, Polyana, walking around like everything's great. Like all these structures of inequality, like I'm cool with that because like fine, right? And his point in running the paper is like, well, that's hypothesis about how human nature works. Hypothesis like, you make people happy. They're just going to ignore the structural stuff. And what he finds is just the opposite.

If you look at people who are taking action to fix structural problems, he does this in the domain of like climate concern. And also he's running this around the times of black lives matter and so who goes to a protest and so on.

He finds that like it's the people who have the highest positive emotion that people with the best mental health that are ones that are going and trying to fix stuff.

“It goes back to where we started our conversation around the udomonic sense of like, how do you become happy and how do you find meaning?”

Exactly. And getting back to the American experiment, right? Like, this was what the forefathers met. They had problems, right? The forefathers were filled with people who are not focused on everybody's e-digmonic happiness. Those unalienable rights are for a landed white dudes and not for everybody, but in their idealistic sense,

what they were trying to go for is that e-digmonic sense of happiness. It was about civic virtue. It was about making everybody happy and that was the happiness they thought we should all be pursuing. Laurie Santos, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks so much for having me on the show.

That's Dr. Laurie Santos. Her podcast is called The Happiness Lab. This conversation was produced by Seth Kelly. It was edited by Paula Newdorf, mixing by Sophia Landman. Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lzano.

Photography by Phillip Montgomery. The rest of the team is Priyamathu. White Orm, Joe Bill Mignos, Alejandro Soto-Goico, Kathleen O'Brien and Brooke Mentors. Our executive producer is Allison Benedict. Next week, David talks to Rafael Warnock, the junior senator from Georgia about the Supreme Court's recent decision on voting rights.

“I think that this Supreme Court has committed violence against our whole...”

...the ways in which ordinary people can have a voice in our system. I'm Lou the Garcia Navarro, and this is the interview from The New York Times. I'm Gilbert Cruz. This week, on the Book Review podcast, our monthly book club meets to talk about Ben Learner's new novel Transcription. It's really, really hard.

His 2014 book made the Times's best hundred books in the 21st century list, so whenever Ben Learner puts out something new, it's an event, and it's something that needs to be discussed. We could talk about this book all day. Listen to the book review wherever you get your podcasts.