#873 - Lionel Page - The Invisible Psychology Of Happiness & Meaning

Dude, I am in love with your sub stack.

I subscribe to a lot of different sub stacks

and yours is maybe my favorite one from this entire year.

You're absolutely destroying it, dude.

It's so great.

It's evolutionary lens on things,

big picture questions everybody's already asking.

I think it's awesome.

So when it comes to, I guess,

what are the problems about how happiness is typically thought about or studied? What is missing from that? Look, excellent question. So in one of my posts, I have this cheeky picture of, you know, the elephant and the blinds.
I think it comes from India, the story. And the story, I'm sure lots of your listeners have heard about it,

that you've got a bunch of blind people,

and they're put in front of an elephant,

and they're asked, okay, what an elephant looks like?

And so, you know, one touches the trunk of the elephant and says,

well, an elephant looks like a tube, and it's wet at the end.

And the other one touches the tail and says,

well, you know, it looks like a string, and it's very fluffy at the end.

And another one touches the tusk and says, well, it's very hard look as a string and it's very fluffy at the end and another one touches the tusk and say well it's very hard you know it's very and it's very smooth um and so when you read the literature sometimes in behavioral sciences and social sciences and when they don't have an evolutionary perspective you get the same kind of stuff you when you know i talk about the books on self-help books on on psychology on of happiness and you will see, you get a book, and this book will tell you, to be happy, you need social connections. You know, the secret of happiness is to have friends, to have family.
Okay, that's very interesting. You take another book, and this other book will tell you, the secret of happiness is to control your desires, you know, to learn not to want what you don't have.
That's stoicism, that's Buddhism.

And another book will tell you the secret of happiness is to reach for the stars,

you know, to have very high goals and to work very hard towards it.

And then you look at these different things like, okay, but what's, you know,

what's the link between these different things?

I mean, are we talking about the same things that we're talking about?

Happiness. And there's one explanation.

What's the connection between these different stories? And these books are like the blinds uh you know giving you a perspective of the elephant and the elephant about happiness is that you have to consider that happiness is a system of valuation design uh and i use the word design you know not designed by a designer but evolution is an impersonal process which looks like it. Designed by evolution to help you make decisions.
And so when you take this perspective, all these different kind of secrets of happiness make sense, but in a big picture. So you're asking what kind of stuff it explains.
For instance, as I said, we are social spaces, so we will need connections. That's one fact.
But on the other hand, sometimes you get all the books about happiness tells you, well, you need to know when to say no to other people. You need to say people make claims to your time, says, can you help me, Chris? Can you do this? At some point, you need to be able to say no.
Well, every system you have of subjective feelings helping you to navigate the world has to handle what you have facing trade-offs. So if you're always saying no to people, maybe you won't have too many friends and that's not good for your success.
But if you're always saying yes, maybe you'll be a pushover. People will take advantage of you.
So a right system needs you to balance these things if you take another uh things like uh the goal you have in life if you if you have very low goals like you know everything is fine whatever you're achieving you're very happy with you will be very successful and so a system of happiness which is designed to make you successful has to push you to n you, to try as hard as you can. So whenever you're going to be successful, you know, you are going to look forward to the next challenge.
So now you may think, oh, what will make me very happy in the future is this big milestone. If I reach this milestone, that's it.
You know, I won't need very much to do much better than that. And what happens is that, let's say you work very hard and you reach the milestone.
And eventually you say, okay, that was good. But what next? You know, like you're going to start looking further ahead.
Like what's the next milestones? Like if you think that being millionaire is what will make you happy. Well, the sad story is that when you reach the million, the first million, the two million, whatever, you'll feel good, but you'll start thinking about the next thing.
So your system of happiness will keep pushing. And so when you have these books, they tell you, you know, either you need to have, you don't need to care about what you don't have.
On the contrary, you need to aim very high. They kind of, they just look at one side of this balance.
The book tells you, don't care about what you don't have. It says you need to aim very high they kind of they just look at one side of this balance the book tells you don't care about what you don't have it says yes you shouldn't look too high it does it's not worth it for me to think in the morning oh i'm not as rich as Elon Musk so this is very disappointing there's no point for me to think that that's not going to help me being successful to have a goal which is so high that i'm never you know there's no point whatever I do in the day is not going to change it so I shouldn't care about things which are unachievable but at the same point at the same time you know if I wake up in the morning and says you know I'm great I'm healthy everything is fine you know why do I stress etc well I'm not maybe going to do the right things which is going to help me move.
So our system of happiness is going to be this kind of stuff, which kind of try to find the right level to push us to do our best. It's neither too high, neither too low.
Yeah, there's that idea of a homeless man isn't jealous of a billionaire, but he is jealous of a slightly richer homeless man. Exactly.
You know, that's something very important because we think that um we always compare right uh one aspect of happiness is that we may think that happiness is just objective and that we are this kind of uh we have this view about what we what we would really want and if we get it we'd be happy but, we always compare to other people. One reason we compare is that we learn from other people.
Let's say, you know, if you ask yourself, am I successful in life? Well, you can look at people like you, people maybe were in your high school when you were young, your mates, et cetera. And if they were much more successful than you, then, and I'm not saying that you're spiteful necessarily, it's not about that.
But if you see that they were much more successful, you may think, wait a minute, they didn't have anything more than me when we started. So why am I not doing like them? You extract information from that, from these people who are like you, who were like you.
And so you would want to, that's's going to be helped you maybe to to change tack

so okay you know i thought that was fine doing what i'm doing but when i'm seeing what they are doing maybe i should do something else so these kind of comparisons it's not useful when you compare to people who are very very different so if you're homeless you know and you wake up every morning thinking that you're not a millionaire that's not going to help you move the next step

ahead of where you are now, right?

And so you will care not about people who are much poorer than you or people who are much less successful and you're much more successful you typically care about people around you and you and that's this interesting stuff that we care a lot about the people who are just like us being a step of us of us. And the people who are very far ahead, we don't even care too much about them.
It's so fascinating. It's like we're plants in an ecology, and we sort of are able to grow toward the light that's nearest to us.
And yeah, it's an uncomfortable realization that our feelings of well-being depend less on absolute achievements than they do on just the comparison to other people in the social circles that we belong with. And I guess that game of relative comparison and the way that social circles, the ones that we choose and the ones that we don't, impact us is just endlessly fascinating to me.
Yeah, well, I'm with you. Like I said, I'm super fascinated in it.
I think what's interesting is that what's fascinated me is how kind of key happiness and these questions we ask ourselves are central to our lives. And in a way, how we are, we don't really know, you know, we don't have intuitions.
So evolution is this kind of programming process which has designed us to work well in the real world. But evolution didn't care about telling us the rulebook.
Evolution gave us the design, but it didn't explain why we're doing what we do. And so we're like following the path that our feelings lead us to.
But why we have these feelings

and why they have the shape they have

and that we don't have the intuitions necessarily.

So that's why when we start thinking about,

oh, what will make me happy,

why I'm not happy, et cetera, et cetera,

it's actually not trivial

because if we're showing you what doesn't care, to make us successful, we don't need to know why we have these feelings. We just need to have these feelings.
Yeah. I think for, you know, the sorts of people that listen to this podcast, uh, introspective, reflective, you know, curious people having a question, uh, having a why that does not have a very well-defined answer is kind of like some version of purgatory meeting hell.

And you're just, you know, you want to know.

And you're right that there isn't this definitive sense. Just going back to that, the social comparison thing, I've been thinking about this for ages, and I love that insight about how people with disadvantaged social origins might be more likely to be happy because they've got a lower reference point to judge life from.
It's so paradoxical, but it makes complete sense. Yeah, look, that's, and actually that goes back to my PhD.
My PhD was on that topic in education. It sounds, you know, when you say that, it sounds like maybe some people on the left would say, well, you're saying that people who are from a lower social background are privileged or that people from a higher social background are disadvantaged.
So, you know what, it's true. The advantage of disadvantage.
That's right. Well, there is a kind of hedonic happiness advantage advantage of being from a low social background and rising up because then what you have is that you know if you use your original social background as a comparison point and it's natural to do so because even as i said you know if you use your peers and you you come from a low social background and you look at people who are your friends and maybe they'll see your friends now you think well you know i did know, I did well.
And so you have these comparisons which helps you have this outlook on life. You know, am I unsatisfied with my life? Well, I did very well relative to where I started from and that makes you happy.
On the contrary, if you're born from a very highly successful social background, well, the bar is super high. So, you know, if your father or mother, they are lawyers, well, you know know if you don't do a super high education achievement uh let's say a very high educational achievement it's just the normal standard that you need to achieve it's not you can't be super happy it's just normal and so that's a high pressure and what you observe is that uh there is a kind of a you know that's what i'm saying i don't say that because there's a lot of questions about privilege, et cetera.
But people were born in a privileged background. You observe sometimes more risk-taking.
And also they want to do some different line of work because they want to escape the comparison. So if your parents, maybe they are lawyers, et cetera, maybe you want to become an artist because, you know, you want to be in a dimension of social comparisons where you can escape the comparison of your life.

Oh, that's so interesting because if you went into law or you went into medicine, there would be a direct comparison between where your father was at that stage in his life. I mean, look, the potential explanation for kids from highly affluent backgrounds having disparate outcomes in educational attainment because they are riven and driven by this terror that they can't keep up with what their parents expected is like, I don't know of anyone that's factoring that into the base, right? And sure, the material constraints, the resources, the access, the networking, the legacy admissions into these higher institute like yes there's lots of structural things right that go on but what about the drive for the kids why are they you know working themselves so hard to do this yeah and uh you know the fact that you have higher expectations placed on you and you are aware that anything short of Yale or Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge or Kings or whatever is going to constitute failure, which is going to result in you being less happy, that I think explains at least part of the disparate outcomes that we see.
Yeah, I'm totally with you with that. So when you, if you are's say you can take two kind of cases different let's say you are from your parents moved from a poor country in the US they didn't have a high high school diploma you know they work hard to pay for your education and you end up in a community college in the US and you get a job and for And for you, that's an achievement.
You made it. You're able to have a house, a mortgage, a car, a standard US way of life.
Now, if you consider from there, do you want to try harder? Do you want to go to university, or hire a more prestigious university, and get a master's degree? The benefits, the psychological benefits for you is not that important because the difference psychologically between where you are now and that additional stuff is not very large because your reference point, as you said, is low. And so the biggest difference is between where you started in your mind here and what you have achieved.
Now, if your parents are lawyers and they did an Ivy League school, I mean, there's no way you would consider going to community college as something like an achievement. You'd be maybe dreading it terribly.
And so for you, this step of the difference between going there or reaching a prestigious university is going to matter extremely. And so, as you say, the drive is going to be there.
And even I would say the risk-taking, something which is interesting when you look at the statistics that for the same grades in high school, kids from higher social backgrounds with average grades, they're more willing to take the risk to continue in standard university things than kids from lower social backgrounds. Kids from lower social backgrounds say, you know, I'm not sure I would be successful at university.
I want a practical training, which is going to give me a job. Well, the kids from higher social backgrounds are more likely to, even if it's uncertain, they would be successful to try hard and to go to university.
And that's also correlated with more sort of social risky behavior,

drug taking, alcohol, fast cars, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, so that's, you're right,

because we often associate drug taking, et cetera,

to low social background, like neighborhoods,

which are risky, et cetera.

But what we observe is that there is a lot of this kind of behavior

also in kids who come from high social background. And one possible, so, you know, one conject observe is that there is a lot of this kind of behavior also in kids who come from high social backgrounds.

And one conjecture is that this kind of resticking

is also associated to the pressure that you have.

I've been fascinated with intergenerational competition theory.

I learned about it about a year ago,

this sort of comparison we have between where were our parents,

when they were our age, and where are we now. And, you know, I think it really explains, maybe this is total

bro science, right? But I'm allowed to do this because I'm not held to the same standards of an

academic like you. My theory, at least in part, is that even though objectively, when you run the

numbers, the current generation is better off adjusted for inflation than any generation before, there is this sense, this milieu that we are not. I think the comparison on social media contributes a massive amount here because we assume that everybody is doing better than they are.
And also we have expanded our social circle to now be so much wider. You're no longer selecting your social circle from who you grew up around, but you're expanding it to the entire world.
And by design, the people that you see on social media pretend that their lives are better than they are. So not only are they a wider social network than you've ever seen before and selecting for people that are more popular, but also on top of all of that, everybody's lying.
So the ability for you to do accurate assessment. And then when we think about intergenerational competition theory, I think we almost use that model.
Where are other people now? That's where mom and dad must have been. And that I think is where a lot of this uncertainty comes up around well you know you look at um the reasons that people say about why they haven't had children yet uh i'm just i'm just not ready uh not financially not in the position which is odd because the poorest countries have the most children and if you scale it over time we are by and large on average richer more affluent more comfortable than we've ever been but the sense is that we're not and given that our social circle has been expanded to the entire world and we have the perspective everyone is doing way better than they actually are it's just it's social anxiety all the way down no look there's several things in what you said said, but I'll start with the social media.
I totally agree with you that social media is a very strange environment. We are not selected to be in this kind of thing.
As you say, it's an expanded social circle. You have, as you say, people lie on social media, lie, in the sense that we take selfies all the time.
I'll take maybe a hundred selfies and I'll pick the best angle, you know, the one where the light is good. I have a twinkle in the eye.
Maybe I use a filter and even should I put that as my social media profile? And so, and you do that for everything. My videos of my holidays will be brilliant.
You know, I mean, when I have a boring holiday,

I won't necessarily talk about it,

but when I have something,

a nice cocktail on a beach in Bali,

I'll post about it.

And so we're exposed to these beautiful lives,

these beautiful pictures of all these people.

And as we were talking before,

we can't help compare, right?

And if this is our comparison points

and it's moved us,

it moves this comparison point much higher. And then we're thinking, well, I'm not doing that well in comparison.
And we have to learn to discount, to learn, okay, wait a minute, there are filters on these pictures. Maybe these people are not that young as they look in pictures.
You know, I see all the nice things they do in the holidays. I don't feel all the troubles.
They went to go these holidays, etc um that's difficult and there's there's a even another thing which is very interesting on social media we have i guess you have heard of it's like the friendship paradox do you know this this thing no friendship okay the friendship paradox is a net something which happened in networks when you're in a network your friends average, have more friends than you. So if you're on Twitter, the people you follow have more followers than you have.
If you're on YouTube, the stuff you follow, on average, they have more subscribers than you have. So that sounds strange.
How is it possible? It shouldn't be an average. On average, we have the same.
No, because the people you select to follow or to be your friends, they are selected. And you have not selected the people with the least friend.
You have selected people who tend to have more friends. And the fact that you selected them is an indication that they are selected.
And so when you look into your circle of friends on social media, you'll find, wow, why don't I have, you know, I have so many followers and these guys are like, you know, super popular. Well, I'm not as popular as they are.
So the funny thing is that whatever network you'll be, you will not be as popular as the average popularity of the people in your network. So that's another thing which is not intuitive, but it will make your reference point higher.
And in comparison, you won't look as good. Does this mean that people in high-achieving groups kind of have a bit of a double-edged sword here because they've got satisfaction from recognition outside of the group, but they've also got social anxiety from within their group? Yes.
So, you know, that's a paradox of the fact that we always want to go higher. Like, when we are in a peer group or in a club, we tend often to look for the next club, the most prestigious club.
Academics, for instance, they want to be in prestigious universities. Well, the cost of it is that, you know, whenever you move to another one,

which is more prestigious,

your colleagues, they tend to be more successful

than before, right?

That goes with it.

And so you join clubs of people more prestigious

and what you have, exactly what you say,

you have this kind of, let's say, you know,

if you join Harvard as an academy,

well, for people outside,

your Harvard member of staff is very prestigious.

But for you, within Harvard, the comparison now are your colleagues were superstars. That's very stressful.
And so in one of my sub-stacks, I described it was Thomas Schelling. You know, it's a story told by Glenn Lowry when he joined Harvard.
And he got very stressed by the pressure of success, of being successful

in publishing, etc.

And he goes to his colleague, Thomas Schilling,

a very famous game theorist, and Thomas Schilling

says, what do you think? Everybody

here is extremely stressed.

They all think that they're underachieving

and when you ask, what

are you doing? They think, oh my god, I'm being judged for not

being performing enough. And so

you have this double-edged sword, as you

say, that from outside, we think all

these people are very successful, but because they're in clubs of very successful people they feel the pressure of not you know being up to scratch with their peers yeah i love the term insecure overachiever i think it captures this energy very well yes and you have you have this term like the imposter syndrome, right? And I think the imposter syndrome is exactly that. So you work very hard to be successful in professional life, to be maybe promoted as a manager in a very important function.
In academia, you want to be promoted professor in a a prestigious university and then you people once out there's a thing oh maybe maybe i shouldn't be here you know maybe people didn't see that actually i'm not good enough to be here i'm here by accidents right and so people have anxieties like that yeah uh you don't get or at least as of yet on sub stack i haven't seen get super tactical around this. You're not coming out like the typical sort of personal development bro and saying, and here are my 10 steps for you to be able to overcome your imposter syndrome or whatever.
But when it comes to the sort of social circle comparison thing, given that you're spending a lot of time researching this and you have a pet interest in it, you must relate this to your own life and you

must have tried to apply some strategy or some tactics to try and negate this social comparison impact on your happiness so what do you do uh as an attempt to try and mitigate this effect Yeah, look, that's a good point.

I'm not sure if I have used it. I've used it in practice to not being stressed by not joining higher circles.
So when I was actually, I was in a when I worked for some time in London, And I have the opportunities to choose between academia

and to work in finance.

And I thought, you know, obviously the wages are much higher,

you can imagine, in London in finance.

And I thought, well, from what I know from Beel Science,

I know that actually the wage looks much higher.

But if I go there, you know, next thing you know,

I'll think that I'm not paid as much as Warren Buffett.

And that's actually very true. You know, I was talking to a trader, and the guy must have been on something like 150,000 pounds, so something like 200,000, $250,000 a year.
So clearly in the top of the distribution. And the guy, I was having lunch with me, he told me, I hope I was rich.
And I was like, well, I mean, you're not a billionaire, and you're a young guy, and you're already on this kind of wedge. It's like super good.
But from his point of view, you know, he's thinking of his manager who is on two or five million a year. And then the next thing is a success story is Warren Buffett.
So I'm aware of this kind of thing. And I guess, you know, I'm not looking back and thinking, oh, I wish I that etc because I know that I mean I think I've been very happy there as well but I'm thinking that you need to be aware that if you were to move in such a circle then your reference point would move with you and so that's a reason not to stress too much and to appreciate what you have now.
Okay another another source of pain. Probably, I think, I've been doing these live shows.
I was in Australia recently doing these live shows. And there's buckets that at the Q&A portion at the end of the talk, people ask.
And one of the most common is something along the lines of, why do I set ever higher goals for myself? Why do I seem unable to be able to be satisfied with what I've achieved? Why every time that I score a goal, do I immediately move the goalposts even further away from me? Why do I overestimate the importance of my next success for my happiness? So talk to me about sort of the role of goals and how it impacts our happiness here. Look, I think that's a key part of my research.
Another paper, several of my posts on sub-stacks were on this topic recently. You know, maybe I'll use a metaphor.
I'll start far and we can go back in more on the topic, but I'll use a metaphor. Let's say you can think of evolution.
Evolution is an impersonal process, right? But it's as if it was designing you and you can use a metaphor if it was kind of a designer trying to nudge you to be as successful as possible. So now what kind of situation we can think of where somebody tries for you to be as successful as possible? Well, one situation is when you have a parent and a child.
And a truth that is going to be clear for every parent is that it's not necessarily always best to motivate a child to be truthful with the child, to say all the truth. And so for the child to know exactly what are going to be the rewards is not necessarily optimal from the parent point of view.
And here's what I mean. Let's say that you got your son or daughter and you register your son or daughter in a competition.
It could be athletic competition, it could be a chess competition, and you have no idea really how good they are. And you want to motivate them and say, if you do well, you'll have an ice cream or what you so you give a schedule of kind of rewards say if you do well i would bring you to the cinema if you do very well at school i'll give you a video console etc then now you the price that you don't know how good they can be uh suppose that you find out that are excellently talented they're um clearly uh go be a well beyond expectations.
So you told them that if they were going to do well, they will have all these rewards. So what do you do now? Do you just keep them giving them all these rewards all the time? They don't need to work very hard because they are very talented.
So you keep giving them rewards. If you do that, it's not going to nudge them to do better because they don't need to work hard.'re super talented if on the contrary you find out that your child has difficulties it's challenged he's struggling to be very good you say oh sorry you know you're not very good so no reward for you never so that's not going to help the child as well so what you'll do is that you'll adapt your schedule for us if you find out that your uh your child is excessively good at chess, you say, okay, maybe I'm going to give you a tutor, and if you win tournaments, you'll have more rewards, whatever.
It depends. In Australia, what we do is we have a lot of...
It's very athletic as a country, very sporting. So you bring your kids to the swimming pool, and you see whether they are good.
And if they are good, you enter them in competition. You may have seen in the Olympic Games, the strategy does very well in swimming because everybody swims in this country.
So, you know, what you do as a parent here is that you won't tell your kid before, oh, wait, I'm telling you that if you're successful, you get this reward. But if you're very successful, actually, I'm going to move the cart further ahead.
You don't want to say that because if the kid knows that, if they do very well, then you're going to move the cart further ahead. They'll be like, what's the point? And nature does exactly the same thing with us.
That is, for us to work very hard, we think, oh, you know, I need to achieve these things. It's very important.
And all the information tells you, if you can achieve it, we have this kind of urge. The paper I've written on it, the title is called, If You Can, You Must.
So if you feel that you can, you really get excited by the idea that you want to do it, right? If you can't, if it's way far ahead of, you know, the realm of what you can achieve, you don't want to try. You won't be interested.
But if you think, you know what, I think I could run a marathon. You will try.
You will want to try if you think it's prestigious enough. If you think, well, I think I can run a marathon, but in four hours, you know, then you'll start thinking about how can I achieve that? What kind of steps? And that feels good to think that I think I could achieve this.
Then the problem is like, let's say you start, you know, you start thinking maybe I could run a marathon and running a marathon will be something which I think is an achievement. You start running and you think, actually, I'm pretty good.
So now running a marathon is not enough. You'll have to do it maybe under four hours or maybe more or maybe a better time.
So the counter will keep moving forward and your hedonic system kind of lied to you initially because your hedonic system told you initially oh if you reach this goal you'll be happy you know but as you realize that you are able to reach this goal maybe you can reach better so if you can reach better now the crowd has to move ahead and now it's this initial goal is not enough anymore and you want this additional goal further ahead and the problem i totally understand people in your shows who says why do i do that well it's by design we're designed to be like that and we're designed to be like that and we're designed not to anticipate because if you were to anticipate that if you achieve the next goal you'll get used to it and you think about the another goal afterwards well you'll be like well what's the point you know i i work hard and i may i may as well just you know enjoy life as it is now oh so that's why we overestimate the importance of our next success for our happiness because if we didn't think well once i achieve x i'll be fine if we didn't have that thought if we assumed accurately that each different destination is just base camp before the next destination gets unlocked and gets appeared to us, we would be much less motivated to go and do it. It's exactly that.
If you think that it's very important to have this next promotion, this promotion will give you status and prestige and income that you think that's what I want in life,

then you work very hard for it.

But actually, in reality, once you

have it, six months later,

it says, okay, what next?

Next challenge, actually I could do better, etc.

If you anticipate that initially,

if you anticipate that the cart is

always going to move forward

beyond you, beyond your reach,

then that's not motivating anymore to reach the next step because you know that the same process will repeat. What's the focusing illusion? But that's exactly that.
So the focusing illusion is a term proposed by Daniel Kahneman and his co-authors. Instead that you focus in life, you tend to focus on some things and say, this is really what I need.
And people may have different views about why they need to be happy. Maybe some people say, what I need is a romantic partner, which is attractive and faithful and friendly, etc.
And if I get that, I'll be happy. Some other people say, well, what I really want to be rich.
Other people may say, what I want is just a group of friends, good social network. And so you really care.
You say, this is what I need. And usually you say that when you don't have it and you think you would be really happy, you focus on that.
This is the key for you to achieve happiness in your life. And then when, if, and when you get it, eventually you come to realize

that was not so important for your happiness.

So the key example given by Kahneman

are people in the US who think that,

oh, if I only had a job in California,

I would have fantastic weather,

brilliant lifestyle.

And so maybe if you live in,

let's say Minnesota,

where winter is very cold,

you imagine that you'd be very happy if you moved to California. Now, what Kahneman did is went to ask people who moved from Minnesota or something like that to California, and says, are you more happy now? And basically, after six months, a year, people say, yeah, I'm happy, but they didn't get the kind of change in life satisfaction that they were thinking they would when they were not there.
So how come we set goals to the highest level of what we think that we can achieve instead of finding happiness in lower aspirations? Surely that would allow us more direct access to happiness. You're totally right right like uh you the a goal you can think of it we took we use the word reference point before you can think as a reference point so you you you judge where you are how well you are doing as a with this goal as a reference so uh if you have a very low goal anything looks good If my goal in life is just to have a nice job,

a house somewhere,

not necessarily in a luxury suburb,

you know,

et cetera.

Well,

it's much easier to achieve that if I say my goal is to be a top manager,

to have a very high income level,

et cetera.

So having a high goal makes that for a given level.

If I have a low goal,

this looks great.

If I have a high goal,

the same thing is not going to look great. So a very simple path to happiness is to have low aspirations.
And if you look in history, I talk about Stoicism or Buddhism or Epicurism as well. So a lot of the kind of historical path to happiness recommendations is very simple.
It's like, stop desiring what you do not have. Just be happy with what you have and that's the secret of happiness.
And there's something very true in it is that if you're able to stop, try to get outside of this race where the goal keeps moving forward, says, you know what? I'm healthy. Have a good meal every day.
You know, got electricity, warm water. My ancestor didn't have that at all.
So that's a fairly good life, right? I don't need to chase further success and further success. So if you're able to do that, you can extract yourself from this pressure.
You'll feel better. But then what you have is that your head-on-execism is not designed for you to feel good.
As we said before, your hedonic system is designed for you to be as successful as possible, as successful as possible. And so your hedonic system, your brain should kind of pick all the information available to identify what you can do.
And if you learn that you can do something better, well, your hedonic system should just uh go a notch above and says you have to do it right you're hiding you're not designed to be happy and enjoy life you're designed really to to try as hard as possible and the reason is that you're not designed you're not designed to be happy in life you're designed to try as hard as possible what an absolute yeah

exactly because you're if you think about our ancestors uh some ancestors may be born with psychological traits where they enjoyed being on the beach and you know it there was enough if there is enough food to have enough food and fish one fish etc and some others were maybe a bit more neurotic

wanted to always work harder and harder

well unfortunately for us

you know fish, one fish, etc. And some others were maybe a bit more neurotic, wanted to always work harder and harder.
Well, unfortunately for us, the people who are the most neurotic and keep trying harder and harder are more likely to be ancestors now than the people who just enjoy life. We are the progeny of the most anxious, insecure overachievers across time.
So I would say there's a balance, but our hedonic system should be designed to keep finding the best thing you can achieve. So as I said before, you know, it's not worth you being depressed every day because you're not Elon Musk.
There's no point into it. But you should identify what is the best thing you can achieve, really best thing, and then aim for it.
And so our hedonic system does that. We get a lot of information for what we have done before, what people like us have done, and then we integrate all this information.
We think, okay, what somebody like me can do? I have some psychological traits, which makes me better at some things. Maybe if I'm very good at talking to people, I should aim to be a manager or maybe to be a public speaker.
If I'm very good at math, I may be thinking, you know, what I should do is working in engineering or in finance. So you will try to find, given who I am and the traits I have, what is the best thing I can do? And you don't need to think, you know, care consciously consciously about it.
You'll pick it up. You'll pick up that, wait a minute, this person is like me and this person is very successful.
Why am I not doing this? And the character will keep moving forward because it's designed just to push you not too far, but as far as possible. I've been thinking a lot about the difference between feeling happy when you succeed and just feeling relieved.
It seems that there is a regular framing that success is the only acceptable outcome, and anything short of that is a failure. So the achievement of success isn't, it turns the achievement of success not from a cause for joy into just the abatement of fear you know what i mean oh i avoided disappointment congratulations but that's such a you know for the again for this sort of high achieving high expectation low confidence people out there that you it's a lose-lose scenario i didn't achieve the goal how miserable i miserable I feel about myself.
I did achieve the goal. Well, that's the only acceptable outcome.
Yeah, look, that's fascinating. It's another, you can explain it from how happiness works.
Happiness is going to work in your brain, always setting expectations and giving you feedback about whether you're doing better than expectations or lower than expectations. Now, when you aim for a goal, usually the resolution towards this goal is going to take place over time.
So if you're working to get a promotion in a company, you have progressive information whether you're doing well enough to be promoted. So your impression of whether things are going well or not, and as things get better, you feel more and more happy.
Similarly, let's say you run a marathon. As you're running the marathon, you're getting information whether you're likely to finish or not.
And so the thing is that you will consume the benefit of success all throughout as you get closer from the goal. So, you know, if you

look at

games like, you know, in the US, you

have American football, for example. The guy starts

being happy before they

score the touchdown. They start being happy

as they know that there is

nobody, you know, in front of them

and they are going to score the touchdown.

And so they start consuming, in a way,

the happiness of the success before the success happens happens exactly. And then when you reach it, when you reach the success, the only thing which could happen is that you may be 99% chance of being successful, but you could still mess up.
So you're running toward the touchdown and you fumble within one meter, that would be a catastrophe. So you have a because you you have already realized that you are going to be successful so you're super happy but you there's a risk that you could not and that's this final stuff that you you're happy not to be failing yeah i love this line from you about how uh the attainment of a goal seems when the moment of triumph is over almost like a letdown because so few people sit back and enjoy it and most people just create another goal that they want to strive for but the the sort of the implication of that is presumably they prefer the process of striving toward a goal as opposed to the state of actually having achieved it which seems completely completely backward, right? Because what you're not saying, why are you pursuing that goal for the pursuit of the goal? No, you're not pursuing the goal for the pursuit of the goal.
You're pursuing the goal because you want to achieve the goal. But every single bit of evidence about the way that we behave suggests that we prefer the striving as opposed to the achieving.
So I think there's two First, you will enjoy the striving because the striving as opposed to the achieving so i think i think there's two things first you you will enjoy the striving uh because the striving is really going toward the goal is like reduce is increasing the chance that you're going to be successful uh but obviously at the very end the fact that you indeed are successful there is still an important step so if you if you look instance, sports matches, and let's say your team is ahead in the game, right? You start being happy that you realize you are very likely to win before the end of the match. But nonetheless, when the whistle blows and you win the match, you're happy because that's the final outcome that success is realized.
Now, what you have is that relative to expectations, relative to maybe the food about how you would feel before if you were to be successful, then you have this focusing illusion. So I have this quote in one of my sub-stacks about Andre Agassi.
It's in his book, Open. And Andre Agassi,

I'm not sure if people remember because it's a few decades ago,

but there was a lot of pressure.

He was a very talented play-teens player,

but there was a lot of pressure

that he was a bit rowdy,

and people say,

maybe he's not this kind of guy

who can actually win big titles.

And then he won Wimbledon.

And then you think,

well, I felt let down

because I was led to believe that winning a Grand Slam would be life-changing. I wouldn't be the same person.
I would acquire maybe another level of existence, a big world. But you would grow into something else having reached this very high level of achievement.
And he said, well, I felt exactly the same person. And compare that to how depressed and sad I was when I was losing in the final of the Grand Slam.
I was not that happy having won. And so that's the thing, because you focus, you would focus on thinking that the Grand Slam is what he needs to be happy.
But once he gets a Grand Slam, surely he's very happy on the day right that's that's one thing on the day he's happy he may cry whatever but a few days later his hedonic system is going to kick in and says wait a minute if you want one you can do more you know you can be number one so so the next is in three months yeah gold medalist syndrome I think it's called oh yes you have the gold medal you have the

I'm not sure if you you are you referring because there's a you know you have this study about the gold silver and bronze medal oh no i think gold medalists so yes that being bronze is happier than being silver because bronze is two steps away from winning but silver was very close I think at least my

again bro signs of the

gold medalist syndrome was that

a lot of the time when people finally achieve

their championship that they want at the Olympics

and they're left like Andre Agassi

feeling significantly

less fulfilled than they'd hoped or

anticipated that they then tell

themselves well ah right

it's because I have to do it twice it's because i have to prove that it wasn't fluke that's that's what the problem is that's right yeah so i didn't know the term uh it's interesting i didn't know this term but yes that's exactly that and i think you know but that's what we're in a way doomed uh to to to experience because if you win one well that's a good you know it's good correlation people win one slam often often they win more than one and so eventually you should be you know if people were like I win one slam and I'm happy now I'm going to enjoy cocktails at the hotel well that's not conducive to further success Yeah it's so funny the sort of curse of continuing to succeed if you are a competent person and you break new ground each new achievement doesn't feel like a cause for celebration it simply feels like the next minimum acceptable outcome that you can have the next time you do the thing exactly exactly and but the funny thing is that you have this, the fact that all people behind

or below these very highly successful people

think that the people who are very successful

are very happy.

So, you know, I can imagine that,

let's say if you're on social media

and, you know, if you start,

you think, oh, if only I had 10 followers,

or not 10 followers, 10,000 followers,

that's the thing, I'll be very happy. People who have 10,000 followers, I think, wait a minute, you know, why don't, you think, oh, if only I had 10 followers, or not 10,000, 10,000 followers, that's the thing, I'll be very happy.

People who have 10,000 followers, I think, wait a minute,

you know, why don't I have 50,000?

People who have 50,000 says, why don't I have like, you know, 200?

And we don't know that.

So we think that these people are happy,

but these people are just looking two steps ahead.

Have you ever looked at the research around when you ask people what their ideal level of annual income would be so yes yeah i look i remember i don't remember the the the um the numbers but i i saw a study and maybe do you remember so i remember what the outcome was which is basically it's almost always about three times what you earn right now so people will say well i would be you know i'm at i earn 50 000 pounds a year uh 150 would you know that would really exactly but the people at 150 say yeah i mean 450 would really be and then it just keeps on going and keeps on going and it's very reliable it's all the way up you know the millionaires jealous of billionaires the billionaires jealous of multi-billionaires oh yeah so i can tell you a few things about this kind of thing it's first on a level on a very basic level you ask people let's say when they're 20 what would be a good life you know what what would be something where when you're 40 you have achieved and you're happy and they say i don't know i've got a house in the suburb a car i've got a big tv you know and then you guys in the 40 okay you've got a car you've got the house you've got a big tv uh is it do you think you have a good life says well you know not really because you know i don't have this thing i don't have that etc so people move their goalposts the kind of stuff that they said they would be happy with is not enough for them to be satisfied. So that's a first thing, interesting thing.
And then in terms of people always looking ahead, there was, I remember I listened one to an interview of a psychologist with specialists of the psychology of millionaires. And he said, you know, when I'm saying that a psychologist of maybe not millionaires, but like super rich, maybe multimillionaires or billionaires, when I say that I'm a psychologist for these guys, people say, wait a minute, they don't have any problem.
And the problem is that he says, no, on the contrary, they are often, they are very miserable. Because, you know, if you earn 50 or $100,000, your next comparison point is maybe the person who gets $150,000.
But if you're a millionaire, your next comparison point is a guy who's like twice the size of your house. He has this multimillion yacht with all these VIPs coming in.
And so they're super frustrated that they are not competing well enough with the next

guys uh ahead will smith in the memoir that mark manson wrote said when i was poor and miserable i had hope when i was rich and miserable i was despondent that's a good one that's a good i. Yeah.
It very much is the case that happiness is not achieving a thing. It's not being rich.
It's being a little bit richer than yesterday consistently over and over again. You're right.
Yeah. So here again, here's a trick.
is that we experience positive feelings

from doing better than expected. But here again, here's a trick, is that we experience positive feelings

from doing better than expected.

So when you go up, usually there's a part of uncertainty which is resolved.

Usually, if you're promoted, there was not a 100% chance initially.

So as you win and you're successful, there's an element of surprise of positive surprise and so you enjoy that but if you were on a schedule where your your the the growth of your income for instance or the promotion is totally scheduled is is it's uh there's no uncertainty maybe because like you Maybe because your income is indexed on inflation

and it's going to increase, whatever,

or maybe not on seniority.

So as you get older and older,

your income automatically increases.

Then if you expect these increases,

even if you're doing better,

you will not feel better

because all these increments

are going to be factored in.

You expect them. And if you expect them, you're not going to be more satisfied.
That's a trick. Yeah.
The relationship between happiness and expectation of surprise is... It feels so ruthless because by design, you can't design surprise.
Like if you knew that it was going to happen, it wouldn be a fucking surprise yeah yeah and and you know you may wonder why why why we design like that why can't we have something like happiness which is something like a mountain and you start from the bottom and as you more and more successful in life you get more and more happiness you know why why we're not designing that? And the quick answer is that designing a system which instead of measuring big difference like that, only focus on measuring variations related to expectations, it's a more efficient system to treat information and to use whatever cognitive capacity you have in your brain to produce a signal which is going to help you so it's a bit abstract but i can say that something which we have learned in the last first 30 years is having a very interesting convergence between ai research and reinforcement learning and cognitive neuroscience and what some cognitive neuroscience found out is that the brain looks like when the brain rewards you as a difference relative to your expectations, it pretty much looks like it's implementing optimal algorithms used in machine learning. So you'd have people working in artificial intelligence trying to program how a program is going to learn the right thing to do.
And the best one simple thing for this program to learn is to say, well, form expectations about what different actions are going to lead to. And then try out.
And when you try the action, you just compare. Is this action, the outcome better than expected or worse than expected?

And then you adjust your expectation.

And if you try a lot,

eventually you are going to learn to do the right thing.

And it's pretty much exactly what we do.

And it's an efficient way

of processing information.

It would be much more difficult

for your brain to have a very complete map

about happiness from zero to the top.

It's better to have a kind of a local stuff guiding you locally from expectations. Incremental.
Exactly. Incremental, yeah.
Yeah, how interesting. So talk to me, let's expand this out a little bit more into habituation and sort of the adaptive explanation for habituation more broadly.
Like why didn't evolution just design us with the ability to feel greater and greater happiness whenever we do better? Well, it's exactly what I was saying before, is that it's more efficient. I think a very good comparison is our visual system.
That's exactly the same thing. So, you know, your visual system doesn't kind of recall the objective luminosity in a room.
The objective luminosity. Actually, it's not measuring it.
From the time where the light hits your retina, what's recorded is actually a divergence relative to expectations. And what you see is that if you were to turn off the light somewhere, so now you see things, you turn off the light, everything is bleak.
So you can't see anymore. But if you wait a bit, your eye is going to adapt.
You're going to start seeing shades, et cetera. And so you're going to be able to perceive difference and contrast that you were not perceiving before.
What has happened is that your eye does exactly the same thing, that you have a kind of an expectation and you observe differences within this range. If suddenly I change the range of luminosity, your eye doesn't see anything anymore.
So you have to adapt to eventually perceive again the differences. And having this, why is it useful? Because if you have a kind of range where you can perceive differences, you want to maximally use this range in the area you are.
If I was to look at this range and say, I have to stretch it to observe any kind of differences, then the problem is that a lot of things would look the same because you have a limited ability to perceive differences. So I want to use this ability to perceive differences the most in the area where there are variations that I need to observe.
So my eyes are optimally adapting my ability to perceive difference and contrast in the range of contrast that I'm facing now. And if you turn the light off or put a bright light, I'm going to adapt to this new range.
And your happiness is the same thing. So your perception of subjective values, they adapt to the range you're facing.
So if you are not very rich selling sandwiches on a cart, you need to be careful about not losing $10. So you'll be mindful about not making mistakes such that when you count the money you're handing in and getting back, that you're not losing money because this money is important.
But let's say that you scratch a lotto card and you become a millionaire. Well, $10 doesn't matter anymore.
So, you know, why would you care? Why would you allocate some of your perception of value to difference in $10 when this doesn't matter anymore? Is there an implication then if sort of incrementalism, this step-by-step nature of us slowly getting toward our goals. Is there an implication that sudden huge leaps in improvement of life circumstances are actually very bad for us in that if you win the lottery, how are you going to ever have a better day than the day that you won the lottery? Like it came out of nowhere.
It sets this new unreasonable standard for you as opposed to, you know, the person who's maybe tormented by their daily grind to move toward their goals. But presumably, if you're already on that sort of path and momentum, you were only half a step behind yesterday and you can be half a step ahead tomorrow.
The difference between that and somebody that just has a windfall ant that dies with $50 million and gives it to them or something, where you go from there you don't even have any systems to be able to locate yourself so i think you're right that if you are very successful very quickly one challenge you face is to reset you know because we're designed for that we're designed to have goals and to move forward etc so one is one challenge you face is to reset your goals in life. If you're not able to do that, if you're not challenged anymore, first you may become bored if you don't think that you have anything to achieve.
But also you may make mistakes. So I think I've heard that people win the lottery and were not especially rich before.
Often they get counseling. And you can imagine so because if you're used to have a lot of money, you want to have a professional investment strategy to gain a bit more money.
But if you move from not much to a lot of money, maybe you think, wait, I'm going to buy a luxury car, a luxury boat, I'm going to... And you're going to spend things which maybe the value deteriorates, maybe organize luxury parties, etc.
It doesn't last. And you may remember, I think that was a very famous footballer, I think it was Best, I think George Best, who said most of my money, I use it on women and drugs and the rest I squand squandered it.
So, you know, if you have a lot of money very quickly, you may not make the best use of it. So I think the challenge when you're very successful is to get yourself back on the ground.
It says, where do I want to go from there? Do we habituate less to certain things? Are there any categories of accumulation that we have in our life that we seem to be a little bit more resilient to this adaptation? So look, it's a very good question. So habituation, once you reach a certain level of comfortable life, which should be lower middle class in the US, anything better, what you observe is that people think they will be much more happy or much happier if they get more.
And actually, you don't. So happiness doesn't increase much.
It does increase within the country. And one likely reason is because within the country, you're able to compare yourself to others.
So what we observe is that this hasn't increased between countries. So you take Americans now, overall, for instance, and you look at the number of people who say they are happy or moderately happy.
It's the same number as 1949. Now, know, all the things that happened since 1949.

People have fridges,

they have like color TV,

et cetera,

they have internet,

things that

whenever it happens,

people say,

it's amazing,

it's fantastic.

But when you ask now,

they don't feel happier.

And that's something

you see in most countries

that when you look at countries,

apart from the very poor countries

which,

you know,

they get sanitation,

they get water,

et cetera.

If you're from a lower middle income country to a rich country, it's very flat. Happiness is very flat.
So that is true. Nonetheless, at the bottom end, there are things which can improve life satisfaction.
So if you move from being homeless to having a house, that improves in the long term your life satisfaction. That kind of locks it in in a more permanent way.
Yeah. So one thing which is possible is that your hedonic signals, if you think about the modern life that we are living, when we have food on the table, when we have sanitations, water, that's a good life.
I mean, ancestors didn't have that have that so we're in the range of the good life which in a way uh the basic signal that we can get we can still learn that we can do better but uh we're already doing very well relative to the kind of things that ancestors were doing but if you are in in a life where you know your your life is threatened because you don't have a home your health is threatened because you don't have access to a good food or etc or protection etc

that may still give you signals that you know that's not good from an evolution point of view so i think there's something where oh that's that's so interesting so much of what we're doing with habituation in lower to like developed nations is chasing down better standards of living, but not removing ourselves from things that could be mortal threats to us. And maybe our brain is able to detect, okay, you don't always have food on the table.
You don't always have a safe place to sleep. You don't always have reliable water or whatever.
you if you get out from that you lock in a particular so the bottom levels of maslow's hierarchy of needs i've always thought this about the um you know issues that many of us face am i actualizing my logos forward is this really me reaching my eudaimonia and making the most of my brief time. It's like, hey, dude, an existential crisis is a pretty fucking luxurious position to be in for all of human history until like 200 years ago.
People were terrified of whether they'd make it to the next day. They thought that they were going to get smited from above by a lightning bolt because they'd masturbated last night or whatever it might be you know like they're just on this permanent fearful world and it's odd that uh yeah if you're asking yourself these deep questions about meaning uh about fulfillment about flourishing about eudaimonia about reaching your goals go it suggests to me that much of the stuff that really matters okay you would absolutely miss if it wasn't there has been sorted and that's why you're up here it is no comfort i'm aware it's no comfort because we habituate but uh i do think it's an important frame no no exactly i think i think you're right and i i have nonetheless so so these all this vision is a bit depressing because uh it can be depressing i don't know i'm you know kennyman described himself daniel kennyman the psychologist described himself as a cheerful optimist a pessimist a cheerful pessimist cheerful pessimist yeah i like that because you know you you don't tell yourself stories about how the world is you know you you take it as it is so it's a bit pessimistic but actually you can still be cheerful in your life so if you know i'm as a person to be cheerful and daniel kenneman was as well so um anyway the the thing i wanted to to say about um the arbitration is that there's a positive aspect to it because i say it can be a bit depressing but there's a positive aspect aspect to it, is that the rest point of happiness where we come back to is not neutral.
And there's good reasons for it, which we can come to it if you want. But if you take a scale from one to 10 and you ask people how happy you are, people don't say, I'm kind of neutral on average.
They won't say five. They would say seven.
So people, on average, tend to be fairly cheerful, fairly fine with it. And, you know, it's true.
You go to people who don't have a high income, and they say, well, yes, life is relatively fine. You know, I could do better.
And they will give you an answer around seven. And you go higher levels and people will tell you an

answer so we habituate but we don't habituate to misery we habituate to a fairly fine level of happiness so that's the positive news i'd seen somewhere the status is a little less subject to habituation than some of the other elements in our life you get any idea if that's true look I think it's I think it's likely be true

for

and maybe that's true? Look, I think it's likely to be true. And maybe this explains why your happiness still increases when you get richer within your country because your status increases within your country.
So when the whole country gets richer, you move with the cohort of your country. So you get the fridge, but everybody gets the fridge.
So you're happy to have the fridge. But when you get the fridge and people don't have the fridge, you're happy that you have the fridge and are ready to others who don't have it.
So I think status makes sense because status is, we are a very social species and status, you know, how well you are regarded by others in your community is a key indication of success. So if you go to ancestors,

in particular for males,

status would be much more conducive

to find mates and to have hairs, etc.

So even if it's something not like food

or sex or whatever,

status, it's likely that it is one thing where we feel what we're primary was, that you feel good from experiencing status. And that's something that, you know, collective neuroscientists also, maybe not necessarily all of them, but something which is accepted by some collective neuroscientists, that status as such experiences an increase in status is going to feel good.
And that is going to be status is super flexible like and you can always keep increasing status all across your life so when you were talking about food etc in a way once you can eat well it's from an evolution point of view there is no so a big difference between the food you get in a five-star michelin restaurant and the food you can buy from getting supermarket and you know that may seem shocking to a lot of people but the fact is that the food in the supermarket is super safe uh relative to where i took about our ancestors were freaking out etc you don't have to fight for the food uh There is no bacteria or parasites in your food.

It's warm, etc.

So the food in the five-star Michelin restaurant,

the biggest difference is not the number of calories,

whether it's safe, etc.

In terms of fitness effect,

it's not going to be very different.

The difference is the status.

It gives you status to be able to... Because you have status, you can do that.

It's a signal of status to be able to eat in such a restaurant, etc.

And so while you can't increase all this stuff about the comfort of your life,

you have a roof over your head, you have food, you have water, etc.

Status can keep increasing.

You can keep relative to other being doing better and better.

The sad thing about it though, is that status is a zero sum game.

But if,

if you rise in status,

it can only be one.

Exactly.

So as you rise in status,

all those who are competing with you are relatively to you going down in

status.

And so it's,

well,

I'm just going to say,

it's not something that you can,

you know,

you have utilitarianism. It's this philosophy that you want to maximize the happiness in the country.
And thirdly, if status is one of the key things where you can increase happiness of individuals, well, you can't increase the happiness of the country because status is, those who have it and those who don't have it is a zero-sum gap. So you can't increase the status of everybody.
Okay, another huge tension that a lot of people seem to have to deal with is this relationship between happiness and a meaningful life. Is it a tension? Is this a fake thing? What is there to know when it comes to useful definitions and differences between happiness and meaning? Look, I find it fascinating.
And once again, I think it's fascinating because we have these big questions. What is the meaning of life? What am I meant to do? I mean, some people don't care, but some people care.
Some people think, what should I do? What would give sense to my life, etc.? Some people make big life decisions. They go to foreign countries and work, etc., in poor countries to dedicate their lives to some causes, etc.
So why do we have these feelings? And why don't we understand? Why are these kind of mysteries? And here again again we are in the thing where evolution gives us the feelings that guides and or decisions for us to navigate the world but evolution didn't need to tell us why we have them and so part of the mystery is that because now we kind of try to think about why we have this but we have not been given the tools the tools because understanding why we have these feelings is not in itself helpful. And actually, I was saying before that you have a convergence between cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.
And it's exactly the same thing in artificial intelligence. If you design a computer program to do a task, you don't need the computer program to know why it's doing the task.
So if you design a computer program to win at chess or to win at Go, you know, the game of Go, you don't need to tell the program, you know, everything which is happening now is for you to win. You just give this program, this system of values, it exposes values to choose the next decision and it revises values depending on whether the outcome is above or below the expectations.
And the program can be completely myopic. It ends up winning a chess.
It has learned to win a chess but it doesn't have a conscience saying, oh, my goal in life is to win a chess. But now imagine this program become self-aware and start thinking, what am I doing? what is my goal in life well you know you would have to find this stuff by itself because the programmer didn't need to put in the program the answer oh everything which is happening is because you have been designed to win a chess and this is the same problem we have we have been designed by evolution to be successful and we experience all these feelings for us to be successful but we have not been given the awareness about why we experience these feelings and so we are grasping these big questions uh because we don't have the tools to naturally think about you know why we we're doing that so the thing about the meaning of life with these big questions um and i think there is a fairly simple answer is Is that the hedonic feelings we have, they have to answer several types of questions.
One question is right now, you know, is my meal now good or is it not good? Should I stop it? You know, is it too breezy? It makes me sick, etc. You know, is this person talking to a friendly person I want to continue the interaction with? Or is it a boring person I'm wasting my time? Or somebody who doesn't like me and I shouldn't say anything private because this person is going to gossip about it, whatever.
So you are asking all these questions and your hedonic feelings right now, whether you feel that you are happy because the food you're eating is good or you feel sympathy with somebody all these feelings are helping you to guide you in the right now moment now this is good but a lot of success is going to be determined about a larger span of time uh you know are you in in the right setting in the stuff you're doing in your life overall is it good so if i ask you how satisfied are you with your life, you are going to think about what you're doing with your life in a bigger window, bigger time window. And you're not going just to think about, oh, is my meal good? Is his friend good? You're thinking of the biggest scheme.
Am I going somewhere in life which is in line with what would be successful, which is like a building, maybe you're standing in the community, finding a romantic partner, maybe raising your kids and seeing your kids grow, et cetera. So if you can see that this kind of stuff happening, you're more likely to experience this kind of life satisfaction.
And what you can have, you can have a disconnect between pleasure and achieving these goals because you can have a lot of pleasure in the short term but they don't lead you to achieving these goals often achieving these long-term goals need for you to do some things which are costly now so you know if you spend your time playing video games from 6 p.m to 5 a. It may be very nice, but if I ask you six months later,

are you happy with your life?

You may say, no, I'm not sure I'm going anywhere.

I enjoy what I do every day.

That's why I'm doing it.

But I don't think I'm going anywhere.

Something is missing.

What's missing is that you're not doing what's right

for you to feel that you are progressing

toward a successful life.

And so when we experience,

when you think about the meaning of life,

I think what's kicking in in your head

is this kind of intuition about,

am I in the right setting?

Am I in the right progress,

this right dynamic

toward being successful in life?

Something which is meaningful

is doing things where people

are happy with what I'm doing.

So my standing in the community is increasing.

I'm perceived as somebody nice and contributing to my community i have friends i have my family my partner loves me etc this gives meaning because we think i'm doing things right i'm moving forward in the right direction and so this gives us kind of feelings it seems like uh time is a really important contributor here that sort of a good life versus a pleasurable life is a conflict across time, short-term versus long-term. And you've got this great, this gorgeous quote where you say, much of life's dissatisfaction results from evolutionary mismatches where short-term hedonic signals conflict with long-term ones.
And it's just this tension. It's this tension between the two.
I want to eat the cookie or smoke the cigarette or drink the beer today, but I don't want to deal with the fatness or the hangover tomorrow. And you scale this up over time.
The thing that's super interesting, I've had this intuition for ages that certain people are predisposed to take more pleasure from meaning and other people are more predisposed to take more pleasure from enjoyment i think people find their way they they do in life the thing that gives them the best hedonic signals so for me i i actually suck quite a bit at pleasure uh really fucking good at meaning like i will you know bury myself for three months in the hopes that something will come out of that on the other side um suck at pleasure good at meaning i have a lot of friends who are the opposite and this was that famous, you may know this story better than me,

but this famous conversation debate, friendly debate between Dan Gilbert and Daniel Kahneman,

where Gilbert was saying that a good life could be one where you spend every hour for the remainder

of your days laid on a lilo floaty in a pool with a cocktail. He said in retrospect, and you look

back, would you have considered a life well-lived? Well, it doesn't matter because day to day your experience was just pleasure i'm in a pool this is nice the cocktail tastes good kahneman said that no what you want is a true happiness or true meaning in life comes from a life which in retrospect you're glad that you lived right and i think that at least to me this is my again another pet bro science theory, which feel free to tear apart. I think that the more ruminative of a thinker that you are, the more you need to optimize to be Kahneman, not to be Gilbert.
Whereas I have friends who are able to just fucking be, they don't care about where they're going with this thing. They're not asking about whether it's this deeper contribution in the same way and maybe they're going to have midlife crisis at 55 and they're going to come back to me and go dude should have buried myself for three months you were or whatever but not that i told them to change their ways or whatever but i just get this like to tie all of that together this tension over time uh short-term hedonic signals conflicting with long-term ones but i think that our predisposition uh the frame that we enter the world with, and the way that we're rewarded individually based on genetics and experience, I think it disposes us to focus on one more than the other.
And I think that this is why one size fits all solutions to this. Most people will lie somewhere in the middle, but there's some people that are out on the tails.
I have no idea what percentile I am. I could be 99.
I don't think I am, but I'm definitely toward the long-term signals. Like they are more salient to me.
They're more powerful to me compared with the short-term ones. Does that make sense? That makes totally sense.
I like how you frame it as, you know, being focused on meaning or being focused on pleasure. And we have always to make these choices, like pleasure right now versus later.
And ancestors had to do it as well. A lot of, for instance, a lot of cooperation, like basic cooperation decision is being nice to other people.
You know, sometimes you can take advantage of people now. There's a benefit now, but what you lose is that you lose that goodwill tomorrow and they won't help you when you need their help.
So even our ancestors in very different settings know how to do these trade-offs. But something which characterized our modern world is that these trade-offs have become way outside of the kind of range of we were facing before because our time horizon has increased massively first our life expectancy has increased you know if you compare to even 200 years ago the life expectancy had doubled that's one thing but also the time horizon has increased because now we have a lot of institutions which give us the time to invest in the future.
Now we have banks. So sometimes banks go bankrupt, but very often, most often, they don't.
So you have this crazy thing which you can put money in a bank at 20 and get money back at 60. When I say bank, it's all the financial system.
Now you think about this, our we're not designed, we're not facing this kind of decision. So when you are 20, 60 is like way out.
So thinking about making these decisions, we don't have the intuitions, we don't have the hedonic feelings to make these decisions. And when you think about now, you know, think about, I don't remember when, what was the age of Alexander when he conquered his big empire, but he was super young.
I think he was less than 25 or something like this. And think about people who are 25 now.
They are like often considered still like kids, right? We have these things where we become in a way ready to enter the world much later. And it takes a lot of time to achieve leadership positions and high position etc so you need a lot of investment you need to work hard at school when you're 15 you need to work hard in early position when you're 25 etc to invest to be successful if you want to be successful i say you need is if you want to be successful and the thing is we this requires requires a lot of postponing of enjoyment, maybe less video games, less eating nice stuff, and less holidays and more.
And so I don't think we have necessarily, this is a big challenge we face. And a lot of unhappiness that we observe I think comes from this tension, is that the world offers us a lot of ways of being happy now.
You know, you have, at the click of a button, you have, in fact, for young boys, like a lot of video guests who take a lot of their time, etc. And it's designed by, you know, designed by psychologists to be exactly tapping into the stuff which is pretense status, which

they like and they enjoy, etc.

So you have all that.

But then you ask people later, are you happy with your life?

Well, the problem is that all these very nice things that you're doing the short term and

that you have been seduced to do in the short term, they have not led you to maybe go the

steps for you to progress in life.

And so you have this mismatch between what you said you know this feeling for meaning and this feeling for pleasure and in a way the problem the modern world is that it's it has designed so much appealing things which are pleasurable in in the present and we want to buy them but it has increased the time horizon that we face and increasing weather the importance, wow. The importance of waiting further.
That's so interesting. I love that.
So what about the classic question, the meaning of life? What do you think that misses given your evolutionary lens, given your insights into sort of neuroscience? Because it seems like what people are looking for is something outside of life. Why is life here? Give me something that transcends the thing that I'm asking the question about.
Right, so I think you're right. That a lot of times when we think, what's the meaning of life? People want to see that there's something objective out there, which gives sense to your life beyond your subjective experience.
So for instance, if I'm working in an orphanage in a poor country, helping kids learn things, I feel I'm doing something good, and that gives sense to my life. Now, if you believe into some metaphysical reality, like, for instance, religion, if you're religious and you believe there is a God or civil spiritual entities out there who gives you a mission to do in life, then I guess that can be the meaning of your life, is to follow these goals given by your religion.
Personally, I don't think that my point of view is purely naturalistic, so I'm just going to look at naturalistic explanation. If you don't have any metaphysical explanation, the fact is these feelings that we want something objective to give sense, to give a meaning to our life, it's just a feeling because, you know, the only thing that we have is our subjective experience.
And so I think that there's nothing out there. There's a, Dennett, the evolutionary psychologist, called a sky hook, you know, to have an explanation, a hook which comes from the sky and holds your theory.
So if you don't have a sky hook, like a religious explanation, the only explanation you can start with is that we have these feelings. They come from our brain.
They have been designed to help us make good decisions. And the feelings of meaning have to come from the view that, you know, you are going somewhere in your life and it has to be connected with the kind of thing which helps our ancestors being successful and it doesn't mean so some of it often is is linked with being very pro-social so i think people often experience meaning where you know they are doing they are doing good toward other people and i think it makes sense because um investing in the future as i said before often being cooperative is investing in the future So it doesn't pay right now to do a lot of good things to other people, but you build goodwill and a good reputation and that helps you being successful in the future.
And I think that we would have the hedonic system helping us to take that into consideration. And because it's far in the future, in a way, these feelings that we're doing something good, it is bringing the benefit from the future in the present.
And so we think, you know, we can, we can, I'm not saying that we're consciously calculating and think, oh, you know what? I'm going to help my neighbor today. I don't really care about my neighbor, but by doing that, when I will need my neighbor help, you know, I can ask.
No, we don't do that. We help our neighbor and we feel good about it.
But what it does is that it also gives us goodwill. So when we need it, we can get it.
And so I think that lots of this feeling of goodwill, of meaning that we experience when we are doing good things is because it would have helped our ancestors to actually be good cooperators and to care about being nice with other people, contributing to the community, rising and standing as being perceived as an altruist and positive person, a trustworthy person. So I think that's why we experience these kind of meanings.
But if you don't have a skyhook, it all has to come from these feelings which are designed to help us being successful i suppose yeah you're

right if if all the happiness and meaning are as signals produced by the brain to indicate if we're

on a path that's aligned towards success but the path gets calibrated by an ancestral past

there's huge opportunity for mismatch now in the modern world. Yeah, exactly.
And I think that's, you know, you see, for instance, a big topic now is the challenge faced by young boys in the modern world. Young boys, for evolutionary reasons, are less maturing later than girls.
And so they are not necessarily ready for the kind of demanding pushback of pleasure that school is requiring. School is requiring to be systematic, to be not jumping around, listening to the teacher, doing your homework, et cetera, for years and years and years.
And the rewards are very far in the future. And what happens is that we see now with a decreasing proportion of young men going to university, being successful, et cetera, because the world offered them, you know, all these quick reward accessible online.
And as pushed back the schedule to become successful, as I say, Alexander, you know, must have been riding a horse with his father and fighting before he was 20. That doesn't happen anymore.
Before you were 20, you were still a kid in the modern world. So this is a clear mismatch.
And, you know, the perspective I'm proposing is not a normative perspective.

I'm not saying you should do that because there is no normative principles, philosophical principles. I'm just saying this is the way we work.
But what it can say is that because there is a mismatch, it can give a warning. but you know

maybe if you don't think

enough about the future

be careful because

modern society can entrap you

with all these nice pleasures it's offering you now, in particular when you're young. And it's not going necessarily to help you do the right step for you to be happy when you're 35.
Lionel Page, ladies and gentlemen. Lionel, let's bring this one home.
Dude, you are fucking awesome. I i love your writing i'm so glad that you're able to speak as well as you write uh you are now officially on the rotation of guests i'm gonna hassle every every couple of months to bring on uh i love it where people want to check out more of the stuff that you write uh where should they go well um i've got a book which is uh here optim Irrational nicely placed so it's about if you're interested in psychology I highly recommend that you check it out and otherwise as you said I have my sub stack where I kind of continue the same name Optimally Irrational and I continue talking about psychology of an evolutionary perspective and and game theory perspective, economic perspective.

And the last posts were about happiness,

and the incoming ones are going to be about coalitional psychological theory,

which I think is super interesting as well.

Good. Until next time.
I appreciate you.

Thank you, Chris. See you.