Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Laurie Santos:

I think we as laypeople kind of get happiness wrong, and I think that leads to lots of misconceptions. I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion all on all the time. Often very high arousal, positive emotion, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Dr. Laurie Santos, she’s the Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology and Head of Silliman College at Yale University. She teaches psychology and the good life, a course on finding happiness and fulfillment that quickly became the most popular class at Yale in over 300 years. Dr. Santos also hosts the podcast, The Happiness Lab, and offers an online version of a Yale course titled The Science of Well-Being. We discuss what happiness really means and how to achieve it, why negative emotions are crucial to the equation, how job crafting can bring purpose to any career, the parenting paradox and so much more. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Q&A

Now. Let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Andrea who asks, “As we approach the end of the year, what’s been your favorite stay tuned episode in 2024?” Now, Andrea, you’re kind of killing me. I’m tempted to say that I love all my children equally, and by children, I mean all my fantastic guests. So I can’t really pick one, but let me make a couple of observations. I’ve begun to really love having regular guests on the show, people who come on from time to time that I think are smart, honest, candid and thoughtful and don’t always say what’s predictable. Some of our regular guests who are favorites of mine, Ian Bremmer, Evan Osnos, George Packer, Mark Leibovich. There’s so many other people I could mention, dozens and dozens of amazing guests who were experts in their field and have great conversations and impart a lot of knowledge, not just to you by the way, but to me, I learn a lot in every single episode.

But probably if I had to pick the category of guests who I love the most, I think I got to say it’s the historians, people like Michael Beschloss, Douglas Brinkley, but even within the category of historian, no offense to those fine and smart gentlemen, the women historians probably are my favorite. The episodes with Doris Kearns Goodwin and Joanne Freeman are among my absolute favorites from the year. Now, do me a favor, tell me what your favorite episode was or maybe you have a couple of favorite episodes. Write to us at letters@cafe.com. Really curious to hear. This question comes in an email from Sandra, “Hey Preet, any New Year’s resolutions?”

Now, I will say that it’s a couple of weeks away from New Year’s, and I am a procrastinator and I don’t intend to vow or resolve not to continue to procrastinate. That’s not on the list. So I don’t really have fully formed articulated resolutions yet, but I’ve been thinking about it as some people do. I can offer something of a preview. I think one thing that I want to resolve to do, and I think I’ve already resolved to do it somewhat this year, but even more, is to kind of be chill. What does that mean? I’m not exactly sure what that means other than to say there are a lot of things that make us upset, angry, unhappy.

You’ll be hearing me talk about a lot of those things with my guest today, and I think for long-term happiness and sanity and effectiveness in the battles that you wage, whether it’s in a courtroom or in the public square or in politics or at the ballot box, I think continuing to try to be calm and precise and smart instead of loud and obnoxious and angry always wins. So I’m going to try to do more of that. And then second, on a personal level, this is a much more common resolution people make is to care about and think more about my own health and the health of the people around me. As I get older and as I see people in my family, including my parents age, I realize more than I ever have before how important your health is. So that’s another resolution to take care of that a lot more than I have in the past.

This question comes in an email from Barbara who writes, “Hello.” Well, hello Barbara. Barbara writes, “I thoroughly enjoy and learn much from your various podcasts. This question is for Preet Bharara.” That’s me. “Doesn’t the speech or debate clause of the Constitution protect the members of the January 6th select committee from retribution by the incoming administration? If not, why not? Thank you so much, Barbara.” So first of all, Barbara, congratulations and kudos for calling it the speech or debate clause, which is how it appears in the Constitution. Lots and lots of people call it speech and debate, so you’ve already earned points with your pedantic friend Preet.

So what is the speech or debate clause for those who may not be familiar? Well, article one, section six of the Constitution says that, “For any speech or debate in either house, senators and representatives shall not be questioned in any other place,” in quote. So the clause is meant to protect the integrity of legislative process by granting members of Congress immunity from prosecution for any and all legislative acts. Now, as the name of the clause suggests, legislative acts include speech and debate, but it’s also been interpreted to extend well beyond that to other things that are in the natural course of the duties of a member of Congress. For example, acts like hearings and voting. Now, your question refers to the January 6th committee, which is you’ll recall was made up of members of the House of Representatives to investigate the January 6th insurrection.

One person singled out for ire by Donald Trump and other members of her party is Liz Cheney. Trump has been on something of a rampage about Liz Cheney over and over and over again, and this week the complaining got even louder when the Chairman of the House Administration’s Oversight Committee, Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia made some statements, he’s alleging that Liz Cheney quote, “Tampered with at least one witness Cassidy Hutchinson by secretly communicating with Hutchinson without her attorney’s knowledge,” and there are a few other allegations as well. Now, all those things, putting aside this speech or debate clause that immunity provision established in the Constitution, these are fact-specific determinations. You’ll remember that there was a lot of sort of interesting back and forth over whether Cassidy Hutchinson got the lawyer of her choosing whether she reached out to Liz Cheney and members of the committee before they reached out to her.

So it’s not clear at all, not only that there was potentially a crime committed, but even something untoward or improper. We’ll see where that comes out. But I do think that as you point out, the speech or debate clause will have a really, really powerful effect on whether or not any criminal case can be brought. It doesn’t stop, members of that committee, Loudermilk’s committee or other committees from having hearings and complaining and putting out reports and having press conferences. But if the question is, can a member of Congress be held accountable criminally for things that were done in the course of actual duties, that’s a very, very tough uphill battle.

Each week I invite listeners to write to us with their questions. Now I want to switch the roles and ask you our listeners a question. As we reflect on 2024, a year which has been marked by uncertainty, chaos and certainly surprises. I want to know what’s one moment or experience that gave you a sense of clarity and perspective, what reminded you of what truly matters? Write to us at letters@cafe.com. Your response may be included in our email newsletter. As always, we truly look forward to hearing from you. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos.

THE INTERVIEW

What does it take to be happy? Happiness Scientist Dr. Laurie Santos joins me to discuss. Professor Laurie Santos, welcome to the show.

Laurie Santos:

Thanks so much for having me on.

Preet Bharara:

I’m very happy to have you on.

Laurie Santos:

I know.

Preet Bharara:

Do you see what I did there?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, it’s fun.

Preet Bharara:

So I have a lot of questions. As I told you before we hit the record button, we’re coming to the end of the year. Lots of people have issues that they care about politically, socially, or otherwise. The holidays are a tough time for a lot of folks because people have experienced loss. We’ve had that in my family and a lot of families. So there are things to deal with and the future’s uncertain and there seems to be a greater amount of worry and concern and depression and loneliness. So you are a perfect guest to have as our last episode of the year, that was 2024. Could we start with an understanding of what we mean or at least what you mean when you teach your class, when you write about these issues, what do you mean by happiness?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, I’m glad we started there because I think we as laypeople kind of get happiness wrong and I think that leads to lots of misconceptions.

Preet Bharara:

Unhappiness?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, lots of unhappiness. I mean, I think we assume that happiness is about positive emotion on all the time, often very high arousal, positive emotion, but that’s not really what we’re talking about. I mean, the social scientist definition of happiness is really thinking about the happiness that you experience in your life and with your life. This sort of definition I like. So the happiness you experience in your life is the set of positive emotions you have. So it’s your sense of joy, your sense of laughter, and the ratio of those positive emotions to negative emotions. Things like anger, frustration, sadness. Being happy doesn’t necessarily mean you get rid of all those negative emotions, but it means ideally that ratio between the positive ones and the not so positive ones is pretty decent. So that’s kind of being happy in your life.

But being happy with your life is how you think your life is going. It’s your answer to the question, all things considered, am I satisfied with my life? And social scientists use this definition because it kind of encompasses this, what they often call the affective and the cognitive parts of happiness. So the kind of emotional parts of happiness, how you feel in your life, but also the cognitive parts, how you think your life is going. And the best case scenario is that we find strategies, behaviors, mindset, shifts and so on that can boost both of those at the same time.

Preet Bharara:

I guess my question is how do they interact with each other don’t and they overlap?

Laurie Santos:

They overlap a bunch, but I think it’s worth noting that there are times in our life and maybe people that we know where we see those two parts of happiness dissociating. I mean, I think maybe on the show you’ve interacted with folks who have every hedonic pleasure in their life, kind of getting positive motion all the time, but maybe they’re experiencing a lack of meaning or don’t know what their life is about. I think I’m often called upon to these events with very rich people where I sometimes see they’re kind of going through that, lots of hedonic pleasure, but kind of a lack of meaning.

Preet Bharara:

So can you just for the record, define and then give examples of hedonic pleasure?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

We don’t say hedonic a lot on this podcast.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, no, it’s true. So hedonic pleasure is just kind of like the hedonism kinds of things that you experience in life.

Preet Bharara:

For example-

Laurie Santos:

Drinking the best wine, sleeping in comfy things.

Preet Bharara:

Like how about a Hershey’s Bar?

Laurie Santos:

A Hershey’s bar I think is a strong… I think people would quibble about whether that’s the best hedonic pleasure chocolate. A Hershey’s fan myself, so-

Preet Bharara:

It was what was available in the cafeteria.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, exactly. Popping into a Hershey’s bar is kind of experiencing that moment of hedonic pleasure. Probably it will give you a little mini boost of positive emotion, but if that was it without a sense of purpose-

Preet Bharara:

Well, it did. It worked for me prior to the show. So explain something else so that we understand what we’re measuring. So if you asked me the question, and I’m very lucky and I think I’m a generally happy person. Am I happy in my life? I am. Am I happy with my life? I sure am. There are moments that I’m unhappy, so catch me on a day that things are not going well or there’s something wrong with my kids, not happy. But that’s not what you mean. So when the question is asked, are you or are you not unhappy? Over what time period? Is it that day? What’s the snapshot value versus overall or how you felt last week? How do you think about that?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, researchers use different time horizons on that. How are you feeling in your life right now? That could be literally right now. We’re having this conversation, you just had that chocolate bar, how are you feeling right now. Often it’s done in the last week, self-report, these positive emotions. But the idea is that what we’re trying to get at is a kind of on average, how are you feeling? And I think that first one, how you’re feeling in your life, that one tends reasonably, I think to move around a little bit more with the circumstances. You just had the chocolate bar, you might be feeling a little happier in your life, but hopefully the chocolate bar isn’t necessarily changing all things considered how satisfied are you with your life, that one tends to be a little unstable.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s say I get on the scale tomorrow and I really didn’t need, or in my higher order brain function, didn’t need the 26 grams of carbs. And let’s say I’m not happy with the scale the next day. How should I think about the fact that I had the chocolate bar the day before? How do we think about delayed gratification and its relationship to happiness?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, this is an important philosophical question, and when we talk about maximizing happiness, we have to ask the question in some ways, whose happiness are we maximizing? And I think we often think about the case that you’re bringing up, which is you today is eating this high carb chocolate bar that might make you tomorrow kind of sad. This is cases of what’s often called sort of temporal discounting. We discount us in the future and we kind of give in to temptation now.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, that’s a different guy. Tomorrow’s guy is-

Laurie Santos:

That’s a different guy.

Preet Bharara:

… a totally different guy.

Laurie Santos:

Tomorrow Laurie is a totally different… But interestingly, happiness researchers also talk about the other problem, which is if it’s myopic to kind of screw over your future self, you can think of cases of what you might call hyperopia. And by that I mean many of us have that really nice bottle of wine that’s been sitting on the shelf for that perfect day or those frequent flyer miles that are adding up for the perfect time to take a vacation. Or me, I think women have this, there’s these spa products. I buy this nice bath bomb or this candle that I’m going to use on the perfect night when I have time. And then the bottle of wine, the frequent flyer miles, all these things kind of expire over time because we haven’t gotten around to them. And so I think for happiness, we also have worry about these cases of hyperopia too. Are we really messing up the happiness that we could be experiencing now because we’re so worried about the future that we wind up not maximizing overall?

Preet Bharara:

Well, so that’s very important question. And I have a personal anecdote in which what you just said resonates a lot. I got married 25 years ago and we went to Italy and could barely afford, but we bought these nice bottles of red wine in Tuscany, Brunello di Montalcino, one of the great wines on planet earth. And we had a bunch left over and they sat in the wine fridge or in the cellar for years and years. And then I happened to be in Italy this year and I overheard someone at a wine tasting say, these Brunello’s are wonderful wines are the great wines. They last about 30 years. The wines that we had bought 25 years ago were themselves about five years old. So I realized we had these bottles of wine that we kept saving for some special day in the future. So at the first opportunity, we took a couple of bottles to good friends of ours and opened them and one of the bottles was ruined. So lesson learned, right?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. I mean that’s classic case of hyperopia, but I think it happens in these… The wine bottles are the really salient examples. It happens across decades. But how often are we checking our email or trying to squeeze one more work thing in when we’re not taking time to hang out with our kids or talk with our spouse. When we think back and our kid leaves home and we might think of those moments as precious even though they don’t feel kind of precious now. So I think in our kind of attempts to sort of well get ahead for a future me, we sometimes are screwing over present us in a way that we forget, but can really have a negative impact on our overall happiness over time.

Preet Bharara:

I guess in part it depends just thinking about ambitious people who want to succeed in their careers or people who are in the gym and they want to build muscle and they want to be better athletes or whatever the case may be. I don’t know that a lot of people experience happiness when they’re on the weight machine. Maybe they do because they want to be happy in their life, not just with their life to use your distinction. And for some people happiness in their life means being able to win that competition in sports or building muscle or being able to look better.

Or if you’re a professional, all that hard work and drudgery and pulling the all-nighter at the law firm or whatever the case may be in your particular profession in that dog-eat-dog world, you might not be happy with your life at that moment, but if it’s important to you to achieve a particular thing in the future, then how do you think about the unhappiness with your life at that moment? Is that actually the wrong way of looking at it because you’re actually in that example tending to your future self?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Well, I think there’s a real danger in putting our happiness in this sort of one event that comes up in the future. And I think this is something we all fall prey to. I’ll be happy when I make partner. I’ll be happy when I get married. For my Yale students, I’ll be happy when I get into medical school or get the perfect grade or something like that. This has been christened by social scientists as what’s called the arrival fallacy. I’ll be happy when I get to this point, but it turns out when social scientists actually go out and study what happens when you get that big accomplishment, get into the perfect school. And one famous case, they studied academics when they find out they got tenure, which is a big thing for academics, when you find out you get tenure. What you find is that the folks predicted that that moment would make them feel super happy and that the happiness they got from achieving that sort of thing would last for a really long time.

But what actually happens is that the happiness you get from that big moment isn’t as big as you thought. It’s like a little bit of a let down and it doesn’t last for nearly as long. I show my Yale students a big moment for them that I think where they fall prey to the arrival fallacy is when they find out they get into Yale. Some of these students in high school work so long and nowadays they put these little videos on YouTube, you can find them where they click on the link and find out they got into Yale and they scream and their parents scream in these videos and so on. And I show these little videos to my students in class and they kind of let out a little sigh when they see them because they remember that moment, but they remember the very next moment where they said-

Preet Bharara:

It doesn’t last.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, now I’m just chasing the next carrot. Now is Yale, but now it’s getting my Rhodes scholarship or getting into medical school and just the very next thing. And so I think this can be a problem when we’re chasing something, right? If we’re getting no happiness out of the chase, then it’s pretty miserable to be going after these things that we predict are going to feel great and feel great for a really long time, but they don’t wind up being as good as we expect.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you about this question in a different way. So I studied political theory in college and we’re required to read Aristotle as I’m sure that you are at Yale, who said, “It’s better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, which I think maybe goes to your point about hedonic pleasures and happiness.” How do you, given what you study and what you teach, think about that quote from Aristotle?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, well, I think on the one hand it’s actually really hard to ask a pig how happy they are. I wish we could write same surveys and kind of level the playing field.

Preet Bharara:

The human analog of a pig with lower order sensibilities, et cetera, et cetera.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, I mean, I think what Aristotle made a distinction between what we’ve been calling these hedonic pleasures, kind of the experience of positive emotion in your life with what he famously called eudaimonia, which is his word for the good life, by which I think he meant a life filled with purpose, a life filled with meaning, in some sense a good moral life. And I think for human beings, we’re really not going to feel that good about our life or be satisfied with it unless we have a sense of meaning, unless we have a sense of purpose. But again, it winds up being reciprocal. I think we predict that delicious bottle of wine will be the pleasure in my life, and it is, but so is doing really good in the world. So is volunteering for a cause that you care about, so is achieving something that you worked hard for? So is helping someone that really is in need.

These kinds of moral goods wind up boosting our sense of satisfaction with life, our sense of purpose, our eudaimonia, but at the same time, they’re sort of filled with much more positive emotion than I think we wind up predicting.

Preet Bharara:

So do you distinguish between someone who has low aspirations and low ambition and can be happier with less as compared to somebody who’s always striving for the next thing? Can you make a judgment? I’m thinking not about who’s living the better and happier life.

Laurie Santos:

Well, I think this is a spot where other ancient thinkers kind of weighed in. If you go back to the Buddha, he thought that one of the biggest causes of human suffering was wanting, was craving, was sort of just striving for the next thing. So it’s not to say that striving is bad, it’s just to say that that striving works best If we can in some sense enjoy the journey along the way, but when it’s really just going to feel good when we get to that next thing, just as we saw in examples we were giving before, that next thing immediately comes a new carrot that you’re going after. We just don’t get as much satisfaction out of arriving as we think. And so it’s not to say that we should all sit on our couches and eat bonbons for our whole lives because I think that’s not the path to eudaimonia either, but we need to balance our striving with a healthy respect for the journey.

This is something that Stanford social psychologists have called the journey mindset, which is like we got to find the joys along the way, and that really does seem to be the path to new life. Now you’re not falling prey to the arrival fallacy because the journey to that arrival moment is also feeling pretty good.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll come back to the journey, but here’s another study or poll that I see from time to time that is utterly fascinating to me, and it’s about the difference in that level of happiness reported by couples who have children and couples who don’t have children. So I have children, I will say as almost every parent I’ve ever met says that they’re the greatest source of joy and happiness in my life. I also say as parents say, “If you have an unhappy child, you cannot be happy fully.” And I can’t imagine, I’m speaking for me, being as happy as I am in my life or even with my life with the absence of those kids. And yet it’s always the case it seems in the studies that I see that as self-reported, couples who don’t have children are happier. Can you explain that and tell us what that means?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. This is what’s been referred to as sort of the parenting paradox, right? This idea that kids really kind of give us a sense of meaning. If I ask, “Hey, are you satisfied with your life? What are some things that make you satisfied with your life?” If you’re a parent, you’re going to say, probably my kids.

Preet Bharara:

Even though they also drive you batty and all that.

Laurie Santos:

But kids mess with the moment to moment happiness. So this kind of gets, I think, not even just being a regular parent, but rewind to the point when you had a newborn, I think that’s the biggest dissociation. You and your partner have just had a baby with your life. You are feeling amazing. You have this sense of meaning, this new person that you love, it’s great. But in your life there’s the dirty diapers, there’s the now not sleeping, there’s the colic or whatever it is. It just doesn’t feel good. And so I think that the parenting paradox really allows us to kind of zoom in on these different two aspects of happiness that sometimes we need to sacrifice our moment to moment happiness to find kind more meaning. That said, I think with parenting, especially with the new stresses of parenting, we might’ve swung a little too far in that direction.

The current, as you and I are having this conversation, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently just issued a Surgeon General’s Public Health Advisory, which is the kind of thing that Surgeon Generals release about smoking or the opioid epidemic and so on. And he released this about parental stress, in other words, being a parent in some sense like a public health crisis because parents are experiencing so much stress. And so I think we need to kind of as parents and as societies that support parents start thinking of, well, what can we do to help parents get back to that moment-to-moment happiness? Because again, there are methods we can use to do that a bit better, even though overall parenting might be a little bit of a hit on your hedonic pleasures and your moment-to-moment happiness. There are ways we can do it better. There are things we can do to reduce parent stress.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Dr. Laurie Santos after this. Excuse me, that some amount of happiness or satisfaction with your life depends on your environment. And if you get happiness from something that’s within yourself or that relates to something you can control, whether it’s your faith or a hobby or a life of the mind or hedonic pleasure, like a Hershey’s bar or a Cadbury bar or whatever, versus people who get satisfaction and enjoyment and pleasure and happiness or whatever synonym you want to use from their relationship to other people, what other people think about them.

And I think from my own prior career prosecuting people, it always is astonishing to me, and I talked about this a little bit with Tina Brown on my last podcast, that people who seem to have everything in life, good family, good education, good life, riches beyond measure, still are driven to commit crime to escalate themselves or elevate themselves into the next tier, in part because they’re just not happy having only a hundred million dollars, they need to have a billion dollars. And I’ve seen various examples of that. Is that just the old fashioned Keeping Up with the Joneses thing? Is it something more significant than that? Does science tell us anything about how to deal with it?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. One of the misconceptions we have about happiness is that it’s a lot due to our circumstances, how rich you are, whether you have a good family, this kind of stuff. And there’s something there. If you’re listening to this podcast right now and you don’t have enough money to put food on your table or keep a roof over your head, if you’re a refugee from your country, obviously changing your circumstances is probably going to materially affect the degree to which you experience positive emotion and the satisfaction that you get with your life, for sure. But for most of the people listening to this podcast right now who aren’t in a dire traumatic situation, turns out that changing your circumstances is not really going to affect your happiness as much as we think. You’d be much better off for example, just changing your internal state, changing your mindset and your behavior and so on.

That said, it is the case that our surroundings can influence our happiness at least a little bit. And we know this from these kind of classic studies of from the so-called World Happiness Report. So this is a group that works with the Gallup Poll organization that’s been doing long-term surveys of people’s happiness from over 200 countries from around the world. And what it tends to find is that there are some countries that tend to be a lot happier than others. So the Scandinavian countries are often quite high. Usually it’s a sort of race between whether Denmark or Norway or one of those countries is going to win.

Preet Bharara:

They’re so annoying those countries.

Laurie Santos:

Well, one the reasons they’re so-

Preet Bharara:

Those countries make me unhappy because they make me feel bad about happy this level.

Laurie Santos:

Feel well, it should make the folks in the U.S feel bad because we in the U.S are very rich country in theory. Our circumstances for many people, at least when you compare us to across the world, are doing pretty great. That said, we’re a very unequally wealthy country, and it turns out that wealth doesn’t matter for our happiness almost as much as the inequality of our wealth. If you’re an unequal wealthy country, everybody just kind of feels crappy. And that kind of gets back to the point you made about Keeping Up with the Joneses. It turns out we don’t tend to objectively evaluate our circumstances, what our actual salary is, how nice our house is, how attractive we are. We tend to compare against other individuals. So we don’t think in terms of these objective points of how well we’re doing, we sort of compare ourselves to some salient reference point.

And our brains are insidious. They’re very good at finding reference points that make us feel totally bad. So if I ask you what’s a good reference point for a really good salary, you’re probably going to think of somebody like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You’re not going to think about the refugee up the street that can barely put food on the table.

Preet Bharara:

It’s different times of my life. When I was 25, I thought that one salary seemed very high to me, and now I’m 56. And in my peer group, that number is different.

Laurie Santos:

And I think this is something even more insidious, which is that we can change our own reference points because we get used to whatever level we wind up at. When I was a graduate student, the idea of earning what a first-year professor earned was like, “Oh my gosh, I would be able to get a reasonable apartment and do this stuff.” But then you get there and then it just becomes your salary. You get bored with it. You want to jump up to the next level and the next level. And that’s frustrating for a couple of reasons. One, it’s like we just don’t appreciate the good stuff we have. So we take it for granted, what’s worse, it’s that if you get objectively better circumstances in life, you wind up expecting those objectively amazing things.

You talked about this delicious wine that you bought in Italy. When you just have that wine, any other crappier wine you’re going to taste after that is just ruined. I often joke that the people who are most miserable on planes are the people who get to fly first class all the time because there’s not much way to go up from that, right? You’re kind at the top of the top. And so once we get to the best possible circumstances, we wound up just getting used to that. And-

Preet Bharara:

So you better not fall.

Laurie Santos:

You better not fall. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

If you rise up, you better not fall.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You said something a minute ago, it’s sort of interesting to me as we think about how to order society, not to be too heavy about it. So I have a series of intro-related questions that just came to mind. I think that was John Stuart Mill who said that about the pig satisfied. We’ll look it up. Maybe it wasn’t Aristotle, it might’ve been John Stewart Mill. As you think about what the goal of ordered society is, is it to make society productive in whatever way that is defined? Is it to increase individual and an average and overall happiness of the citizenry? And if you think it’s some version of that second one, when you say income inequality causes an excess or a surplus of unhappiness, well, what’s the reverse of that? Some version of redistribution of wealth, socialism, perhaps communism.

Do people in societies that more resemble the latter, have more happiness? Because that’s not what the Scandinavian countries are. They’re capitalist countries that have huge safety nets. So what does your research tell you about, at least in respect to this dimension, what works and what doesn’t work?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, so I think to understand what works best, it’s helpful to dig into specifically on wealth, say what’s going on in terms of people’s happiness. I mentioned if you’re listening to this podcast and you don’t have enough money to put roof over your head or food on the table, changing your circumstances, and by that I meant getting more money is going to make you happy. And there’s a famous paper by the Nobel Prize winning economist, Danny Kahneman, that sort of looked at this in around $2,010. He found that if you’re on the low end of the income spectrum, then getting more money and getting higher salary will make you happier. But that kind of-

Preet Bharara:

And in fact, because you mentioned it, I don’t remember the figure off the top of my head, at some salary level, I think, didn’t he find that even tripling your salary doesn’t increase your happiness?

Laurie Santos:

Exactly. And in $2,010, he found that this was around… $75,000. So give or take, you and I are taking a little-

Preet Bharara:

But not in Manhattan.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Well, we can quibble. Every time I bring up this number, people are like, “Well, in Manhattan, it’s different than living in Iowa. What if you’re a single-family couple, or you have three kids, and you have”-

Preet Bharara:

And the standard, I don’t mean to fight the price.

Laurie Santos:

The point of Kahneman’s work is there is some point at which it levels off. And that point is probably not as high as we think.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a lot more.

Laurie Santos:

$2,020, 24, $2,025 is probably around 110 maybe. But the point is it’s not a hundred million. After, again, $2,010, $75K, which is what Danny originally studied, doubling or tripling your income doesn’t at all affect your stress levels, doesn’t reduce your stress levels or increase them. It doesn’t make you experience more positive emotions, doesn’t have the effect we think, right? But let’s get back to redistributing wealth. What does that mean? Well, that means if I take some money away from the folks who are earning a hundred million, they’re not going to notice it. It’s not going to really negatively affect their happiness at all. But if you could get that money to somebody who was earning less than $75,000 and $2,010, all of a sudden, that would make them a lot happier. And so I think we do get some hints that redistribution of wealth might be really useful.

But another thing that we get, and I think we learned this more from the World Happiness Surveys and looking at Scandinavian countries, is that what we really need out of wealth is sort of this support network, this kind of safety. So if we get sick, if we lose our job and so on, we’ll kind of have something to take care of us. One of the things that if you look at Scandinavian countries, this is Denmark in particular, many of them have these cultural sayings about not being better than somebody else. The Danes have this idea of Jante’s law, which I’m probably saying wrong because I’m not Danish. But Jante’s law is this idea that you shouldn’t really strive to be better than somebody else. You shouldn’t brag and say you’re better. We’re kind of just all equal. And I think that that fits with what’s happening in terms of not just their wealth levels, but their status levels and so on.

Because everybody has a social safety net. It doesn’t really pay to go off and become a super high-powered lawyer because probably pay in taxes enough that you’re not going to see that same boost in wealth as you would maybe in the U.S. And so the assumption is that that makes the folks who could have had this super high salary worse off, but the data really suggests it might not work that way. It might be imperceptible to those individuals.

Preet Bharara:

That’s not great for the standing of your country in other ways and for GDP and for lots of other things. And how does this translate to sports? Are competitive athletes more or less happy than the average person, given what you just said?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, I mean, I think they experience a lot of pressure. They’re less great surveys comparing exactly, competitive athletes versus laypeople. But a lot of the competitive athletes you talk to, unless they’re finding ways to seek out a journey, mindset and so on, are pretty miserable. I can’t name names. I’ve been called out to do a lot of consulting with competitive sports teams. I tell my dad and my brother and folks who are sports fans, like, “Oh my God, you talked to this person about happiness?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I did. Because despite what they’re making, despite how amazing they’re doing, how many championships they won, they’re still feeling pretty miserable.” That last championship came in and all of a sudden they’re like, okay, now there’s even more pressure for the next one. And so these great circumstances, these amazing successes don’t make us as happy as we think.

Preet Bharara:

Can I tell you a small thing that has made me happy in this moment?

Laurie Santos:

Please. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

So I mentioned about the pig dissatisfied or the pig satisfied, I thought was Aristotle, and then I self-corrected, sometime later and said, John Stuart Mill. The team has informed me that it’s actually John Stuart Mill.

Laurie Santos:

Amazing.

Preet Bharara:

So we didn’t have the mistake persist in perpetuity in the podcast. And that makes me a little bit happy.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Let me ask about athletics again for a moment, because there are very few in the world, elite athletes for whom must be a ridiculous existence. You can be Tom Brady, you can be LeBron James, and you can be the literally the best athlete in your position and in your sport in the world or that the world has ever seen. And then you lose a game and you’re very unhappy. So that’s a certain kind of existence. But there are a lot of people who are listening who have kids who are in sports, and there’s a lot of debate among parenting, communities about how we should handle sports and how competitive should be. My boys played little league, and I remember there sometimes there are signs at the park reminding folks, this is supposed to be fun.

Laurie Santos:

This is a game, parents-

Preet Bharara:

This is a game.

Laurie Santos:

It’s supposed to be fun.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a game. Leave your weapon at home. Please do not attack the… How should we be thinking about sports that are supposed to be fun and make you happy?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Well, I think this is another spot where we need to get back to this journey mindset. One of my favorite interviews that I did for my own podcast, The Happiness Lab, was with the Olympic skater, Michelle Kwan, who I grew up admiring. People have heard her name. Turns out she never won gold medal. And I kind asked her, what that-

Preet Bharara:

Could have sworn she did.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, exactly. You kind of just update and assume. But what she would say was that, “That’s fine. I actually didn’t… I wanted the medal, that’s why you’re there. But the thing I most enjoyed was just being at the Olympics.” She talked about the day that she got to first lace up her skates and skate over the ice with the Olympic rings because those colored Olympic rings, that symbol is set in the ice and she remembers what it looked like sort skating over the ice with those Olympic rings. She remember what it felt like to be in this huge arena and hear the cheers of fans and the kind of murmur of just so many different languages and voices at once. Those are the things that she was enjoying. And she got those, even though she didn’t get a chance to get a medal.

And I think that’s what we need to get back to for our kids in sports, they’re learning, you’re having fun with your friends, you’re just getting some exercise. Moving our bodies is one of the easiest behaviors we can engage in to feel a little bit better. There’s evidence that a half hour of cardio exercise is almost as effective as a prescription for anti-depression medication, just simply moving our bodies feels good.

Preet Bharara:

Wait a minute, how many milligrams is 15 minutes?

Laurie Santos:

I don’t know, have to get down to it, but no. Meta-analyses show that literally your psychiatrist could prescribe moving your body to reduce depression or reduce anxiety. It works just as well. It’s just doesn’t make the pharmaceutical companies as much money. So these are all things that kids could be enjoying in the moment as part of the journey playing sports. But all too often I think we just get caught up in whatever that victory is, whatever that arrival is at the end.

Preet Bharara:

So talking about a little bit of an older set, not kids, but people who are entering the job market or changing jobs, it seems to me that the correct advice is do a job that you like and that you love every day as opposed to something that’s going to get you some future objective, right? I think part of the reason that my friends and colleagues at the U.S Attorney’s Office in the Southern District where I was for a lot of time, I think now that I am thinking about these issues in these terms, I never thought about these issues in these terms before. You’re doing your job and the job is to make sure that you’re doing justice. That the premium was not placed on getting the conviction, although that’s gratifying and vindicating the rights of a victim and getting proceeds back to a victim who may have been robbed of their money and their bank accounts, et cetera, et cetera.

But the joy and the satisfaction came from every day doing the job and talking to witnesses and appearing in court. As proof, this question, I don’t know how many people appreciate this, people who are in those prosecuting jobs, particularly at really high-performing offices like my former office are literally leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table. I was able to persuade people to come back from private practice and in private practice in New York, we’re talking about millions of dollars coming back to work for a very good wage still in America, but like $150,000. The only reason you would do that I think, is if the job brought you great satisfaction. And that, for that community, which is one of the reasons I thought it was special, that was more important than making money. Do we need more jobs like that?

Laurie Santos:

Oh, I think definitely. Or we need to find ways to bring the parts of the process that we really enjoy to those jobs. Because if you’re a high-powered lawyer in private practice in New York, you might have the option to switch to be a prosecutor, or maybe you have enough money to retire and I don’t know, become a-

Preet Bharara:

That’s also true.

Laurie Santos:

… glassblower or something. Not everybody has that privilege. And so there’s an open question. If your job isn’t so flexible, what are some ways you can bring the sense of values and purpose to this job? And here’s a spot where I really love the work of my former colleague at Yale who’s now at the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Resninski. She does a lot of work on this process that she calls job crafting. And the idea is that with job crafting, you kind of sit down and you think, what are my strengths? What are my values? Maybe for these prosecutors who lose some money, but take this new job. Well, it’s really working with people or I care about justice, I really care about fairness and I want to fight. Maybe it’s bravery, right? I got to push myself all the time, kind of fight these big fights, whatever it is, we could come up with all these different kind of strengths and values.

The idea of job crafting is you take your normal job description and you figure out a way to bring those values in no matter what it is. And the reason I love Amy’s work is that she studies job crafting, again, not in attorneys, not in podcasters. She studies job crafting in hospital janitorial staff workers. So these are people who are washing people’s linen and cleaning the floors when people get sick. And she finds that between a quarter to a third of them really report that their job is a calling. They have to get paid, but they love their job and they would show up even if they weren’t getting paid. And those individuals tend to be the ones that spontaneously job craft. They’re bringing their values in. She tells these lovely stories. One was a story of a janitorial staff worker who worked in a chemotherapy ward.

And if you’re listening now and you’ve had the unfortunate to have to get chemotherapy often makes people sick. So a big part of the guy’s job was actually cleaning up vomit in the room. But he said, “Well, that wasn’t my job. My values are kind of social intelligence and humor and empathy. I wanted to make these patients laugh.” And so every time he had to go up and clean some vomit, he would joke. He’s like, “Oh, this looks like a big spill. I’m going to get overtime,” and you’re laughing. He was like, “The people laughed and that was my job. That’s why I show up at work every day.” And so I love Amy’s work because it shows if you can get creative about job crafting as a guy who cleans up vomit in a hospital, for most of the people listening right now, you can get creative about your own job too. The key is figure out what things get me going. What do I really like? And ask the question, how can I infuse more of that into what I do every day?

Preet Bharara:

I want to talk about acts of kindness because you talk about that as being important. And I remember the freshman or sophomore in college, I took psych 1 from a giant in the field named Jerome Kagan. And he would bust all these myths that we thought were true, but psychology teaches us or not. And one of those was, he said, if you want someone to like you, don’t do them a favor. Ask them to do you a favor, which is counterintuitive to say the least, because the person who has done you a favor is now invested in you, which is related to this idea that you get gratification and happiness from doing kind things for other people. Can you talk about that and why that happens?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. I think this is a huge misconception that we all kind of get culturally right now. If you look at any kind of not so evidence-based article on happiness, they talk a lot about self-care, treat yourself. I think intuitively we think that the path to happiness is doing something nice for ourselves, but just as you said from the class you took with Jerome Kagan and probably decades of work since then, pretty much every study shows that we get a boost in happiness not from-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not that many decades.

Laurie Santos:

Two decades. One decade, two decades.

Preet Bharara:

No, it’s three. It’s two decades. It’s okay.

Laurie Santos:

No, but the key is we get happiness from doing nice stuff for other people. One of my favorite studies on this was done by the University of British Columbia Psychologist Elizabeth Dutton. She does this study where she walks up to subjects on the street and just hands them 20 bucks. But the key is that she tells you how to spend that 20 bucks. She either says, “By the end of the day, spend this $20 on yourself. Do something nice to treat yourself, or by the end of the day, spend this money to do something nice for somebody else. You have to donate it to an unhoused person. You could buy your friend a latte, whatever it is, but just got to be for somebody else.” And then she has people rate their happiness, and then she has people rate their happiness again at the end of the day, once they’ve spent the money and she finds that by and large people self-report being happier when they’ve spent the money on other people.

That’s not what we predict, but it’s sort of what the data show, and that means that, as you’ve said, we can do something nice for others merely by asking people for help. I think you and I are having this conversation at the end of the year where a lot of us are thinking about charity and so on. I think for some people, donating some money is the thing to do, but some people are feeling financially kind of strapped right now and aren’t able to do that. And I think the key is to remember that sometimes by asking the people around you for help, by being a little bit vulnerable, you can give a gift to someone else too. Something that I think we often forget we can do for others, but it’s really a way to let them feel competent, let them feel like they’re doing something to give them a little bit of a happiness boost.

Preet Bharara:

Why is it so counterintuitive, though?

Laurie Santos:

I don’t know-

Preet Bharara:

What do we not understand about-

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s so much-

Preet Bharara:

… human psychology that that’s such a revelation to us?

Laurie Santos:

… There’s so much that we get wrong about happiness. I feel like this is one piece. I think that this bias is part of a larger thing we get wrong that folks like the University of Chicago’s Nick Epley have christened under-sociality. We just all over the place misunderstand the big benefits that we get from other people. We don’t realize that doing something nice for others will feel good. We don’t realize that chatting with a stranger will boost our mood. We don’t realize that giving a simple compliment to a stranger, expressing our gratitude, asking for help, all of these things are evidence-based happiness boosters that make us feel really great and make us feel more satisfied with our lives. And so many of us are just leaving opportunities to do that on the table all the time.

Preet Bharara:

It seems like such a win-win proposition, not to be corny about it. Here’s the thing-

Laurie Santos:

It builds the pie. It builds the happiness pie.

Preet Bharara:

… that will make you happy, and also it helps another person. Why don’t we have more charity? It makes you wonder, right?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Why don’t we have more charity? Why don’t we have just more conversations, more kindness?

Preet Bharara:

It’s not a sacrifice.

Laurie Santos:

More kindness. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Charity’s not a sacrifice.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. This is why I really love teaching students about the science of this stuff because it is true. Our mind just has these mistaken intuitions. I’m the professor who teaches this stuff, and I’ve seen the studies. I could quote the stats, but when push comes to shove and I’m having a tough day and I’m about to spend five bucks on a nice latte for myself, I’m not thinking, “Well, let me gift the person behind me in line this latte.” That’s what will really boost my happiness. I know the data and I still don’t have that intuition. I can put it into practice. Rationally knowing this stuff, I’ve changed some of my behaviors around, but my intuitions haven’t changed, and that’s frustrating. It’d be nice if the mind were more cooperative and we could update all our intuitions, but it doesn’t work.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, the other intuition that he exploded, which is relevant as I age, is that you are more likely to remember the name of your second grade teacher than maybe professor you had in a prior year, which to me, as I talk about Professor Kagan is also true because I remember his name. And now that I’ve done the math is like 35 years ago and I can’t remember the names of people I met on Monday, so that’s another one. Can you talk about the importance of gratitude and what that means? Is it a muscle you exercise? Is it a sentiment you have? Is it passive? Is it active? And why does it matter?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Well, I think one reason gratitude matters a lot gets back to what we were talking about before, this idea that we just kind of get used to stuff, that the good things in life just stop feeling as good if you keep getting them over time. Gratitude is powerful because it’s a way to hack that. When you think, I don’t know, we used the first class example. I’m sitting in first class, I might not have sat in first class. Look at these cool little socks I get or this extra room in my chair. I’m noticing that feels really good. That’s the power of gratitude. We kind of shine this little attention spotlight on what we have and we notice that it didn’t have to be that way. We don’t want to take this for granted because it might not always be this way, and that can really allow us to recognize the good things in life and to notice the blessings. And really study after study just shows the benefits of this stuff. Not just for our happiness, but for other things too. People experience-

Preet Bharara:

But what does that mean? Does that mean that you… So I’ll give you an example in my own life. So I have to actively practice gratitude and I have a really good life and I’ve had a really good life for a long time, but I was annoyed by some things at work. Something didn’t go the right way or I was not as prepared as I might’ve been, whatever. I was grumpy and cranky and my wife says to me, “What did you do again yesterday?” I said, “What do you mean?” “What’d you do in the middle of the day yesterday for work?” I said, “I did a podcast interview.” She’s like, “Who did you interview again?” I said, “Steven Van Zandt. Little Steven from the E Street Band who I love along with Bruce Springsteen.” “And they paid you to do that interview.” I said, “Yeah, okay. I’m going to stop complaining now.” Is that what you have to do from time to time?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. I mean, really one of the easiest interventions is just to commit to scribbling down three to five things that you notice that you’re grateful for every day. So that can be something really cool. I got to interview someone from my favorite music band ever, which maybe doesn’t apply to everyone, but it can be simple things like my morning coffee, my kid’s smile, the way the tail wagged, there’s a little bit sunny. Sometimes my gratitude things are just silly things. Like I was in the shower and the light in my shower sometimes creates this little prism and I noticed it, and it’s just really colorful and it’s great. I think sometimes gratitude feels like has to be this big thing. I’m grateful for this really important thing in life, but sometimes you can kind of reduce it just to the little positives, the delights. I sometimes like to replace a gratitude practice with what I like to call a delight practice, where you just notice the cute, funny, beautiful, awe-inspiring things in the world and just make a note of that was delightful.

Sometimes that can feel a little bit lighter than kind of going for gratitude, but the key of a practice like this where you notice it over time is that you’re training your brain to focus on this stuff. Another dumb feature of brains is that we tend to have what’s called a negativity bias. Those hassles in life, the fact that you had a bad day, the grumpy stuff we notice all the time, we don’t have to put any effort into it. It doesn’t need to be intentional at all. It just comes for free. But the delights, the delights in life, we got to seek out. And the key about making it practice is, just like the exercise practices we were talking about earlier, you can build up your reps and train your attention muscle to notice the good stuff, but it takes some intention and some energy.

Preet Bharara:

But sunrises and sunsets are free too.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s all this stuff that’s free. I recently just had COVID and I guess these new variants of COVID are kind of back to the OG COVID where a lot of folks are losing their sense of taste and smell. And that happened to me. I completely lost my sense of taste and smell for about six weeks.

Preet Bharara:

Oh goodness.

Laurie Santos:

And I hadn’t noticed how awesome having smell was at all. But as soon as I lost it, I was like, oh my God. Once it started coming back, I’m like, coffee, my partner, my bed sheets my favorite soap. Just the simple things.

Preet Bharara:

But how long does that last?

Laurie Santos:

It lasts long if you go back to it. I’ve started to actually make a practice because I do my own little delight and sort of gratitude practice. I just kind of scribble in a notes app on my phone and I have in big letters, smell, at the top. And so every time I see that, I sometimes go back to noticing of like, oh, it’s actually cool that I can smell the coffee right now, or I’m kind of out. It’s a really rainy day today where I’m in New England and it was just had that kind of crisp, wet smell and I was like, “This is a sensation I get. That’s cool.” And so the beauty of gratitude is it totally will go away if you don’t intentionally practice it, but gratitude can be something that kind of brings you back.

Preet Bharara:

How important are friendships to maintaining not just sanity, but happiness? I think they’re very important, but you tell us.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, they’re huge. I mean, if I had to pick one thing you could do to be happier, it would be to improve and engage in social connection, whether that’s with a really good friend, with a stranger. And this is the kind of stuff that matters, not just for things like happiness, but for longevity too. There’s some lovely work coming out of Bob Walderman’s lab at Harvard that’s been part of this sort of Harvard adult study of development. So they follow individual Harvard students from way back in the day through their ’80s. And now they’re kind of continuing this longitudinal study studying not just those individuals, but the kids of those individuals and the grandkids of those individuals. And one of the things that this really long running, huge study has found is that if you want the best predictor of happiness in life, but also health later in life, it really just seems to boil down to your social connections. They just matter much more than we think.

Preet Bharara:

In both ways, right? So if you have a lot of connections and a lot of friendships, you’re healthy. And I guess it follows that the opposite is true, but not always. And people who don’t have friends or connections to loved ones are at the worst peril of depression and disease, right?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, the surgeon general likes to quote that self-reported loneliness. If you self-report on surveys, you feel very lonely. That’s as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It’s twice as bad as being obese for all kinds of things, like your existence of heart disease and inflammation and just chronic health problems, just not having social connection is that bad.

Preet Bharara:

Which age groups in America today are the happiest in which are the least happy? And I know it’s going to be a disconcerting answer from you.

Laurie Santos:

No, no. It’s actually pretty good, I think, for you. Yeah. So historically, we thought of happiness as sort of a U-shape function. So the young folks tend to be really high in happiness. Then you get to college, things go down, your 30s, things go down. They hit a kind of nadir around 48, 49. So I’m actually just turned 49.

Preet Bharara:

Ooh, I’ve passed that.

Laurie Santos:

So I’m starting to go back up on the curve. And then things get better and better into old age, which is again, not what we expect. I think we expect the young side that kind of makes sense that young people should be happier, but we don’t see the kind of upswing towards the end of life. But the closer you get to death, despite the health problems, despite the grief, despite the kind of objectively bad stuff that we know can happen later in life, you actually wind up being happier. I think the only caveat to that though is that that U-shaped pattern has been flattened over time. Older individuals have become less happy than they were say 20 years ago. And much more profoundly young people have become much, much more unhappy than they were before.

Preet Bharara:

Right. No. Well, that’s the thing that gives me pause. That’s why I was making the remark that I made because that’s sort of sad and upsetting.

Laurie Santos:

Super sad. The time of life that you’re most supposed to be happy, our current young people are experiencing.

Preet Bharara:

Oh my gosh, I think about my kids who are happy and well-adjusted, but they don’t know how happy they should be.

Laurie Santos:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

They have very good lives.

Laurie Santos:

And even if they’re feeling okay, their generation is not. So right now among college students, over 40% report being too depressed to function most days, over 60% say that they feel very lonely most of the time. Another over 60% report feeling very anxious, one in 10 current college students has seriously considered suicide in the last year. It’s really an epidemic.

Preet Bharara:

So what do we do about that, professor?

Laurie Santos:

Well, I think we try to teach people how to overcome their misconceptions when it comes to what matters for happiness. I think a lot of the misconceptions we’ve talked about pursuing money, pursuing these accolades at all costs, not investing in your social connection, not investing in other positive emotions like gratitude, where you’re sort of striving for everything, not noticing what you have. I think these are easy behavioral and mindset hacks that we can all engage in to feel a little bit better. I think our culture, especially for young people is push people away from that. But I think there are things we can do to get back towards that.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not a particularly religious person, but is there any correlation between the shrinkage of the church in all the various religions and the increase in unhappiness?

Laurie Santos:

For sure. Yeah. I mean, so the data on religion and happiness are interesting. So individuals who engage in more religious practices tend to be happier, but it’s not the case that individuals who have strong religious beliefs are necessarily happier. What do I mean by that?

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s super interesting. Why is that?

Laurie Santos:

I think why it is is that it’s not the beliefs that matter for your happiness, it’s your behaviors. So take an individual who’s really engaged in religious practices. They’re probably doing things like going to services where they engage in social connection. They might be participating in charity, maybe they’re saying prayers where they experience a sense of mindfulness and presence and gratitude. Religious practices often involve a lot of the same behaviors and mindsets that we’ve just talked about that seem to matter for happiness. And that’s what seems to give you a boost. And you have that not just kind of doing those kind of practices on your own. It’s sort of part of a really rich set of traditions and beliefs that allow you to realize the importance of that stuff.

And the key is that that’s true pretty much no matter what religious practice you’re engaged in, all of them have these kind of features that tend to improve social connection, improve a sense of gratitude, talk really strongly about doing nice things for others, make that a value. All of these things are kind of true in religion, and therefore I think engaging in religious practices winds up making us happier.

Preet Bharara:

We may have sort of incidentally covered this. You’ve talked a lot about the things that make you happy in the act you can engage in, they’ll increase your happiness. What’s the opposite? What are the things that you do or that happen that make people the most unhappy?

Laurie Santos:

Well, I think it’s kind of investing in things that are sort of the opposite of that. So we’ve talked about the importance of engaging in gratitude, not falling prey to these sort of comparison biases. What’s a thing that you can do that really brings up those comparison biases and make you feel like you don’t have enough? I think hopping on social media for a lot of us, kind of seeing these negative comparisons writ large kind of makes us feel terrible. I think engaging with our technology can also be an opportunity cost on social connection, which is ironic. I think these portable phones that are in all of our pockets were initially designed, at least in part to be used as a phone to literally connect with somebody else.

But how often have you not talked to someone in real life because you’re staring at your phone and noticing what’s going on on the other side of Reddit or the other side of some political blog and just not talking to your spouse. And so I think the things that cause an opportunity cost of stuff like social connection, engaging in gratitude and so on, those things wind up being a real hit on our happiness that we often can’t see directly.

Preet Bharara:

Am I correct that listening to podcasts dramatically increases happiness?

Laurie Santos:

For sure, and especially some podcasts could [inaudible 01:01:55].

Preet Bharara:

I can think of two.

Laurie Santos:

For sure.

Preet Bharara:

I can think of two in particular. Before I let you go, and any advice for people entering the holiday season who have reason to be sad and not happy?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah. Well, I think this gets to something we haven’t talked about yet, which is negative emotions. I think sometimes we think if you’re experiencing those, it’s just bad. It’s just bad for happiness. But as Aristotle and other great thinkers would’ve said-

Preet Bharara:

Are you sure it was Aristotle?

Laurie Santos:

I think it was Aristotle for sure.

Preet Bharara:

Or it John Stuart Mill?

Laurie Santos:

But as many, many thinkers have said, your negative emotions are important part of the equation. I think the correct way to think about negative emotions is almost like the alert signal on your car. If you’re driving down the street and your engine light comes on or your tire light comes on, that’s inconvenient. It might not be awesome. But if you ignore that, you kind of do so at your peril. I think if you’re going through this holiday season and you’re experiencing some grief that’s kind of like a tire light. There’s something you need to take some time to feel sad about, you might miss someone. You might need to take some time to think about those memories and kind of engage with that. If you’re going through this holiday season and you’re feeling a little bit lonely, that’s probably a really honest signal that you need to reach out to somebody, make a connection, call a friend, and so on.

A really big one, if you’re going through this holiday season and you’re feeling overwhelmed, like you can’t even, there’s way too much on your plate. That’s probably a really honest engine light signal that you need to take something off your plate, that you need to give yourself a break, that you need to find some space in your schedule. And so I think if you’re experiencing negative emotions, the right response is like, “Awesome. Thank God I have that alert to tell me what I need to do to make changes so I can feel better.” The only worst thing than having your tire go out is not having your tire light work because then you just wouldn’t know, and then you find out on the highway somewhere. And so thank your negative emotion system. It’s really giving you useful information that you can act on.

Preet Bharara:

Also, very sound automotive advice.

Laurie Santos:

Also very sound automotive advice.

Preet Bharara:

So final question. I want to go back to the definition. This may be a dumb and too clever by half question, but we have been taught that the opposite of love is not hate. They say the opposite of love is indifference. So my question is, what’s the opposite of happiness? Is it actually sadness or is it the absence of feeling or something else?

Laurie Santos:

Yeah, I think it’s not negative emotions. I think happiness, I always go back to sort of Aristotle’s definition. It really Aristotle’s definition.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, I’m going to look up John Stuart Mill,

Laurie Santos:

His word eudaimonia, right? Happiness is about living a good life. And I think the opposite of eudaimonia is feeling like something’s off. You’re feeling overwhelmed. You’re not feeling like you have a sense of purpose, you’re feeling kind of meh, those kinds of signals that you’re really not living up to the good life that you could be. And so by making some changes, that research really shows, so you can get back to. Aristotle’s definition of eudaimonia and a kind of way of pursuing happiness, that’ll feel a lot better.

Preet Bharara:

Dr. Laurie Santos, thank you. I made a list of simple things, just to summarize, have gratitude for simple things, engage in acts of kindness and get more friends. We can all do that, right?

Laurie Santos:

That sounds pretty good.

Preet Bharara:

We can all do that, right?

Laurie Santos:

That sounds pretty good.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Thanks so much for your insight. You should come back a lot because I feel better already.

Laurie Santos:

Amazing.

Preet Bharara:

Thanks so much.

Laurie Santos:

Thanks so much, Preet. Thanks for having me on the show.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Dr. Laurie Santos continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for Insiders, we discuss what we call the Keanu Reeves Doctrine and mastering the art of letting things Go.

Laurie Santos:

I think what he’s onto is something important, which is that all of us mess up every once in a while, and it’s important to kind of give people some compassion

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

To end the show this week, I’d like to reflect a little further on the interview you just heard with Laurie Santos. Someone asked me at the outset what my favorite episode of the year might’ve been, and I need some more time to process. But I will tell you, in the 24 hours since my conversation with Dr. Santos, I’ve been thinking about so many things that she said. And if you ask me in a week or two, I think this episode might be way up there as one of my favorites of the year. Dr. Santos described during our interview something called the arrival fallacy, the mistaken belief that happiness waits for us at some distant destination, a promotion, a bigger house, a certain milestone, but time and again, research and life experience remind us that happiness isn’t a place we arrive at. It’s the journey itself.

Now, that may sound corny. It may sound like a cliche, but that’s because it’s true. She also spoke about the power of gratitude, that when we stop to notice what we have, we shine a light on the things we might otherwise take for granted. Again, cliche, sure, but that’s because it’s true, and we still don’t do it enough. So as the year winds down, maybe we can make time to savor the moments that truly matter, the time spent with family, the laughs shared with friends, and the quiet ongoing journey of discovering ourselves. This holiday season, let’s try to give ourselves the gift of presence, of slowing down long enough to appreciate the path. And finally, from my conversation with Laurie Santos, the thing that surprised me the most and has stuck with me the most was the revelation supported by science, that helping other people not only makes the person you’re helping happier, but in fact the person doing the helping, happier.

Acts of kindness, even small ones are a path to your own happiness. As Laurie pointed out, there’s all this discussion in the happiness sector about self-care and taking care of yourself and worrying about your own body and your own health and your own prosperity. And that’s all good and important, but the path to happiness also comes from helping other people out. Be good to yourself always, but also be good to other people. Science says that it’ll make you happier. From all of us here at Stay Tuned with Preet, we Wish you peace, gratitude, good health, and a renewed appreciation for the journey. Happy holidays.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Dr. Laurie Santos. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner, and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.